evaluative language in essays

Academic Language: Language for evaluating

• Academic Vocabulary
• Cautious Language
• Language for evaluating
• Sentence structure
• Word families & Collocation

Academic language for evaluating

In academic writing we have to show that we do not accept without questioning the ideas or concepts in the texts we read, but that we evaluate points or ideas in these texts.

Evaluation in academic writing requires us to analyse the points, ideas or topics in academic texts and to discuss their relevance, effectiveness or application to the topic/s we are writing about. Evaluation is key to critical writing because it allows us to show that we question, understand and analyse what we read.

We can evaluate an issue or idea by interpreting it and commenting on its relevance, effectiveness, significance, limitations, implications, etc.

On this page you will find;

Types of evaluative language

• Help on bringing your own voice
• Effectiveness
• Limitation or weakness
• Significance of evidence

We can evaluate the effectiveness of an argument or intervention using phrases such as: 

• the approach has been successful in...
• the intervention has proven effective in...
• the results demonstrate the efficacy of the intervention
• the approach has potential to improve...

“Truth is demoted to current understandings of the world, based on the available evidence and resources we possess. This view, which problematises uncritical acceptance of truths and current understandings, is helpful when we consider the impact of changes to social life.”

“Also relevant to changing student populations is Harris and Brampton’s (2003) suggestion that postmodern paradigms are important for an understanding of the debates about language, ethnicity and race because they highlight tensions in the way different people experience the world.”

We can show how strongly our views are aligned with or against an idea using phrases such as:

• strong evidence suggests that...
• there is substantial evidence to support...
• the evidence is convincing
• the data is consistent with...
• the results are statistically significant

“In his analysis of students in French HE institutions, Bourdieu (1997) convincingly argued that working-class students were less successful (Thomas 2002) not because they were of inferior intelligence or not gifted, but because the curriculum was `biased in favour of those things with which middle-class students were already familiar’ (Robbins 1993, p. 153).”

“One of the most serious effects of deficit thinking is that it strengthens stereotypes in the minds and thought of educators, policy makers and students themselves.”

“In essence, deficit thinking allows generalisations about student ability to be made, and supports a laziness to grapple with the complex issues around student difficulties. In the process, people who are already disenfranchised are labelled and further stigmatised.”

“In highlighting the political meaning and historical relevance of absences or silences, Cooper offers an astute revision of historical memory and an insightful analysis of France’s fundamental political and philosophical paradoxes.”  

We can evaluate limitations or weaknesses in the evidence or arguments using phrases such as:

• one limitation of this study is...
• this argument is weakened by...
• the evidence presented is limited by...
• there are inconsistencies in the data
• the methodology used in this study has limitations

“Media coverage of this phenomenon, readers’ heated responses to media coverage, and existing research literature around Chinese students’ experiences tend to centre around challenges students face in the USA without adequate exploration of how external sociocultural contexts and histories shaped students’ experiences (Abelmann and Kang 2014). This creates an incomplete understanding of Chinese students’ experiences in the USA and inadvertently perpetuates a stereotype that the students are incompetent and deficient.”

“One problem with this binary view of good-bad language or good-bad writing is that a variety of ‘problems’ within an educational setting are sometimes misdiagnosed as language problems, whereas I found issues affecting the practice of writing to be more complex.”

“This deficit position tends to view literacy practices as neutral and objective, and one further consequence of this perspective is that there has been a focus on what is referred to as "strong text" conceptions of literacy characteristics (Meacham 2000, p.181) which rarely acknowledge a reliance on culture or diversity in terms of sociolinguistic, historical or political context.”  

We can evaluate the significance of the evidence or argument by using phrases such as:

• this is a significant finding because...
• this study contributes to the field by...
• this evidence has important implications for...
• this result is consistent with previous research on the topic

“In seeking to use crisis as a term of analysis, Hay (1999, p.318) argued for the concept to be re-defined, indeed more closely defined, in order to differentiate between ‘a punctuated or step-wise periodisation’ in accounting for socio-political change and the ‘more incremental and evolutionary understandings of the process’ (ibid.). This understanding is critical; for in setting the conceptual parameters for the periodisation of crisis it thus becomes possible to define the opening and closing of the crisis period, and to contain the analysis of federal dynamics within a time frame."

“E. H. Carr profoundly adds to the debate on the immanence of crisis in International Relations theory at the world analysis level, and also reflects his knowledge and understanding of the Marxist approach to International Political Economy in his analysis of the sources of crisis and conflict.” 

“In the seminal ‘Twenty years’ Crisis’, Carr challenges the utopian direction of International Relations  in the interwar years from a realist perspective, grounded in critical thought.”

“Of more direct salience to the thesis’s conceptualising of crisis is their link of the ‘scope and nature of the crisis’ (ibid.p.18) and their focus on ‘accountability and learning processes’ (ibid.).”  

We can evaluate and compare different arguments or pieces of evidence using phrases such as:

• in comparison to...
• on the other hand...
• when compared to...
• in contrast...
• conversely...
• there is a significant difference between...

“Our conceptualisation of racial macroaggressions is different from many other scholars who define racial macroaggressions as the overt, ‘large scale’ (i.e. state) acts of racism experienced by People of Color (Gildersleeve, Croom, and Vasquez 2011; Smith et al., 2007a).” “We argue that the terms ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ should not define acts of racism as subtle or blatant. In fact, Pierce (1974) makes a similar argument about the limitations of terminology when he stated, ‘[t]hese problems are only micro in name, since their very number requires a total effort that is incalculable’.”

“We concur with Pierce that we are limited by the terms we use to describe the complexities of racism and the harm they can cause. We certainly do not intend to depreciate everyday racism by using the term micro. To the contrary, we would agree with scholars like Dumas (2014) who argue that microaggressions are in fact a form of ‘everyday suffering’ that have become socially and systemically normalised and effectively minimised.”

“National cultural labels are sometimes applied less critically by some from the field of intercultural communication and management (see Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars 1993; Hofstede 1980). Indeed, for this reason, Norton (2000) prefers to avoid definitions of cultural identity framed by a sense of a shared group or language because of the tendency for this to become fixed and the potential for it to become essentialist. This is an important point and Norton concedes the term can and ought to be understood in a more flexible way.”

Bringing our own voice

• Expressing your own voice
• Ways to express our voice

We can show our position towards ideas discussed in our writing by replacing the over-used ‘according to’ in our writing with a range of evaluative adjectives and adverbs that indicate what we think of other writers’ views.

Example 1:  “Atkinson is misguided when he inaccurately claims that students need . . .” 

We can show our position with regard to the points of view or evidence that we have presented by using a combination of precise verbs, hedging and other evaluative language . 

Example 2:  “Furthermore, it appears that Friedman may have overlooked some key data when he raises the possibility that . . .”

We can show how confident – or not – we are with regard to our position through the use of hedging / cautious language , such as may, might or could  

Example 3:  “The investigations to date may indicate a fundamental flaw in this approach."

You can be more confident through the use of intensifying language as certainly, definitely or must.

Example 4: “The findings certainly show a need for more research on this topic . . .”  

Evaluation in academic writing allows us to show our voice (our view on the topic). Voice can be expressed through:

• Presenting a position
• Presenting a position and developing/defending/supporting it. 
• Presenting counter evidence and making an argument against it.
• Identifying a gap. 
• Hedging/more assertive language (show your contribution by commenting on the strength or weakness of a point).
• Avoiding overuse of according to, strengthening your argument with an adjective/adverb that indicates your position.
• Using active verbs.
• Giving your opinion/evaluation of what other writers claim - showing confidence in your own position.
• Relating one text to another.
• Critically commenting/concluding.  

Further Reading

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54 Evaluation

What is evaluative writing.

Evaluative writing is a type of writing intended to judge something according to a set of criteria. For instance, your health might be evaluated by an insurance company before issuing a policy. The purpose of this evaluation would be to determine your overall health and to check for existing medical conditions. The better your evaluation, the less the insurance company might charge you for coverage.

More commonly, if you plan to spend ten dollars on a movie, you might instead go to Rottentomatoes.com read through what professional movie reviewers and even amateur movie reviewers thought of the film. Rottentomatoes.com makes things simpler by boiling down a review into a score of “freshness”, thus if a film is 97% fresh, nearly everyone enjoyed it. However, we are given reasons for this unless we actually start reading reviews on each film. So, go to Rottentomatoes.com and read a review of a film you have recently watched. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a new film.

Reviews are actually evaluations of films. They use criteria such as the plot complexity, characterization, dialogue, relevance of theme, shot composition, acting, and other elements to determine the overall quality of the film.

Reviewers have long praised  Citizen Kane , but is it truly a great film? It was a grand film with enormous sets, a larger-than-life protagonist and strong performances by Joseph Cotton, Orson Welles, and Agnes Moorehead. However, many films possess these qualities. Critics were much more fascinated by the use of light and shadow in many scenes and the unique camera angles created by Gregg Toland, the cinematographer. The camera moves frequently and constantly incorporates contrasts. Welles even used ceilings on his sets to create a much more “boxed-in” sense from the viewer. In some scenes, Toland uses reflected images to provide different perspectives of the characters during particular scenes. In another scene, Welles shows both the passage of time and the dissolution of a marriage by first showing the newlyweds talking and flirting over breakfast as Kane’s wife wears a nightgown and a loose silk robe. This is followed by a succession of mornings until the final scene where the wife wears a high collared blouse, long sleeves, and a scowl as the two trade bitter verbal jabs. In a few short minutes, the audience watches the newlywed’s progress from giddy to openly resentful. It’s these innovations that lead critics to praise the film.

Is it everybody’s favorite film? No. Evaluation and preference are two entirely different measures of quality. Evaluation requires criteria so as to create a more objective “measure” of quality. Preference is about what you like. I like  National Lampoons Christmas Vacation  because it makes me laugh and because I can watch it with other people and they will laugh, too. Luckily I live in world where I can evaluate an objectively great film and enjoy an objectively bad one. (Though I think I can make an argument that it is objectively a great film.)

ESTABLISHING EVALUATIVE CRITERIA

The key to effective evaluative writing is starting off with a clear and precise assertion. Your main assertion is what you will use to perform the evaluation. You may want to argue that a Chevy Tahoe is better than a Ford Expedition based on its horsepower, gas mileage, capacity, warranty, etc. Other evaluators might argue the difference between their towing capabilities. Whatever the main argument may be for your evaluative essay, make sure that your argument is clear.

• Make sure you have a well presented subject. Without one, you will lose your readers.
• Create a thesis statement. Thesis statements help you stay focused and help your reader to understand what is being evaluated or judged.
• Give only information that is imperative to the decision making process. If it looks like unnecessary information, it probably is.
• Do not be biased when creating an evaluative essay. Give both good and bad examples of the topic.

You are the “expert” in an evaluative essay. Support your opinions with facts, not whims.

HOW TO EVALUATE

A big question you might have is: how do I evaluate my subject? That depends on what your subject is.

If you are evaluating a piece of writing, then you are going to need to read the work thoroughly. While you read the work, keep in mind the criteria you are using to evaluate. The evaluative aspects may be: grammar, sentence structure, spelling, content, usage of sources, style, or many other things. Another thing to consider when evaluating a piece of Evaluation writing is whether the writing appeals to its target audience. Is there an emotional appeal? Does the author engage the audience, or is the piece lacking something? If you can, make notes directly on your work itself so that you remember what you want to write about in your essay.

If you are evaluating anything else, use your head. You  need  to try, use, or test whatever thing you are evaluating. That means you should not evaluate a 2005 Chevrolet Corvette unless you have the $45,000 (or more) to buy one, or the money to rent one. You also need the know-how of driving a car of that power and a base of knowledge of other cars that you have tested to make a fair comparison.

On the note of comparisons,  only compare things that are reasonably alike . People don’t care to know how a laugh-out-loud comedy like National Lampoons Christmas Vacation compares to Citizen Kane; that is for a different type of essay. Compare comedies to other comedies and dramas to other dramas. That is what people are looking for when reading comparisons in an evaluation essay. However, keep in mind that comparisons are always useful in illustrating an idea and providing context. They give shape and clarity to often complex ideas presented in evaluations.

Whatever you are evaluating, make sure to do so thoroughly. Take plenty of notes during the testing phase so that your thoughts stay fresh in your mind. You do not want to forget about a part of the subject that you did not test.

STRUCTURE OF THE EVALUATIVE ESSAY

Introduction.

In the introduction of your evaluative essay, you should clearly state the following: – what you are evaluating (the subject – like  Citizen Kane  or  National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation ) – the purpose of your evaluation – what criteria you are evaluating your subject on (plot, characterization, cinematography etc.) For example, you should not just write that you are judging the acting in the film. You should explain that you are judging the individual performances of actor, the plot of the screenplay, and cinematography. Give the reader background on the subject including the “who, what, when, where, and why” elements of the subject.

Be sure to be very descriptive and thorough when evaluating your subject. The more you leave out of the essay, the more unanswered questions your readers are left with. Your goal should be to cover all aspects of the subject and to tell the audience how good or bad it is. Consider, for example, not only what quality the subject possesses, but what is missing. Good evaluations measure the quality or value of a subject by considering what it has and what it lacks.

Check out: Useful Phrases for Use in Evaluative Writing

The conclusion for an evaluative essay is pretty straightforward. Simply go over the main points from the body of your essay. After that, make an overall evaluation of the subject. Tell the audience if they should buy it, eat it, use it, wear it, etc. and why. After that is done, your essay is finished.

The conclusion of a review is also an opportunity for some flourish. Think about how you can sum up the best or worst of the experience to send your audience marching toward or away from the subject of your evaluation. Good job!

Evaluation Copyright © 2020 by Liza Long; Amy Minervini; and Joel Gladd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Essay Papers Writing Online

A comprehensive guide to writing an evaluation essay – tips, examples, and techniques.

Welcome to the ultimate guide on writing an evaluation essay! Evaluating a subject, be it a book, movie, restaurant, or a piece of art, requires critical thinking and analysis. In this comprehensive guide, you will learn valuable tips and examples to help you master the art of evaluation essays. Whether you are a student working on an assignment or a writer looking to sharpen your skills, this guide will provide you with the tools you need to craft insightful and compelling evaluations.

Writing an evaluation essay involves assessing the quality, value, or significance of a particular subject based on specific criteria. It requires careful evaluation, evidence-based analysis, and a clear presentation of your findings. In this guide, we will walk you through the essential steps of writing an effective evaluation essay, from choosing a topic and developing a thesis to organizing your arguments and refining your writing. By following our tips and studying the examples provided, you will be well-equipped to write a standout evaluation essay that engages and persuades your readers.

The Art of Writing an Evaluation Essay

Writing an evaluation essay requires a careful analysis and critique of a subject or a topic. To master this art, you need to develop a critical mindset and attention to detail. Here are some key steps to help you craft a compelling evaluation essay:

By following these steps and honing your critical thinking skills, you can master the art of writing an evaluation essay and create a compelling and insightful piece of writing.

Understanding the Evaluation Essay

An evaluation essay is a type of writing that assesses and critiques a particular subject, such as a movie, book, restaurant, or product. It requires the writer to analyze the subject and provide a judgment based on defined criteria. The purpose of an evaluation essay is to evaluate the subject’s quality and effectiveness, and to present a clear and coherent argument for the writer’s assessment.

When writing an evaluation essay, it is important to have a clear understanding of the subject being evaluated and to establish specific criteria for evaluation. These criteria can vary depending on the subject and the writer’s perspective, but they should be logical, relevant, and objective. The evaluation essay should also include evidence and examples to support the writer’s judgment and provide a well-rounded assessment of the subject.

Overall, the evaluation essay requires critical thinking, analysis, and effective communication skills. It is an opportunity for the writer to express their opinion and evaluation of a subject in a structured and persuasive manner.

Choosing a Topic for Evaluation Essay

When selecting a topic for your evaluation essay, it’s important to choose something that you have a genuine interest in and can thoroughly analyze. Here are some tips to help you pick the perfect topic:

• Choose a subject that you are knowledgeable about or have personal experience with.
• Select a topic that is relevant and timely to your audience.
• Pick a topic that can be evaluated objectively based on criteria.
• Consider choosing a controversial topic to spark debate and discussion.
• Ensure that there is enough information available for research and analysis.

By following these guidelines, you can find a topic that will allow you to write a compelling and insightful evaluation essay.

Structuring Your Evaluation Essay

When writing an evaluation essay, it is important to follow a clear structure to effectively communicate your assessment of the subject matter. Here are the key components of structuring your evaluation essay:

• Introduction: Start your essay with an engaging introduction that provides context for the topic and clearly states your evaluation criteria.
• Thesis Statement: Develop a strong thesis statement that presents your overall evaluation and main points.
• Criteria: Identify the specific criteria you will use to evaluate the subject. These criteria should be relevant to the topic and provide a framework for your assessment.
• Evidence: Support your evaluation with concrete examples, evidence, or data. Use specific details to illustrate your points and clarify your assessment.
• Analysis: Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the subject based on your criteria. Provide a balanced assessment that considers both positive and negative aspects.
• Conclusion: Summarize your evaluation and reiterate your main points. Offer a final evaluation that reflects your overall assessment of the subject.

By structuring your evaluation essay in a clear and logical manner, you can effectively convey your assessment to your audience and support your evaluation with strong evidence and analysis.

Tips for Writing a Successful Evaluation Essay

1. Choose a topic that you are familiar with and passionate about. This will make the writing process more enjoyable and engaging for you.

2. Clearly define the criteria that you will use to evaluate the subject. Make sure your criteria are specific, measurable, and relevant to the topic.

3. Provide evidence and examples to support your evaluation. Use facts, data, and examples to back up your claims and make your argument more convincing.

4. Use a clear and logical structure for your essay. Start with an introduction that provides context and introduces the topic. Then, develop your evaluation in the body paragraphs, and conclude with a summary of your main points.

5. Be objective in your evaluation. While it’s important to express your opinion, make sure to support it with evidence and consider different perspectives.

6. Edit and revise your essay carefully. Check for spelling and grammar errors, ensure that your arguments are well-supported, and make sure your writing is clear and concise.

Examples of Evaluation Essay

1. Movie Evaluation: “The Shawshank Redemption” is a classic film that touches on themes of hope, redemption, and friendship. The storyline, acting, and cinematography all contribute to the emotional impact of the movie. However, some critics argue that the pacing of the film is slow in certain parts, affecting the overall viewing experience.

2. Restaurant Evaluation: XYZ Restaurant offers a diverse menu, with options ranging from traditional dishes to modern fusion cuisine. The ambiance is cozy and inviting, creating a pleasant dining experience. However, some customers have complained about the slow service and inconsistent quality of food.

3. Book Evaluation: “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee is a timeless classic that explores themes of racism, justice, and morality. The author’s evocative writing style and vivid characterizations make the book a compelling read. However, some critics argue that the novel oversimplifies complex issues and lacks nuance in its portrayal of race relations.

Revision and Proofreading

Once you have completed your evaluation essay, it is crucial to revise and proofread it thoroughly to ensure that it is polished and error-free. Follow these steps to refine your essay:

• Check for coherence and structure: Make sure that your essay flows logically from one point to the next. Check for transitions between paragraphs and ensure that your arguments are presented in a clear and organized manner.
• Verify the accuracy of your evidence: Double-check all the facts, statistics, and examples you have used in your essay to ensure their accuracy. Make sure that your evidence supports your evaluation effectively.
• Evaluate the clarity of your thesis statement: Your thesis statement should clearly state your evaluation and the criteria you are using. Make sure it is concise and specific.
• Scan for grammar and spelling errors: Proofread your essay carefully to catch any grammar or spelling mistakes. Use a grammar checker or have someone else read your essay to identify any errors you may have missed.
• Check the formatting and citation style: Ensure that your essay follows the required formatting guidelines and that your citations are properly formatted according to the citation style specified in the assignment instructions.
• Seek feedback: Ask a friend, family member, or teacher to read your essay and provide feedback. Consider their suggestions and make revisions accordingly.

By revising and proofreading your evaluation essay, you can ensure that it is well-written, coherent, and error-free, enhancing its overall quality and effectiveness.

Final Thoughts on Evaluation Essays

Writing an evaluation essay can be a challenging but rewarding endeavor. It allows you to critically assess a topic or subject and provide your own unique perspective on it. Remember to choose a topic that you are passionate about or have expertise in, as this will make the writing process more enjoyable and insightful.

When crafting your evaluation essay, be sure to provide a clear evaluation criteria and support your claims with evidence and examples. Use a balanced approach, acknowledging both the strengths and weaknesses of the subject you are evaluating. Additionally, make sure to structure your essay in a logical and organized manner, with a clear introduction, body, and conclusion.

Overall, evaluation essays offer a valuable opportunity to develop your critical thinking and analytical skills. By following the tips and examples outlined in this guide, you can create a compelling and thought-provoking evaluation essay that engages readers and sparks meaningful discussions.

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Evaluative verbs – adding sophistication to analysis

Recently, I wrote an article for TES about how an unexpected number of pupils at my school achieved grade 9s in GCSE English. It was popular and I received lots of feedback. One area that interested many people was the discussion about the evaluative verbs that top students tended to use in their writing. Traditionally, teachers of GCSE English have encouraged pupils to use analytical verbs, often pushing them for a synonym for ‘suggests’ or ‘shows’. I have an example list of my own that I’ve used for some time:

With the advent of the evaluation question on GCSE English language specifications, teachers have now placed a greater onus on ensuring their pupils use the language of evaluation to ensure that examiners can tell they are attempting to sum up the quality of a piece of writing or the technique that the writer has deployed. Often this takes the form of the ubiquitous adverb ‘effectively’ and adjective ‘effective’. For example ‘Orwell effectively portrays the unpleasant conditions for miners through his personification of the ‘roaring…machines’…’ Or ‘This is effective because ‘roaring’ implies the lethal nature of these giant machines and gives a sense of the deafening volume…’

What I find, however, is that the most successful pupils evaluate consistently, whether or not the question prompts them. In the literature exams, our highest attainers wrote about how a writer ‘ridicules’, ‘trivialises’, ‘demonises’ or how a character ‘coerces’, ‘sentimentalises’ or ‘derides’ another. I’ve tried to put together a list of the evaluative verbs pupils might typically use in their writing. This is far from definitive. And some of the verbs are only evaluative if used in a particular context. But it’s a good place to start if you wish to really stretch your top pupils:

• Criticises –  rebukes, admonishes, chastises,  lambasts, castigates, demonises, condemns
• Questions – queries, disputes, casts doubt upon, refutes, interrogates, examines, challenges, exposes, provokes
• Ridicules – mocks, trivialises, satirises, lampoons, derides, pillories, parodies, caricatures
• Celebrates – commemorates, honours, salutes, recognises, acknowledges, memorialises, lionises, fetishises, idealises, eulogises, elevates, glorifies, sentimentalises, romanticises, beautifies, deifies
• Subverts – undermines, overturns, alters, modifies, corrupts
• Accepts – welcomes, embraces, affirms, reaffirms
• internalises, externalises
• Technical terms – anthropomorphises, zoomorphises

Here are some examples of how evaluative verbs might elevate responses to a sophisticated understanding of the writer’s intention:

• Stephenson portrays Jekyll as a duplicitous character. (simple statement)
• Stephenson insinuates that Jekyll has repressed his transgressive desires, leading a conflicted dual nature. (analytical statement)
• Through his portrayal of  Jekyll’s conflicted dual nature caused by his repressed transgressive desires, Stevenson ridicules hypocritical Victorian attitudes towards sin. (evaluative statement)

Thanks for reading,

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Evaluative language use in academic discourse

2003, Journal of English for Academic Purposes

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Evaluative language in undergraduate academic writing: expressions of attitude as sources of text effectiveness in English as a Foreign Language

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the use of attitudinal language stands as a potential source of effectiveness in undergraduate academic writing in English as a Foreign Language (EFL). In order to achieve this purpose, interpersonal features of a corpus of essays written by Mexican undergraduate students of English Language and Literature were analyzed. The model of appraisal (Martin, James R. & Peter R. R. White. 2005. The language of evaluation: Appraisal systems in English . Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan) was used to trace and contrast attitude resources of affect, judgement and appreciation in academic essays in relation to the grades they were granted by university professors at different levels of instruction. The results of the study confirm a significant relation between the use of resources of attitude and the perceived (in)effectiveness of the analyzed texts, as well as factors which potentially determine the nature of such relation and pose relevant implications for academic writing instruction in EFL in the context of the analyzed corpus.

1 Introduction

Writing academically in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is widely recognized as central to undergraduate education due to its role as the main means of production and dissemination of knowledge in international contexts ( Nesi and Gardner 2012 ). Academic writing is also considered as an activity which involves complex sets of skills that even expert writers keep on improving after continued experience ( Chazal 2014 ). As part of such complexity, the appropriate expression of interpersonal meanings has been found to be one of the most challenging components when learning how to write academically ( Hood 2010 ), mainly because of the pedagogical challenges involved in an appropriate induction of learners into the linguistic conventions developed by specialized discourse communities to produce interpersonal meanings.

Different from skills and competencies related to the communication of factual information and conventional paradigms of textual organization, construing interpersonal meanings involves the use of linguistic resources to express interaction among speakers, as well as the communication of the feelings and points of view they intend to share ( Moss 2011 ). Interpersonal meanings also convey social roles and evaluations ( Hyland 2005 ), as well as the speakers’ expression of a subjective reality, which conveys social relations, personal values, and different kinds of opinions they want to share with other speakers ( Perales et al. 2012 ). Additionally, the expression of interpersonal meanings relates to authorial presence, also known as stance, in academic texts; “how writers present themselves and express their own views and judgements” in relation to others ( Candarli et al. 2015 : 193). Because of their discourse semantic nature, the workings of these dynamics and their rhetorical effects might make it harder for learners of EFL academic writing to acquire, observe, and evaluate than grammatical and organizational features, as attested by observations like Lancaster’s (2014) , who has referred to interpersonal dynamics as recurring patterns of language use that are difficult to notice from casual scanning.

As explained by Ken Hyland, research has shown that fundamental challenges in teaching and learning interpersonal conventions in writing are found in two main sources of difficulties. For one thing, despite its actual social nature, academic writing may still be regarded as objective, rational and impersonal, which results in a neglection of the fact that academic, disciplinary practices involve variations in systems “of appropriate social engagement with one’s material and one’s colleagues” ( Hyland 2004 : 11). Additionally, cultural factors that shape students’ expectations, strategies, beliefs and, in general, schemas of knowledge and the whole process of learning also present learners with important challenges; besides the acquisition of grammatical structures, lexical resources, and notions of textual organization, learners writing in EFL have to deal with differences between diverse cultural conceptualizations of knowledge construction and communication. While certain cultures tend to favor “an analytical, questioning, and evaluative stance to knowledge”, others “have a very different perspective that favors conserving and reproducing existing knowledge” ( Hyland 2003 : 38).

Hyland’s considerations coincide with Chitez and Kruse’s (2012) observations about what they call writing cultures , which result from the fact that “each educational system creates its unique mixture of educational genres, writing/learning practices, assessment procedures, instructional materials, expectations towards writing, and required writing competencies, in varied relationships with the genres and practices of professional or scientific domains” (p. 153). An imminent consequence of this is that communities of learners and individual writers carry particular writing dynamics acquired from their various experiences, many of which differ significantly from each other. Thus, students learning how to write in EFL face the challenge to adjust – to lesser or greater degrees – to generalized conventions according to which they are expected to demonstrate their knowledge by voicing their judgements and putting their opinions forward in certain ways. Adjusting appropriately to such conventions may result in effective writing, which has been defined by Vega (2015) as the instantiation of argumentation which appropriately accommodates to the audience’s framework of attitudes and beliefs, gaining force in its adhesion to the speaker’s proposals.

Based on the consideration that the expression of interpersonal meanings plays an important role in the production of successful written academic texts and, as a result, may represent a significant source of (in)effectiveness in academic writing, several works have analyzed the use of interpersonal resources by undergraduate students in EFL in diverse international contexts. Some of such works have explored this dimension of academic writing from the perspective of Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model ( Candarli et al. 2015 ; Crosthwaite and Jiang 2017 ; Lee and Deakin 2016 ), while others have adopted the systemic-functional perspective of the appraisal model ( Martin and White 2005 ) as their theoretical and methodological basis ( Derewianka 2007 ; Lee 2008 , 2015 ; Mei 2006 , 2007 ; Ryshina-Pankova 2014 ).

Despite the abundant production of research this subject has seen around the globe, the exploration of the relationship between interpersonal resources and effectiveness in academic EFL writing has not received much attention in Mexico and Latin America, where most related research has focused on academic writing in Spanish L1 ( Castro 2013 ; Castro and Sánchez 2013 ; González 2011 ; Ignatieva 2021 ; Navarro 2014 ; Valerdi 2021 ; Zamudio 2016 ). It is also worth noticing that, as it will be shown in further sections of this paper, most previous works beyond Latin American contexts have explored the interpersonal discourse of EFL writers from disciplines which require effective communication in English, but not the professional mastery or depth that is expected from future professionals of the English Language and Literature at different levels of linguistic and disciplinary instruction. Such potential mastery and depth in knowledge represent the need to analyze the workings of interpersonal language considering as many realizational variables as possible. Stemming from this, the objective of this paper is to use qualitative and quantitative research methods to analyze the use of interpersonal resources in a corpus of academic essays written in EFL by Mexican undergraduate students of English Language and Literature at a public university in Central Mexico. This exploration is developed within the framework of Martin and White’s (2005) model of appraisal with specific focus on the system of attitude and the instantiation variables of attitudinal category, realization, explicitness, trigger, and authorship. In this work, I compare the features of attitudinal realizations in low-, middle-, and high-graded essays in order to understand the relationship between the use of attitudinal language and the perceived effectiveness of the essays where it is instantiated. Additionally, the features of the evaluative language in the corpus are observed in relation to the instructional and linguistic experience of the undergraduate authors of the texts, which were classified as basic, intermediate, and advanced.

In the following section, a brief account of the system of attitude is presented with particular focus on the categories that have been analyzed in this research. This is followed by an account of previous works that have explored the relationship between attitudinal language and the (in)effectiveness of academic writing by undergraduate EFL learners from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Then, a description of the mixed methodological approach which was applied in this research is presented. Finally, I report the most significant findings of this work in order to discuss their implications to teaching academic writing in EFL in the Mexican context.

2 The appraisal model and the system of attitude

Martin and White (2005) developed the appraisal model as an extension of the analysis of the interpersonal metafunction proposed in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (1985 , 2004 . While Halliday describes this metafunction at the lexicogrammar stratum in terms of the clause as an exchange through the system of mood , the appraisal model approaches the expression of feelings, points of view and social relations at the stratum of discourse semantics through the systems of attitude , engagement , and graduation . The first one involves the discursive negotiation of emotion-related meanings (feelings, moral/ethical judgements, and aesthetic responses), while the second one relates to the speaker’s positioning in relation to other voices. The system of graduation has to do with the resources deployed to intensify and attenuate realizations of attitude and engagement ( Martin and White 2005 ).

This paper is concerned with the system of attitude , which encompasses the linguistic expression of emotions and their institutionalization as opinions related to the notions of ethics and aesthetics. The ultimate objective of using these resources is to share subjective points of view for the audience to consider them and, if the discourse is successful, adhere to them. In this sense, the expression of attitude is central for speakers’ argumentation of their positions and the representations of the world they communicate since “it is possible to adhere oneself not only to a thesis, but also to ways of thinking, seeing, and feeling” ( Amossy 2009 : 67–68). Thus, considering Vega’s definition of effectiveness (2015) as argumentation which accommodates to the audience’s attitudes and beliefs in order to increase its adhesion to the speaker’s proposals, the rhetorical effects of communicating one’s propositions accompanied by attitudinal evaluations may have the potential to enhance the effectiveness of the produced text beyond the scope of its objective contents.

In the model of appraisal , expressions of attitude are analyzed in terms of three sub-systems: affect , judgement , and appreciation . Affect relates to the linguistic realization of feelings, considered as the most basic forms of personal reaction in human linguistic development ( Martin 2000 ; Painter 2003 ; Torr 1997 ). These expressions are usually classified into the categories of +/− happiness [“affairs of the heart” ( Martin and White 2005 : 49)], +/− security (related to ecosocial well-being and sensations of anxiety and confidence), +/− satisfaction (linked to the satisfaction of personal needs and goals) and +/− desire (involving the willingness or attraction towards entities and processes). Prototypically, instances of affect are lexically realized in the form of qualities (attributes and epithets), mental and behavioral processes, and modal adjuncts. Table 1 illustrates examples of affect analyzed in the corpus of this study. The two columns on the right present information about the variables of realization – the lexico-grammatical form – and category – attitudinal sub-type – of each example.

Instances of the four categories of affect .

All the examples presented on this and other tables and figures are instances of evaluative language analyzed in the corpus of this research, except for *, which has been adapted from Martin and White (2005 : 46).

Resources from the judgement and appreciation sub-systems are the result of the modelling and sophistication of affectivity according to social norms and aesthetic parameters produced by social conventions, hence their status as institutionalizations of affect . These institutionalizations represent moral/ethic judgements about people, their actions, and the consequences of their actions, as well as personal considerations about the aesthetic properties of things, processes, and people. Following Martin and White’s (2005) description, expressions of judgement are classified into the categories of +/− normality (how special or unique someone is), +/− capacity (how able a person is), +/− tenacity (how resolute someone is), +/− veracity (related to people’s honesty) and +/− propriety (linked to people’s integrity). Judgement is typically realized through qualities and modal adjuncts ( Table 2 ).

Instances of the five categories of judgement.

Expressions of appreciation encode aesthetic evaluations of speakers in terms of three categories: +/− reaction (emotional responses provoked by things and processes), +/− composition (perceptions of the balance, regularity, and order of things), and +/− valuation (opinions about the aesthetic and practical value of things). Prototypical realizations of appreciation take the form of qualities and circumstances ( Table 3 ).

Instances of the three categories of appreciation.

The examples of attitude presented up to this point correspond to inscribed realizations; expressions that encode attitude overtly or explicitly. Affect , judgement , and appreciation can also be indirectly invoked . The particularity of invoked realizations of attitude is that they demand a special effort from the audience or interlocutor to identify and process the type of evaluation the speaker is doing. Another peculiarity of this type of realization is that it involves the selection of resources pertaining to the ideational metafunction, which “gives structure to experience, and helps to determine our way of looking at things, so that it requires some intellectual effort to see them in any other way than that which our language suggests to us” ( Halliday 2002 : 175). Hence observations by Hood and Martin (2005) and Hood (2010) of processes and participants as efficient attitudinal invokers: ideational meanings are seldom neutral, and speakers choose non-inherently evaluative resources for their invoking potential.

attitude is prototypically invoked through lexical metaphors, processes, nominal participants, and nominalizations of processes and qualities. A notorious exception to these invoked realizations is the case of affect , which can be inscribed through mental and behavioral processes. Table 4 illustrates invoked realizations of attitude analyzed in the corpus of this work.

Invoked realizations of attitude.

An additional remark on attitudinal invocation relates to potential double coding ( Martin and White 2005 ) resulting from indirect realizations of attitude where a given evaluation from one category may be invoked by means of the inscription of another category as in (1) below. In this example, the author expresses a negative evaluation of a reviewer’s knowledge ( appreciation > −composition), which indirectly realizes a negative evaluation about his abilities as a literary analyst ( judgement > −capacity). The possibility of finding such types of invoked realizations in discourse represents the need to make methodological decisions regarding the labelling of attitudinal realizations in an analysis, as was the case in this work. Pertinent observations are made later in the Section 4 .

For the purposes of this research, additionally to the variables of realization, category and explicitness, the variable of trigger is particularly relevant. This variable indicates the stimulus that motivates an evaluation. For the nature of the essays studied in this work – i.e., essays on literary works from English Literature – triggers of attitude were related to characters, other components of the literary works commented by the authors of the corpus (atmosphere, style, plot, etc.), and entities external to the literary works about which they write in their essays (literary concepts, periods, genres, currents, other works, different authors, etc.). Table 5 illustrates instantiations of attitude with labels of their realization, category, explicitness, and trigger.

Instantiations of attitude with realization variables.

3 Research on attitudinal meanings in undergraduate EFL academic writing

The study of the linguistic expression of attitude and its relationship with successful EFL academic writing has received considerable attention in international contexts. Jalilifar and Hemmati (2013) analyzed a corpus of argumentative essays written by postgraduate Kurdish-speaking Iranian students of TEFL to explore whether appraisal resources can be used as a reference to evaluate argumentative writing in low- and high-graded essays. These authors found that higher proportions of attitude were characteristic of more successful texts, although both groups of texts were similar in a tendency to use more judgement and appreciation than affect . Additionally, high-graded essays displayed significantly more invoked affect through nominalizations and more inscribed valuation than low-graded texts, which tended to inscribe affect through mental processes and to invoke valuation . In terms of judgement , the main contrast between both sub-corpora lied in the selection of sub-categories, with high-graded essays mainly displaying resources of capacity and low-graded texts mainly instantiating normality . Jalilifar and Hemmati (2013) conclude that, although clear tendencies showed that more successful essays tend to display more attitude , punctual instantiations suggested that “in assessing the essays as high- or low-graded, more important than the number of appraisal markers exploited in essays was how these resources were employed” (p. 75). This conclusion coincides with observations by Hunston (2011) , Hunston and Su (2019) , and Valerdi (2021) , who have pointed at the centrality of lexico-grammatical patterns and the strategic use of evaluative language in argumentative structures over low or high proportions of appraisal resources in texts.

Reaching similar conclusions, Myskow and Ono (2018) studied how Japanese undergraduate students of Law and Political Science used resources of affect, judgement and appreciation as part of their arguments’ justifying evidence in a corpus of 62 biographical essays. Having rated the texts as either high or low on the basis of a self-designed rubric, these authors found that both low- and high-rated essays displayed similar proportions of general attitudinal appraisal , with judgement as the most prevalent type of evaluation. Here, the relevant contrasts took place in terms of the most frequently used sub-systems in each group of texts, with high-rated essays displaying higher proportions of appreciation and judgement , and low-rated texts displaying more resources of affect . Additionally, for these researchers, what students found challenging was not the selection of particular attitudinal categories, but finding appropriate grammatical constructions for them to support their arguments; they noticed students relied heavily on attributes to inscribe conclusive evaluations about people. Myskow and Ono (2018) suggest writing teachers should not encourage learners to adopt critical perspectives through heavily polarized inscriptions, but to integrate evaluations with evidence in support of their conclusions through particular grammatical constructions.

In a work that explores the relationship between undergraduate students’ lack of critical voice and limitations in the management of evaluative language, Lee (2015) compared high- and low-graded persuasive essays written by native (Australian) and non-native (South Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese) undergraduate EAP students to identify how evaluative language contributes to academic writing success. In that study, native and non-native writers deployed judgement and appreciation ten times more frequently than affect . When focusing on appreciation resources, the author found that valuation was predominantly more used over expressions of composition and reaction , which they interpretated as a subject-specific particularity. When contrasting low- and high-graded essays, Lee found that less successful texts displayed affect-related reaction twelve times more frequently than successful essays. Additionally, she found that high-graded essays by both native and non-native writers displayed similar tendencies, with frequent use of judgement -invoking valuations . In 2008, Lee had reported very similar tendencies in a study based on a remarkably similar corpus, with high-graded essays deploying significantly more varied attitudinal resources – mainly invoked evaluations of judgment  – and depersonalized attitude  – in the form of nominalizations – than low-graded texts. For  Lee (2015) , shaping an appropriate use of evaluative language is key in EAP instruction, where “students’ exposure to the appraisal system helps them to acquire the relevant English Language skills including grammar and vocabulary most effectively in a context-appropriate manner” (p. 73).

In a work which supports Lee’s (2015) position, Bahmani et al. (2021) propose the model of appraisal as a pedagogical tool to help EAP writers show their critical stance in their texts. To support their claim, the authors developed an experimental study at an Iranian university, comparing the writing successfulness of an experimental group of 30 postgraduate students of English Language Teaching to that of a control group with the same number of students. The experimental group received writing instruction with explicit explanations and analyses of attitude and graduation . On the basis of standardized pre-tests and post-tests applied to both groups, Bahmani et al. concluded that explicit instruction on the use of evaluative language enabled the experimental group to perform more successfully in contrast with the control group, which did not improve its performance significantly.

Besides research based on appraisal analysis, the role of attitudes in academic writing in EFL has seen remarkable contributions developed through applications of Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model. Despite general differences between metadiscourse and appraisal , both models have been found to share remarkable similarities in their conceptualization of linguistic attitudes (Du et al. 2023) : linguistic resources that “indicate the writer’s affective […] attitude to propositions” via markers of surprise, agreement, frustration, importance, etc. ( Hyland 2005 : 53). In this paper, key metadiscourse works are worth mentioning for their special focus on contrasting less or more effective texts on the basis of their attitudinal features.

One of such works is that by Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) , who support the idea that successful attitudinal conventions can stem from instruction in academic writing. They explored how explicit instruction on the use of attitudinal metadiscourse affects the development of stance features in essays and reports. The authors investigated the development of attitude markers and other metadiscoursal resources during one semester of EAP instruction to undergraduate students from various disciplines in Hong Kong. After analyzing written samples before, during, and after explicit instruction, Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) found that undergraduate authors had reduced their use of attitudinal markers significantly in their texts. Additionally, when they graded the same written samples, they found that interpersonal features developed through instruction were more likely to have a positive impact on evaluators. For these authors, “the ability to express a relevant and plausible stance is a crucial indicator of writing quality and development” (p. 94). As challenging as this has been proved to be, such ability can be trained in undergraduate students, who enter university writing privileging their attitudes about their claims and their positions, but may be instructed to develop a new academic voice, “gaining control over the rhetorical and linguistic aspects of academic discourse via the use of a more careful, narrower, less polarising and less personal range of expressions with which to convey their attitudes on a given topic” (p. 102).

Lee and Deakin (2016) looked more closely at the role of attitudinal metadiscourse markers in the effectiveness of undergraduate writing in EFL by analyzing essays written by Chinese learners enrolled in their first or second writing course at a university in the United States. The essays had been rated through a standardized grading rubric either as low or high. Lee and Deakin (2016) found that authors of successful essays had a tendency to include significantly more attitudinal markers than less successful essays. Additionally, these authors observed that attitudinal resources in high-rated texts displayed more varied lexico-grammatical realizations. In these authors’ corpus, the expression of authorial stance through attitude seems to be an important factor of success. Nevertheless, compared to other types of stance markers – namely hedges, boosters, self-mention, and engagement markers –, they observe that attitudinal resources are among the least used expressions of interpersonal meanings in both low- and high-rated essays. These findings can be related to those by Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) in that not only do linguistic realizations of attitude seem to be modulated by EFL writers when writing in English, but they also appear to stem from effective instruction that results in the acquisition of rhetorical conventions of academic EFL writing. Adhering to or neglecting such conventions affects the impression of (in)effectiveness of undergraduate academic texts.

These works have explored and confirmed, to varying degrees and from interrelated perspectives, the possibility to link the use of evaluative attitudinal language to effectiveness in academic EFL writing in different international contexts. The following section presents a description of the methodological approach that was applied in this research in order to explore such relationship in the Mexican context. This will be followed by a report of the results obtained.

4 Methodology

The purpose of this paper is to analyze realizations of attitude in undergraduate academic essays in EFL in order to determine if their attitudinal features represent a potential source of text (in)effectiveness beyond lexicogrammatical and structural considerations. This is done through a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology, comparing the deployment of resources from the three attitude sub-systems in essays written by Mexican undergraduate students from different instructional levels of the major on English Language and Literature at a public university in Central Mexico.

The major in English Language and Literature consists of eight consecutive semesters. Students entering the first semester must provide evidence of having completed three years of EFL instruction during their high school studies. Additionally, they must pass an exam that determines whether they possess competencies equivalent to band B2 from the Common European Framework. As part of their studies in the major, they study four 16-week language courses during the first four semesters (one course per semester). From the fifth to the eight semesters, their training in the language takes place through specialized content subjects that are taught in English. These subjects include advanced English Literature courses where essay writing is a regular instructional and evaluative practice.

4.1 The corpus

The corpus of this work includes 41 essays that were written as final assignments in 16-week English Literature courses by students from different instructional levels: it comprises 15 essays written by students from 1st through 3rd semester – labeled as ‘basic’–, 15 essays from 4th through 6th semester – classified as ‘intermediate’ –, and 11 essays from 7th through 8th semester – considered as ‘advanced’ –. The texts were written under the general instruction to analyze one of the literary works studied during one semester, identify its most remarkable literary features, and justify observations about the chosen work. Each essay was evaluated by the teacher of the English Literature course where it was collected and was granted a grade from 5 to 10. During the recollection of the corpus, teachers in charge of the courses reported to have evaluated the essays on the basis of appropriate analysis of literary concepts and features, as well as cohesion, coherence, and grammatical accuracy. No standardized or specially-designed rubric was used, so the results of evaluation resulted from the expert view of teachers according to the academic liberty policy of the university.

For the purposes of this study, the texts were further divided into three sub-categories according to the grade they were granted by course teachers: low-graded (essays with notes from 5 to 6), middle-graded (notes from 7 to 8), and high-graded (notes from 9 to 10). Table 6 illustrates the composition and distribution of the corpus.

Composition and distribution of the corpus and sub-corpora.

4.2 The analysis

All realizations of attitude in the corpus were recorded and analyzed taking into account the variables of category, realization, explicitness, and trigger. For the trigger variable, five subject-specific labels were established due to the nature of the analyzed discourse: Author 1 (A1) is marked when the writer evaluates him or herself; Author 2 (A2), when the writer evaluates the author of the literary work he or she discusses in the essay; Character (CH), when the evaluated entity is a character or narrator from the literary work discussed in the essay; Text (TXT), when the writer evaluates elements of the literary work he or she analyzes in the essay, such as atmosphere, style, plot, etc.; and Other (OTH), when the evaluated entity is external to the literary work under analysis, such as literary periods, genres, other works, different authors, etc. Additionally, the authorship of attitudinal evaluation was identified through the variable of appraiser ( Martin and White 2005 ). This variable distinguishes between authorial (the writer is the one who evaluates attitudinally) and non-authorial (the writer attributes an attitudinal evaluation to someone else) realizations of attitude .

Besides tracking attitude types in the corpus, the purpose of observing all these realizational variables was to avoid misleading recordings due to potential double coding – i.e., invoked realizations of one attitudinal category instantiated by inscribed realizations of a different one. Because a delicate analysis of this type of invoked attitude is beyond the scope and purpose of this work, when examples of this were identified in the corpus, the inscribed interpretations were considered for the analysis on the basis of prototypical realizations and variables described earlier in Section 2 .

Table 7 illustrates attitudinal instantiations from the corpus with the labels of all the variables observed, including an instance of invoked judgement which was recorded as inscribed appreciation (**). In this example, inscribed appreciation ( +valuation ) is used to evaluate human +veracity indirectly.

Instantiations of attitude with labels of five realizational variables.

All instances of attitude were recorded and quantified in dynamic tables. Proportions of expression of each type of attitude were calculated by dividing the number of occurrences of each attitudinal paradigm by the total number of clauses in each text and sub-corpus (# of attitude instantiations/# of clauses). When focus was on attitude sub-types and realizational variables, proportions were calculated by dividing the number of the corresponding attitudinal paradigm by the total number of attitude instantiations in each text and sub-corpus. As in previous work on appraisal ( Lee 2008 ; Mei 2007 ; Valerdi 2016 ), Chi-squared tests were performed in order to confirm the statistical significance of the findings. This type of test is used to “examine the distribution of data across the categories of our analysis” and “the extent to which the distribution of your observed data varies from the distribution that would be expected if the independent variable had no effect on the dependent variable” ( Levon 2010 : 78). The students’ instructional level (basic, intermediate, and advanced) and perceived effectiveness (low, middle, and high) are independent variables in this study while the expression of attitude and its variables are dependent variables.

In linguistic studies involving categorical dependent variables, chi-square tests with a resulting p value of <0.05 indicate there is a relationship between the variables ( Rasinger 2013 ). In other words, such tests “tell you that there is at least a 95 % chance that the independent variable does in fact have an effect on the dependent variable” ( Levon 2010 : 81). The following section presents the results of the study and indicate p values obtained by the chi-square tests.

5.1 Attitude in the general corpus and by instructional level

As a general feature, there is a significantly reduced proportion of evaluative language in the whole corpus, with only 18.02 % of the clauses expressing attitude. This is reflected in each of the instructional level sub-corpora: 19 % in basic essays, 16 % in intermediate essays, and 20 % in advanced essays. Additionally, these sub-corpora display appreciation as the most recurrent type of attitudinal positioning, while affect is the least frequent attitudinal paradigm in the corpus. The proportions of the different types of attitude are statistically significant in all the instructional levels of the texts ( Table 8 ).

Proportions of realization per attitude sub-system by instructional level.

a When a p value is too long to be contained in a single cell, Excel, the program used for quantitative explorations in this work, reports the result with the suffix ‘E’ followed by an entire number. Such coding means that, for an exact reading of the p value, the decimal point in the result must be moved as many places to the left as indicated by the number following ‘E’. In this case, the value of p is statistically significant, as the full result (0.0000000000000000108249) is meaningfully bellow conventional 0.05.

When considering the variable of explicitness, the corpus features a progressive reduction of evaluative inscription, which is predominant in basic essays and reduces by 21 % in advanced texts ( Table 9 ). The differences in explicitness among the sub-corpora are highly statistically significant.

Proportions of inscribed and invoked attitude by instructional level.

Further careful analysis of the explicitness variable reveals that evaluations of  affect and appreciation are mainly inscribed in the three groups of texts while resources of judgement tend to be invoked ( Table 10 ). This corresponds directly to the most representative lexical realizations of attitude in the corpus: attributes, epithets, and mental processes for affect; attributes and epithets for appreciation; and processes, nouns and nominalizations for judgement. The proportions of explicitness were found statistically significant for judgement and appreciation only.

Proportions of invocation and inscription of attitude types by instructional level. Predominant tendencies are highlighted.

Regarding the realizational variable of triggers, authors of intermediate and advanced essays have literary characters, literary features, and external entities related to the works they analyze in their essays as stimuli for evaluative expressions, in that order of saliency and in almost identical proportions. Writers of basic essays, on the other hand, focus primarily on the authors of the works they discuss when positioning themselves attitudinally, but coincide with their intermediate and advanced counterparts in focusing on literary features of their analyzed works secondly, and thirdly on external entities ( Table 11 ).

Triggers of attitudinal evaluations by instructional level. The three most representative types of triggers in each sub-corpus are highlighted.

5.2 Attitude by perceived effectiveness

The corpus displays meaningful contrasts in the evaluative features of the essays when their perceived effectiveness is taken into consideration. In Table 12 , we can see there is an increasing presence of attitudinal evaluation that progresses from low-graded to middle-graded essays in the basic and intermediate sub-corpora. Such progression, however, does not continue in essays from the advanced sub-corpus, where the distribution of attitudinal realizations contrasts with the other texts and was found to be not statistically significant.

Proportions of attitude in relation to grades granted by university teachers.

A ppreciation resources are the most recurrent attitude type in all low-, middle-, and high-graded essays, followed by judgement and, in much lower proportions, by affect . Additionally, as illustrated in Table 13 , proportions of judgement and affect are close in representativeness to each other in all groups of texts, which indicates an interesting regularity related to the degree of effectiveness attributed to the essays by university teachers.

Proportions of attitude types in relation to grades granted by university teachers.

The explicitness variable does not seem to affect the tendencies in the corpus when related to perceived effectiveness ( Table 14 ). Inscribed appreciation and invoked judgement are the most representative choices in low-, middle-, and high-graded essays. Realizations of affect are significantly inscribed with two exceptions to this tendency. First, intermediate middle-graded essays display invoked affect over inscribed realizations by a difference of 20 %. Secondly, advanced low-graded essays are radically different from middle- and high-graded texts from the same instructional level with 100 % of affective realizations being invoked. Despite the clarity of these tendencies, differences in explicitness were not found statistically significant in relation to perceived effectiveness.

Proportions of invocation and inscription of attitude types in relation to grades granted by university teachers. Predominant tendencies are highlighted.

Table 15 shows remarkable regularities in the types of triggers that undergraduate writers of two sub-corpora have in mind when expressing attitudinal evaluation of different types. In the intermediate and advanced sub-corpora, all low-, middle-, and high-graded essays display evaluative focus on characters, textual literary features, external elements, the authors of their analyzed works, and the very authors of the essays, in that order of predominance. Interestingly, essays from the basic instructional level differ in every single proportion of trigger choice from the others, with textual literary features as the main attitudinal trigger in all low-, middle, and high-graded essays. The second most representative triggers in low- and middle-graded essays are external elements and characters, respectively, while high-graded essays prioritize authors of their analyzed woks. Finally, low- and middle-graded texts coincide in privileging the attitudinal evaluation of the authors of the works they study in the third place. High-graded essays, on the other hand, prioritize their attitudinal stance regarding elements external to their analyzed literary works. These results were found to be highly statistically significant for the basic essays of the corpus, slightly non-significant for the intermediate texts, and markedly non-significant for advanced essays.

Triggers of attitudinal evaluation in all sub-corpora in relation to grades granted by university teachers. The three most representative types of triggers in each sub-corpus are highlighted.

6 Discussion

The results of this research show a meaningful relationship between the use of attitudinal evaluation in undergraduate academic EFL writing and the production of effective texts in the context of the analyzed corpus. In this section, this is shown by discussing the results from general to particular starting with a global scenario of the corpus, then looking at attitudinal features of the texts according to their instructional levels, and finally discussing attitude in relation to the essays’ perceived effectiveness. Following this order, it will be easier to relate the findings to attitudinal features in general undergraduate academic writing and then observe specific features where perceived effectiveness in the texts plays a distinctive role in the corpus of this work.

6.1 Attitude in the general corpus

The first relevant observation is the reduced presence of expressions of attitude in the global corpus, which is a general regularity that previous studies from various contexts have found as a significant feature of academic writing. The low occurrence of attitudinal evaluations in this sort of discourse can be understood in terms of argumentative pertinence. As Hunston states ( 1999 ), in academic discourse, only certain things get linguistically evaluated and they do it in specific ways when it is worth it. Additionally, looking back at Petty and Cacioppo’s (1986) observations on the effects of subjective language in discourse, the appeal to the affective responses of an audience usually takes place at strategic points where an objective argumentation may lack the necessary persuasive potential. Thus, in discourses where objectivity is highly appreciated, attitudinal evaluations are used in limited proportions and forms, leading to a strategic management of evaluative resources.

Such strategic nature in the use of attitudinal evaluations has been previously explored in academic discourse in Spanish and in EFL academic writing. Valerdi (2021) found that attitude resources occurred in limited proportions due to their usefulness in certain specific types of argument components in postgraduate academic discourses in Spanish. The corpus of this study seems to conform to this strategic management of attitudinal expression. Within the area of EFL academic writing, Jalilifar and Hemmati (2013) concluded that particular dynamics of attitudinal deployment in texts are more determinant than large global amounts of attitudinal language in texts. In line with this, Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) concluded that effective writing displays limited and careful expression of attitudinal meanings. Considering these antecedents, the general features of evaluative expressions in the corpus of this work seem to respond to academic writing conventions that learners have associated to their use of their target language and, in turn, reflect a general tendency that has been identified as a feature of effective writing in academic contexts.

6.1.1 Attitude types

A second feature the corpus shares with general effective writing is the predominance of realizations of appreciation in more than 50 % of evaluative resources. Such predominance prevails when breaking the corpus into smaller sub-corpora of basic, intermediate and advanced instructional levels. This leaves little room for affective evaluations, which occur in no more than 9 % of attitudinal realizations in all sub-corpora. As mentioned before, only certain things are evaluated in academic texts, and they are in certain ways only. This is confirmed when comparing these findings with those of previous works on appraisal in different contexts. Zhang and Cheung (2018) , for instance, found appreciation as the most realized type of attitude in articles on Second Language Writing, which they see as the result of a strategic evaluation which focuses on the value of things in order to objectify observations that are subjective in nature. Lee (2015) observes similar tendencies in undergraduate essays and emphasizes the importance of evaluating things related to the subject matter in the production of academic texts. According to these interpretations, prioritizing the appraisal of discipline-related things is central in academic arguments, where evaluation tends to be more objective than it would were it based on observations about human behavior or emotional responses of writers.

6.1.2 Attitudinal explicitness

The inscription and invocation of attitudinal meanings display one more regularity of the corpus that remains constant in the basic, intermediate, and advanced sub-corpora. From a general perspective, attitudinal evaluations are predominantly inscribed, making their attitudinal stance accessible in terms of the effort their identification and interpretation demand from the reader ( Halliday 2002 ). Nonetheless, such inscribing tendency changes when looking at each attitudinal category; realizations of judgement tend to be invoked in more than 65 % of occurrences.

These features carry interesting implications in terms of the degrees of explicitness with which EFL academic undergraduate authors deploy their evaluations. First, the global tendency to inscribe evaluations coincides with Hood and Martin’s (2005) observation that academic writers do not usually invoke attitude when constructing arguments around their work. The features of the corpus of this work confirm the validity of that observation in EFL academic writing. Regarding the contrasting realizations of judgement , previous research has shown how evaluations focused on people and their behavior tend to be managed more carefully in academic contexts than those triggered by things, taking the form of invoked attitudinal resources ( Hood and Martin 2005 ; Valerdi 2016 ). Apparently, the authors of the corpus behave more freely or confidently when evaluating things related to the subject matter of their work and their own personal impressions through appreciation and affect than when dealing with human – or humanized – triggers, in which case they tend to proceed more cautiously. It seems plausible to say these features correspond to generally effective evaluative dynamics in academic writing. Even though proportional differences between inscribed and invoked affect are not statistically significant ( Table 10 ), the regularity of their plain contrast and the significance of differences in judgement and appreciation stand as a remarkable feature of the corpus.

6.1.3 Triggers of attitudinal evaluation

The tendencies of the most recurrent triggers of attitudinal evaluation in the corpus are another area of significant regularity across instructional levels. The vast majority of attitude realizations is triggered by elements inherently associated to the literary works the authors analyzed in their essays; in the overall corpus, the most recurrent triggers are literary characters, followed by textual features from the realm of literary studies, and entities and concepts external to literary works in second and third place, respectively. These results seem to be a direct consequence of the instructions authors were given to analyze a literary work by identifying its most remarkable features as instances of literary genres and to justify their observations. Here, the notion of justification is key; since the authors were expected to justify their observations about literary features, it would seem natural to expect arguments founded on argumentative conclusions and supporting ideas focused on such things as characters, textual features and the contexts around literary works. Such was the case of the corpus of academic essays analyzed by Myskow and Ono (2018) , who found that attitudinal resources were used as part of the two central components of arguments, namely conclusions and supporting ideas, connected to subject matter-related triggers. Taking into consideration Myskow and Ono’s experience, together with Valerdi (2016) findings on the realizations of attitudinal evaluations directly connected to specific argument components, the statistically significant features of the triggers variable in this corpus confirm the centrality of attitudinal evaluation on the elaboration of academic arguments.

6.2 Attitude by instructional level

The corpus displays significant variations if the results are seen from the perspective of the three levels of instruction of the authors of the texts. There is a clear tendency for uses of affect and appreciation to decrease progressively from basic through advanced essays, while realizations of judgement increase from 13 % to 40 % ( Table 8 ). This could be interpreted as the direct consequence of the authors’ choice to evaluate characters from the works they studied and, as a result, it further supports the strategic nature of evaluative choices in the corpus; if any type of attitude was to remain present at different instructional levels, it was the one triggered by human-like entities. Additionally, despite the general reduction of inscribed evaluations in all three sub-corpora ( Table 9 ), expressions of judgement developed on the opposite direction, reducing their invoked realizations significantly ( Table 10 ). These observations suggest interesting evaluative dynamics on the corpus; while there is a general caution on the part of authors to evaluate human and human-like entities in their texts, there also seems to be certain development of a notion of discursive authority ( Poynton 1985 , as cited in Valerdi 2016 ) allowing writers to express their stance regarding human triggers in more open terms through inscribed judgmental evaluations as they gain more linguistic and disciplinary experience.

The relationship between evaluative language and disciplinary experience can also be seen in the triggers on which authors focus their attitude realizations. Writers of basic essays contrast with writers of intermediate and advanced texts in their evaluative focus on authors of literary works as the third most relevant triggers ( Table 11 ). Clearly, the interpretation of writers of basic essays regarding what elements are central in literary analysis is particular. Considering previous observations about the relevance of prioritizing arguments around the value of things to objectify evaluations ( Zhang and Cheung 2018 ), it seems plausible to conclude that, in intermediate and advanced texts, the less central consideration of human elements different from literary characters is the result of the development of a more specialized selection of elements worthy of literary discussion. These findings further support what has been observed by Candarli et al. (2015) , Lee and Deakin (2016) and Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) ; attitudinal choices seem to be modulated by EFL writers when writing in English and, in parallel with this, they stem from disciplinary instruction which leads to the acquisition of academic EFL writing rhetorical conventions. On the grounds of these observations, it is clear how previously discussed general features of effective writing develop in the corpus as essays progress towards more experienced writing.

6.3 Attitude in relation to perceived effectiveness

The results of the analysis evidence a tendency in high-graded essays to display significantly greater proportions of attitude than texts graded as low and middle ( Table 12 ). The fact that the advanced sub-corpus displays an irregular distribution – with middle-graded essays presenting the most attitude  – could be explained by the acquisition of more regularly applied conventions by advanced writers resulting in closer proportions between these groups of texts. Further explorations of advanced essays in this and similar contexts are needed to confirm this. Still, even though the p value of 0.11234221 indicates results might be different for this sub-corpus if this research were replicated, in the actuality of these results low-graded essays display the least instances of attitudinal evaluation.

It is remarkable to notice the significant predominance of appreciation over judgement and affect stands when effectiveness is considered. This indicates the development of attitude -related interpersonal conventions along basic, intermediate, and advanced instructional levels has been shaped by pedagogical dynamics that favor the observed tendencies via both instruction and academic evaluation: what teachers disseminate and evaluate as effective motivates what learners use to shape their discourse in this type of writing as they move towards more specialized levels of literary analysis. It is worth remembering that, according to what they reported, teachers who assessed the essays did not consider attitudinal expressions in their evaluation criteria. Then, in line with Lee’s analysis (2008), we can conclude that teachers might have perceived the management of evaluative language, which directly relates to writers’ stance and voice, as part of the appropriate analysis of literary components and features they sought; attitude is central to effectiveness in the corpus of this work.

Similar findings in previous research indicate the latter interpretation may also apply to other contexts; Jalilifar and Hemmati (2013) found successful EFL texts by Iranian writers displayed significantly more frequent instances of appreciation than judgement and affect , just as Myskow and Ono (2018) did in their essays by Japanese students. Moreover, similarly to this research, patterns of attitudinal inscription and invocation in the corpora analyzed by those authors can be significantly related to degrees of (in)effectiveness. In the corpus of this work, inscription of affect and appreciation contrasts with invocation of judgement in low-, middle-, and high-graded essays – save for minor variations in affect , the least representative category, in the basic and intermediate sub-corpora. Although these contrasts may require further exploration to confirm statistical significance, their plain tendencies and their consistency with the significant dynamics by instructional level confirm the role of attitudinal meanings in the shaping of undergraduate writers’ positioning and, most importantly, a positive relationship between realizations of attitude and the effectiveness of undergraduate EFL academic writing instantiated by the corpus.

Such relationship is further evidenced by the development of attitudinal triggers selection patterns. As it was previously described, in both intermediate and advanced essays, characters, textual features and external literary elements are the most representative triggers in low-, middle-, and high-graded essays. In the basic sub-corpus, however, the very authors of the essays figure as either the second (low- and middle-graded texts) or first (high-graded-texts) choices. The contrast this represents can be explained, once more, on the basis of instruction and academic evaluation; although attitudinal stance focused on the very authors of the essays conflicts with the general features of the corpus, the fact that the other two main trigger types in basic essays remain within what can be seen as disciplinarily central in the general scenario may have allowed for certain tolerance on the part of teachers. Although having access to feedback received by the writers of the basic essays would be the only way to confirm this, it should be enough to notice that trigger selection in relation to text effectiveness takes a clear orientation in the rest of the corpus, thus corroborating the role of attitudinal evaluations in undergraduate academic writing instantiated by the corpus.

In the light of these results, a positive relationship between the expression of attitudinal meanings and academic texts (in)effectiveness has been confirmed. What is more, the writing conventions followed by the authors of the corpus of this work suggest that attitudinal features privileged by university teachers in basic levels of instruction determine the conventions adopted in effective texts at more advanced levels, even when attitudinal dynamics do not seem to have been explicitly prioritized. Apparently, attitudinal dynamics in the context of the corpus have developed from complex influences which go beyond mere linguistic and disciplinary instruction. These observations relate to Chitez and Kruse’s (2012) considerations about writing cultures: further extra disciplinary features related to writing cultures shape what could be considered as effective or successful in writing academically. These include learners’ class experience before and during university education, contact with diverse curricular arrangements, university-specific organizational structures, national writing cultures, and differences among languages. As evidenced by the findings of this work, these factors represent important aspects to consider in the design of academic writing programs and discipline-specific writing courses as these may have to take into consideration the features of their participants’ target audiences, including potential expectations determined by their own linguistic, cultural, and even institutional backgrounds.

All these considerations have a particular centrality in programs focused on training future professionals in English Language and Literature for, as it has been shown, even when interpersonal dynamics involving attitude conform to similar general tendencies in the whole corpus of this study, they vary significantly at more delicate degrees of analysis such as instructional levels and realizational variables. Additionally, exploring such delicacy in variation, which can only be done by analyzing the academic discourse of speakers from different instructional levels within the same undergraduate community, may also serve as a valuable source of information for pedagogical actions aiming to guide undergraduate writers in the production of effective texts in other disciplines.

7 Conclusions

As the findings of this work have shown, the construction of interpersonal relationships through the use of linguistic resources of attitude plays an important role in the perceived effectiveness of undergraduate EFL academic writing at different levels of experience and disciplinary instruction, which indicates the importance of broadening assessment criteria of academic writing beyond the constraints of lexicogrammatical accuracy and text structure, as well as pertinent observations about attitudinal positioning in instructional processes, in favor of deeper interpersonal metalinguistic awareness in both students and writing instructors. In order to face these instructional challenges, it is important to emphasize the results also show that the influence of attitudinal language in the (in)effectiveness of academic texts is furtherly determined by a complex series of contextual factors including discursive authority, writing experience, discipline-specific focus objects, and the multi-faceted writing-related cultural background of writers.

These conclusions are supported by six main findings that have been reported in this paper: 1) In adherence to general academic writing, the corpus displays a significantly low occurrence of attitude resources, which results from a strategic deployment of interpersonal resources by writers as to what is evaluated in their texts and in what ways; 2) General attitudinal features in the corpus privilege appreciation as the most frequent type of attitude and position affect as the least deployed evaluative resource, which reflects the writers’ prioritizing of evaluations of discipline-related things to project an objective-like positioning; 3) Realizations of judgement throughout the corpus are mainly invoked, signaling the adoption of particular evaluation strategies around human or human-like triggers; 4) Basic essays feature greater use of attitudinal resources than intermediate and advanced essays, suggesting a progressive development of objective-like writing dynamics; 5) Overall, high-graded essays display more frequent expressions of attitude than middle- and low-graded essays, suggesting that the expression of attitude is not simply reduced in learners’ discourse as they move forward in their academic training, but according to conventions that favor certain types of strategic attitudinal positioning in texts; 6) In general, the realizational variables of attitude category, explicitness and trigger selection show significantly matching tendencies in high-graded essays in the basic, intermediate and advanced sub-corpora, confirming the central role of the strategic use of affect , judgement and appreciation resources in terms of their realizational variables in the production of effective texts, even when writing conventions develop towards reduced proportions of attitude . Those findings which were not found to be statistically significant might need further exploration, perhaps on the basis of a larger corpus, in order to refine their implications from a statistical perspective. Still, it is worth remembering statistical interpretations, either descriptive or inferential, always leave room for open possibilities.

Regarding the latter point, interpretations of the reported results need to take into consideration that a relevant limitation of this study is the size of its corpus. Although the results of the analysis demonstrate consistent and mostly statistically significant features, their full implications apply to the context of the academic community where the essays were collected. In order to obtain more generalizable findings with more predictive potential in relation to the Mexican context, future work might need to replicate the study on the basis of a larger and more varied corpus.

While the scope of the results of this work is limited to the boundaries of the context of this research, the implications of its findings represent meaningful contributions that complement previous research on the workings of appraisal resources of attitude in EFL academic writing. Most importantly, this work contributes to further understanding of the workings of evaluative language in academic instruction in the context of Mexico, where pedagogical developments from the systemic functional perspective of appraisal theory are still in their early stages. It is ideal that the focus of future work seek to implement research findings in the development of concrete instructional tools which improve the scenario of effective interpersonal positioning for undergraduate authors seeking to take part in international disciplinary dialogue through academic English.

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