Evaluative language and authorial voice

Task one - review discussion

Last term when we looked at cohesion, we saw how words can be positive or negative, even when they say the same thing. For example, we can call something a success or a failure depending on whether we think it was good or bad. If something is difficult in a good way we call it a challenge, otherwise we call it a problem. Similarly, we could describe a government transport project as spending or investment depending on our point of view. We call this evaluative language.

• Find pairs of words in the box on the right which refer to the same thing.

Task two - Identifying authorial voice

Evaluative language is one way of conveying authorial voice; in other words, what the writer of a paper thinks about the topics he or she is writing about. Another way in which writers can convey their voice by offering predictions and recommendations, as well as by hedging their language. We were introduced to this when we looked at the language of conclusions last term.

• The excerpts below are taken from the Hans Rosling talk that we looked at in the last lesson. Identify the sentences in which he's offering his voice and evaluation on the topic:
  1. There was an improvement of life expectancy.
  2. There's no gap between rich and poor any longer. This is a myth.
  3. This is Africa. 10 percent the world population, most in poverty.
  4. In some countries, 99.7 percent of children survive to five years of age.
  5. Chile will have a lower child mortality than Cuba within some few years from now.
  6. It seems you can move much faster if you are healthy first than if you are wealthy first.
  7. Now that's dangerous, to use average data, because there is such a lot of difference within countries.
  8. China is growing, it's not so equal any longer, and it's appearing here, overlooking the United States.
  9. There are some web pages like this, you know, but they take some nourishment down from the databases, but people put prices on them, stupid passwords and boring statistics.

Extract A

Martindale (2003) states that Ann Kelley, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison claims that she has discovered that rats who overindulge in tasty foods show marked, long-lasting changes in their brain chemistry similar to those caused by extended use of morphine or heroin. When she looked at the brain of rats that received highly palatable food for two weeks, she saw a decrease in gene expression for encephalin in the nucleus accumbens. “This says that mere exposure to pleasurable, tasty foods is enough to change gene expression, and that suggests you could be addicted to food”. (Martindale, 2003: 43).

Extract B

The consequences of not moderating the intake of fast food are rather alarming. Experiments on rats carried out at the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison indicate that overindulgence in foods high in sugars and fat results in long-lasting changes to the brain chemistry similar to those caused by extended use of morphine or heroin. According to Martindale the results highlight that “…mere exposure to pleasurable, tasty food is enough to change gene expression, and that suggests you could be addicted to food” (2003: 43). A consequence of eating fast food is therefore a tendency to become addicted to it. As addiction means an abnormal dependency on something (Collins, 1984), there is perhaps cause for concern. It is clearly important that people are made aware of the potential threat of fast food. Coupled with research on young American children and the rise of obesity by more than 42% over the last 25 years (Schlosser, 1998), educating people on the risks associated with fast food from an early age is essential.