Stance was a rhetorical element that I was unfamiliar with. To get accustomed to it, I found that reading different genres helps determine stance. Throughout the semester we looked at multiple different genres typically used in scientific writing and found the stance for them all through oral class discussions. Stance, in my head, is defined the author’s attitude towards the topic and how you introduce it to your audience.

Your stance will most of the time depend on your genre. For example, while we were writing our informative reviews, we had to have a neutral stance (no opinion) on the topic because it can lead to a biased review. An informative review should just be a summary of two or more perspectives of a scientific topic/argument. When you incorporate a stance with that, it changes its genre. On the contrary, our position papers required a stance because position papers are arguable opinions of a topic/issue.

One example of a neutral stance was my informative review, “The Scientific Impacts of Overturning Roe V. Wade” where I summarize the effects of the 1973 US Supreme Court case being overturned in the science community. I included no opinions in this paper, just logical and abstract truths I found from various reviews and scientific journals/articles.

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