“Formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing”.

Stance was one of the rhetorical elements this class required us to utilize in our writing. It is also one of the few that I feel that I already had a grasp of before entering this class. Stance is the authors attitude or position regarding the topic they are addressing in their writing. Stance was most important in my memo and engineering proposal because they were documents that aimed to persuade someone to provide funding for some type of project. I feel that I did not focus too much on stance for the technical description of lab report because they were more of informative documents. They were not as much to persuade the reader of anything, so the authors opinion on the topic does not matter as much.

I feel that my best job with stance was actually with my first project, the memo. The memo was the easiest genre to write a clear stance in. My memo addressed president of City College, Vincent Boudreau, where I informed him about an issue at the school (academic advising) and asked him to contact me so that we could discuss the matter further. This screenshot below comes from my memo, and clearly depicts me setting a stance. I show Mr. Boudreau that I am very unhappy with the academic advising at city college by saying things like “she had over 500 students to advise all by herself. This number is unacceptable”. The recommendation section of the memo adds onto the stance nicely because it shows your audience that you want to further discuss the matter, meaning you are passionate about it and want it to be fixed.

Figure 1. Part of my Memo.