Helping Students Express Stance: What Research Reveals about Stance Qualities in Success Student Writing in the Disciplines

An important assessment criterion for student academic writing, one that remains largely unnamed and untaught, concerns expression of stance. The term stance refers not only to the content of the writer’s position, but also to subtle markers of attitude, evaluation, and interaction with the reader. The quality of stance expression—whether, for example, it is more assertive or measured, amplified or muted, involved or distant—has been found to shape instructors’ assessments of overall writing quality. In fact, linguistic analyses have revealed patterns of difference in stance between higher- and lower-graded papers and between beginning and advanced student writing. Drawing on discourse analyses of thousands of graded papers, this talk will explore patterns of stance expression that appear to be valued across fields. It will explain why certain stance qualities are valued over others and, along the way, challenge certain myths about student academic writing—for example, that it is best to “avoid I” and eliminate hedging expressions. The talk will conclude with a discussion of teaching strategies for making stance a more transparent part of writing instruction.