Evaluative Resources for Critical Thinking
As an academic genre, the functions of a research paper is to evaluate and persuade, that is, to evaluate the importance or validity of the present study, to critique previous relevant research works as well as to align readers with the author's perspective. A research paper is field-specific with technical jargons and special phrasal (e.g. nominalisation) and sentential structure, and is specifically targeted at the readers of the same academic community.
When writing research papers, there are some strategies we can use in order to express critical thinking. Lexico-grammatical resources namely the evaluative language (Swales & Feak, 2004) or Appraisal resources (Martin & White, 2000, 2005, 2007) would be used in the writing to evaluate and express stance. Appraisal resources will be the focus of this website and its semantic categories in the system explained here.
More explanations and examples are on the MA Literature Review Website.
According to Martin and White (2000, 2005, 2007), Appraisal system provides rich resources for expressing interpersonal meanings such as emotions, and evaluation of people and things. Such interpersonal meanings are enhanced by gradable values (increasing or decreasing in degree or intensity) and speakers' position or stance.
The explicit semantic resources of evaluating emotions, people and things are named Attitude, which will be the specific area to be discussed in this website. The values reflecting the writers' voice or position are named Engagement, meaning how the writers deploy these resources for alignment and solidarity. Both attitudinal and engagement values can be graded with Graduation values, be it increment or decrement.
See further explanation of critical argument using Appraisal and examples of Attitude, Engagement and Graduation on the MA Literature Review Website.
Academic genre generally requires objectivity, whereas it is still necessary to express your criticality through your writing to show you are capable of evaluating the values and significance of your own research, expressing judgement towards previous research works, and aligning readers with your argument. Attitudinal resources provide explicit lexico-grammatical items to express the following (See more examples by clicking on the links below:
Affect: Feelings, emotional responses (e.g. I am totally amazed by your performance.)
Judgement: Evaluation of people's behaviour, personality, morality, etc. (e.g. You are an amazing performer.)
Appreciation: Evaluation of phenomena or things in terms of their quality, aesthetic values, etc. (e.g. The amazing performance shocked the audience.)
Academic writing requires the "institutionalisation" of emotions, meaning moving away from representation of feelings using Affect, towards more institutionalised interpersonal meanings with Judgement and Appreciation.
This website illustrates how effective research papers construct evaluative meanings through the management of attitudinal values in terms of distribution at subsequent generic stages with the idea of "attitudinal lexical density" and through effective patterning of these attitudinal resources to facilitate coherence and cohesion of text organisation as well as evaluative "colour" (Hood, 2010).
Hood, S. (2010). Appraising Research: Evaluation in Academic Writing. UK: Palgrave MacMillan.
Martin, J. (2000). Beyond Exchange: Appraisal Systems in English. In S. Hunston & G. Thompson (eds.), Evaluation in Text (pp. 142-175), Oxford: OUP.
Martin, J. & White, P.R.R. (2005). The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. UK: Palgrave MacMillan.
Martin, J. & White, P.R.R. (2007). Working with Discourse: meaning beyond the clause. London: Continuum.
Swales, J. & Feak, C. (2004). Academic Writing for Graduate Students: Essential tasks and skills. USA: The University of Michigan Press.