Hyland’s Stance and Engagement

Gist of the Article

            In Ken Hyland’s article Stance and engagement: a model of interaction in academic discourse he takes a close look at the interplay that happens when a writer takes a stance with their claims and strategically engages with their reader.  The author talks about how academic writing has shifted from interpersonal to more social.  He defines both stance and engagement and describes their features by giving examples (e.g., “Hedges are devices like possible, might and perhaps). He goes on to talk about how a writer must present himself as a disciplinary insider as well as persuade his audience on his claims.  The author looked at corpus data of texts and interviewed participants to investigate assumptions and practices of different disciplines.  Some of the interesting findings were that in scientific papers readers expected the writers to have considerable domain knowledge and the “soft” fields as he calls them seemed to use interactional markers 75 percent more than those of engineering and science.  Hyland found that in engineering and science papers directives were the most salient feature used.  The author closes by stating his hope that he has shown the importance of stance and engagement to bring writers and readers together in a written dialogue.

My Response

            I found this to be a very interesting article because I have always found what we have to do as academic writers confounding.  We take a strong stance and then chose words to manipulate the strength and commitment of our own arguments to persuade an audience.  It feels like there is a dance being performed between the writer and the reader.  The writer is trying to assert his claims, but not too strongly as to lose his audience while the reader is judging the author on his validity and insiderness. I think this article is beneficial to us as teachers because it clearly defines both the features of stance and engagement.  These are things we as instructors need to explain to our students because for them to begin to understand academic texts they read they will need to have a sense of why writers make these choices and the meanings behind them.  I as an ESL instructor will want to introduce my English for Academic Purposes students to the different strategies and word play they can use in their writing to persuade their readers of their claims and at the same time try to make sure they understand why writers are doing it in their readings.  I think it’s a tough task for us reading instructors because even more advanced readers don’t always understand how or why they use these strategies themselves.  I have enjoyed reading Hyland’s articles on hedging and I think this is another interesting piece.  I think more research could be done on how writers are actually using the features of stance and engagement in what Hyland calls the “soft” fields.