زينب رحيمي

Despite earlier studies that individually explored the significance of authorial voice and emotion in argumentative writing quality, no previous research has attempted to address the collective impact of both on argumentative writing effectiveness. To bridge this gap, the present study investigated the potential role of emotion and authorial voice in argumentative writing quality in the corpus of EFL Iranian students’ 314 argumentative essays at IUST (Iran University of Science and Technology). To this end, a thorough eva‎luation of each essay was conducted through a two-step process. Two raters eva‎luated the essays independently, scoring both argumentative quality and authorial voice by well-established argumentative writing and analytic voice rubrics. Then, to gauge the emotional states of the corpus, each essay received emotional scores, employing a sentiment analysis tool with a user-friendly interface applying lexicon-based analysis. Accordingly, the data were analyzed in SPSS 27, conducting correlation and multiple regression analysis, to gain insight into how authorial voice and emotion affect the quality and persuasiveness of argumentative writing. Ultimately, the R programming language was utilized to carry out lexicon-based sentiment analysis, enabling us to get the bigger picture of emotions preva‎lent in the essay corpus with subsequent impact on argumentative writing quality. The results of the study suggest that both authorial voice and emotion are associated with argumentative writing effectiveness. Notably, some dimensions of both, including the manner of idea presentation, presence and clarity of ideas in the content, sadness, trust, and writer and reader presence significantly predicted students’ argumentative writing quality, explaining 28% of the variability observed. Last but not least, the most frequent emotions dominant in the corpus were positive, trust, and anticipation. Overall, the finding indicated that employing authorial voice dimensions and imbuing certain emotion categories in EFL argumentative essays proved to enhance the persuasiveness and quality of argumentative writing. The study concludes with implications for L2 writing instruction and further research avenues in this area.

نگارش مدافعي , هويت نويسندگي , تحليل احساسات

Argumentative Writing , Authorial Voice , Sentiment Analysis

zeinab rahimi

dr. mohammad amini farsani, dr. behrouz minaei bidgoli