The strategic use of engagement resources in engineering written reports

Abstract

Written engineering discourse is embedded in its social context and is sensitive to the relationship between an engineer and their client. In order for engineering writers to be able to frame their evidence as part of a convincing argument, they require a strong understanding of the client’s needs and the regulatory context. To present this understanding and framing in writing, the grammatical resources covered by the ENGAGEMENT framework (Martin and White, 2005) are crucial. Engagement resources offer the tools with which to position the voice of the writer in relation to the reader and other voices. This paper presents the findings of a study of the use of engagement resources in a corpus of professional engineering texts which are being used in a larger project investigating the persuasive discourse of engineering. The results indicate that engineering writers strategically manipulate the contraction and expansion of the discourse space in accordance with the purpose of the text, the nature of the evidence and their particular persuasive stance. This manipulation either opens or closes the amount of room afforded to the reader to disagree with the propositions presented. Engagement meanings are also graded to increase likelihood of success and downplay negative perceptions. Finally, engagement resources are selected in such a way to present an impression of objectivity in the writing style. These findings have implications for the teaching of writing to engineering students.