Stance is another very important part of the rhetorical situation, and can manifest in many ways. From the beginning of the course I believed stance and purpose were synonymous and interchangeable, but through the course I learned that they are distinct from each other in their meaning. While your purpose can be to education or persuade, your stance is your actual opinion on the topic. Using the multimodal project as an example again, my stance was pro-nuclear and renewable energy. My stance could have easily have been anti-fossil fuels which would have changed the evidence used and how I delivered it to my audience.

Depending on the genre you are writing you may need to mute or emphasize your stance. For example a scientific narrative or blog post may rely heavily on you stance, opinion, agenda or bias while a scientific article or medical factsheet should not feature your opinion because the purpose if just to educate or inform