Evaluation in the art-historical research article

Tucker, Paul M.

doi:10.1016/s1475-1585(03)00047-x

Cited by 47 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Considerable research interest has therefore been invested in discovering precisely how writers persuade readers of their claims and lead the academic community to “adjust its network of consensual knowledge in order to accommodate those claims” (Hunston, 1994, p. 192). Studies have shown the lexical and grammatical choices that seem most productive expressions of stance in academic genres such as undergraduate essays (Aull & Lancaster, 2014), theses (Charles, 2006), abstracts (Hyland & Tse, 2005), and research articles (Hyland, 2012) as well as in L2 student writing (Hyland, 2004) and in disciplines as diverse as geology (Dressen, 2003) and art history (Tucker, 2003). Stance is also a key feature of readers’ assessments of text quality.…”

Section: Stance In Academic Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Change of Attitude? A Diachronic Study of Stance

Hyland

Jiang

2016

Written Communication

146

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Stance, or the writer's expression of personal attitudes and assessments of the status of knowledge in a text, has been a topic of interest to researchers of written communication for the last three decades. Notwithstanding this interest, and a more general curiosity concerning the gradual evolution of genres, very little is known of how stance in academic writing has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred uniformly across disciplines. Drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from the top five journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we seek to determine whether authorial projection has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years. Our paper presents, and attempt to account for, some surprising variations and an overall decline in explicit stance during this period.Successful research writers construct texts by taking a novel point of view towards the issues they discuss while anticipating readers' imagined reactions to those views. This intersubjective positioning is encompassed by the term stance and, in various guises, has been a topic of interest to researchers of written communication and applied linguists for the last three decades. Recognising that academic writing is less objective and "author evacuated" than Geertz (1988) and others once supposed, analysts have sought to identify the ways that writers use language to acknowledge and construct social relations as they negotiate agreement of their interpretations of data with readers.Despite prolonged and widespread curiosity concerning the notion of stance, however, together with an interest in the gradual evolution of research genres more generally, very little is known of how it has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred uniformly across disciplines. In this paper we set out to explore these issues. Drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words 2 taken from the top five journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we seek to determine whether authorial projection has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years. Conceptions of stanceThe ways that writers and speakers express their opinions is an important feature of all interaction and researchers have long been concerned with describing how stance is linguistically marked. A range of terms have been used to conceptualise the idea. Some are umbrella conceptions such as posture (Grabe 1984), attitude (Halliday, 2004), appraisal (Martin, 2000), evaluation (Hunston & Thompson, 2000) and metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005a). Others focus more specifically on the linguistic realisations of judgements, feelings, or viewpoints by looking at intensity (Labov 1984), disjuncts (Quirk et al, 1985), hedges (Hyland, 1998) and modality (Palmer, 1986).Two related ideas have been particularly influential in current conceptions of stance: evidentiality (Chafe, 1986;Chafe and Nichols, 1986) and affect (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1989;Besnier, 1990).Evidentiality refers to the status of the knowledge contained ...

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Section: Stance In Academic Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Change of Attitude? A Diachronic Study of Stance

Hyland

Jiang

2016

Written Communication

146

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“…The technical and the poetic can be seen together even in phrasal units (e.g., "the joyful character of the movement") and in instances when lyrics from the music spill over into her descriptive prose ("to present the text and to glitter and shine" 7 ). Such a hybrid form of writing, in which the aesthetic description is part and parcel of the author's interpretation of the work, has been documented in other areas of scholarship related to the arts (see Tucker's [2003], analysis of art history).…”

Section: Discursive Hybriditymentioning

confidence: 94%

Multimodal Genre Systems in EAP Writing Pedagogy: Reflecting on a Needs Analysis

Molle

Prior

2008

TESOL Quarterly

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This article reports on a genre-based needs analysis for a graduate course in English for academic purposes (EAP) at a large public U.S. university. In particular, it describes the theoretical reconceptualizations of genre analysis that the data provoked. Using ethnographic methods, an investigation of academic genres in several classrooms in three academic disciplines (civil and environmental engineering, architecture, and music) found three complexities that challenged the original premises of the needs analysis: (a) that academic genres existed in genre sets and systems that involved process and pedagogical genres as well as genres of disciplinary or academic presentation; (b) that genres were routinely multimodal in process and form; and (c) that the discursive character of particular texts was routinely quite hybrid. This article discusses and illustrates each of these findings and argues for understanding them as dimensions of multimodal genre systems.

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“…The term criticality was coined by Bruce (2014) to describe evaluative judgments made by writers within any field of human activity about some aspect, object, or behavior of that field. In the last few decades, criticality in academic writing has been approached from various angles using different terms like evaluation (Geng & Wharton, 2016;Tucker, 2003;Xie, 2016), stance (Biber, 2006;Charles, 2006;Crosthwaite, Cheung & Jiang, 2017;Hyland, 2005;Jiang & Hyland, 2015), and also voice (Escobar & Fernández, 2018;Lores-Sanz, 2011;Matsuda & Jeffery, 2012;Nelson & Castello, 2012) to show writer's viewpoints, emotions, attitudes, and positions towards certain entities or propositions. All of these are elements of critical evaluation and pertinent for effective literature review writing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expressions of Criticality in Expert and Student Writing: A Corpus Contrastive Analysis of Literature Reviews

Tarmizi

Hussin

2021

IJMAL

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Literature review in academic writing plays an integral role in demonstrating writers’ knowledge about a field of study as well as in informing the writers of influential researchers and research groups in the field. More importantly, writers are expected to critically analyze previous studies related to their topic. Despite its importance to the academic text, student writers find it challenging to establish a critical stance and to provide evaluative judgment when reviewing the literature. This paper presents a contrastive analysis of student and expert writers’ expressions of criticality in literature review sections of 8 applied linguistics master theses from UiTM (a Malaysian public university) and 62 literature reviews of research journal articles from a similar field (i.e., Language and Communication, English for Academic Purposes and Applied Linguistics). Corpus techniques are used to identify the most common expressions of criticality used by these two groups of writers. The corpus was analyzed using detailed consistency analysis and concordance software from WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2012). Findings revealed that student writers prefer to use hedges and boosters to express criticality and the evaluations they make tend to sound more reporting rather than analyzing and synthesizing the resources critically. Results from this study are beneficial for constructing pedagogical instructions and guidelines for student writers in their critical analysis of the literature review.

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Evaluation in the art-historical research article

Cited by 47 publications

References 2 publications

Change of Attitude? A Diachronic Study of Stance

Change of Attitude? A Diachronic Study of Stance

Multimodal Genre Systems in EAP Writing Pedagogy: Reflecting on a Needs Analysis

Expressions of Criticality in Expert and Student Writing: A Corpus Contrastive Analysis of Literature Reviews

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