Stance and Engagement

Out of all three articles assigned for reading this week, Hyland's "Stance and Engagement" article was the most enlightening and practical.  I found the notion that academic writers should not only position themselves within a topic but also within other writers on that topic to be a well-made point. In addition, the concepts of stance and engagement were easy to understand and easy to apply.  I noticed that Hyland's structure and voice organized his ideas and communicated them well respectively.  His use of multiple examples helped to clarify some of the more difficult ideas of the text.  

As a high school teacher, I instantly thought about Bloom's taxonomy while reading this article.  I felt that the two articles would compliment each other in order to help students improve their writing.  While Bloom would help students develop their ideas, I believe that Hyland would help them position themselves in an argument and interact with the audience.  A position paper or research paper would be an ideal assignment to have students learn about different points of view on a topic; students could then use the concepts of stance and engagement to position themselves and interact with the reader.  Peer review sessions could also incorporate reader response questions where the student evaluates another student's level of engagement through the text.  This would help develop audience awareness in students.  However, I would eliminate the category of "personal asides" for students because I find it to be a difficult concept to grasp that may confuse rather than help.  Otherwise, I plan on using this article in the classroom to help students participate in an academic conversation, develop their voice, and develop their audience awareness.

In John Swales and Hazem Najjar's article "The Writing of Research Article Introductions," they discuss the archetypal structure of research articles.  Having read many of Swales's articles previously including another article (aside: or maybe the same one) on research article introduction last semester, the article was more of a review than enlightening.  This is not to say that the article is not useful.  I find this article to be extremely useful, but to a select audience.  For example, I would only expose high school seniors to writing of this caliber.  This is not because of the level of language the authors employ, but rather, the content of the subject matter.  Although I would love to incorporate this article in a sophomore or junior English class, being a first year teacher, I don't believe I have the capabilities at the moment to incorporate it successfully into a research unit.  This is not to say I wouldn't use it in the near-future.

In Miller's article "Genre as Social Action," his diction and clunky voice repeatedly distracted me from absorbing the content.  For example, he uses words such as "ethnomethodological" and "ontological status of situations."  As a reader, there is a lot of stop and go which hinders from the absorption of the author's message since readers can only store around 120 wpm in their short-term memory to process in their long-term memory.  Hence, the reader must constantly re-read in order to understand the author's point.  This article made me appreciate Hyland's voice even more, and I may consider using this article as an example of voice and audience awareness for my students.