Stance and Dialogicity in Academic and Professional Writing
- Carmen Sancho Guinda Universidad Politécnica de Madrid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8945-2550
Abstract
How much leeway is there for ‘authorial voice’ in such a constrained and concise text as the description of a standard engineering procedure? This article examines the strategies deployed by fourth-year aeronautical and aerospace students from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid for building their own academic ethos and transmitting an impression of credibility and reliability. The scrutiny of an electronic corpus of over 300 samples of individual authorship and 76 of collaborative writing, all of them written in English and for the compulsory subject English for Professional and Academic Communication, reveals that these inexperienced writers position themselves regarding content and audience by transgressing formal conventions, resorting to expressions of subjectivity (hedges, boosters and attitudinal markers of various sorts), adopting a greater or lesser degree of metadiscursive deference to the reader and graduating spatiotemporal and modal distances.
Author Biography
Carmen Sancho Guinda is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics Applied to Science and Technology at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, where she teaches English for Academic and Professional Communication and in-service seminars for engineering teachers undertaking English-medium instruction. Her research interests comprise the interdisciplinary study of academic and professional discourses and genres and the teaching and learning of academic literacies.
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