Your stance is your attitude towards the topic at hand. You must be very careful with stance. Your stance could easily move form portraying a professional and clinical perspective, to a passionate and biased perspective that quickly loses weight.

This is seen often with overzealous journalists who get too passionate and get ahead of themselves, turning people away from an otherwise solid argument.

This paragraph written above was a example of taking my stance too far. My comment regarding “overzealous” journalists comes on strong and can push people away from my argument.

In the works submitted our semester, our stance varied by work. The engineering proposal, and lab report all involved a stance that was not perfectly neutral. In my lab report, I was looking at the experiment from the situation from my hypothesis (although my stance was still scientific, and fair). In my engineering proposal, me and my team believe fully in our idea, and we are writing to support that idea.

On the other hand, my technical description is dead, flat, and neutral with regards to stance. This is because my aim is to simply explain a mechanical system. There is no opinion in this. I am not contemplating whether the system is perfect, or if it can be improved.

I must learn to mind my stance if I am to be a strong writer. This is a weakness of mine.

For example, in my Memo assignment, I could have afforded to not come off as aggressive. Below is a screenshot of my memo where I suspect I my have been too strong, particularly in the second line.

I must heed my stance, or I will lose my audience. My mother always said, “Its not what you are saying, but how you say it”. Unsurprisingly, my mother’s words hold true even in another context.