Style and Stance #7: Pinning Down My Categories

I came a long way in my last post ... Let me quote myself:

• "For written texts, style has always been the main way to convey stance because we do not have the other options of voice inflection, dress, gestures, etc that are considered when we look for style in spoken language." 
• "Academic writing wants to show a certain stance so adopts a certain style in presenting a given content."   
  
• "My task now is to categorize this stance and define this style to see if journals are intentionally disaligning from this stance by making different style choices."
• "Rather than stance being the primitive that drives style, stance is the created by style." 

But I am left with somewhat the same question I had before: how does content fit in?  What is the role of all of the stuff we want to jam into our writing?

Style and Stance #6: Defining These Terms

Reading ahead to Kiesling’s  “Style as Stance” was really great advice from Dr. Anderson.  I have been trying to understand the relationship between style and stance, and Kiesling presents a new idea for me to consider: "any choice of linguistic form made by speakers is based ultimately on the interpersonal or epistemic stance they wish to take with their various interlocutors at a particular time, and … it is stances that become associated, through cultural models, with various identities" (172). In other words, stance is at the heart of what then drives style choices and style-shifting.