Undergraduate Understandings: Stance and Voice in Final Year Reports

Abstract

The ability to evaluate one’s material and establish a connection with readers is now acknowledged to be a key feature of successful academic writing (Hyland, 2004; Swales, 2004). As other authors in this collection have noted, academic argument involves presenting a position on things that matter to a discipline and this expression of a point of view has to be accomplished in a context of certain community and genre conventions. These conventions simultaneously place constraints on individual expression and offer opportunities to carve out a personal position, and this is the domain of stance and voice (Atkinson, 2001; Biber, 2006). Both these terms address interpersonal aspects of language, concerned with how writers and speakers represent themselves and their ideas to particular interlocutors. Despite their importance, they are extremely complex concepts, variously defined and not always fully grasped by student writers, especially by those working in a foreign language. Following other analysts, I understand stance to refer to a writer’s rhetorically expressed attitude to the propositions in a text and voice as his or her attitude to a given community.