Stance

Every time I analyzed the rhetorical elements in one of my documents, I felt like stance didn’t really belong or was the least important out of all them. Whenever I think of stance, I think of an argumentative essay or a debate. There are cases in engineering documents when stance is key, but I don’t feel like it happens very often. Engineers are supposed to make things and solve problems; discussing problems and taking sides is usually left to the politicians. It just doesn’t make sense to think about stance if you are writing a memo about installing new HVAC units in an office building. Maybe I am being ignorant or overlooking something, but it just didn’t make much sense to me to talk about the stance I had in my documents. When I was writing my technical description about a digital caliper (Figure 1), I didn’t have a stance, and what I wrote in my reflection paper about stance, was simply to satisfy the formality.

Figure 1.

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