Similarly, academic readers will pick up dozens of small pointers from the way that you write text, which will engender expectations about what you are trying to do. For instance, how you label schools of thought in your discipline, and how you then describe your own work, will cue readers to where you stand in the subject's intellectual currents, who you are aligned with and who you are opposed to. Many commentators have detected tribalist tendencies amongst academics, such that they must cluster into schools of thought and create possibly fake factional conflicts amongst themselves. Others lament a proprietorial instinct that leads to a constant differentiation of positions. Charles Caleb Colton observed wryly: 'Professors in every branch of knowledge prefer their own theories to the truth; the reason is that their theories are private property, but the truth is common stock