You-attitude is a pedagogically convenient cover term that subsumes considerable
complexity, both with respect to the text effects it may include and the text charac
teristics that create these effects. Some of the insights on politeness, tact, and def
erence found in the work of Brown and Levinson, Leech, and Fraser and Nolen
can help provide guidelines for assessing how important a you-attitude may be in
writing about a particular real-world situation, and case grammar and information
structure can inform strategies to enhance the expression of a you-attitude. Rather
than being a binary variable, you-attitude appears to be gradable, and an infor
mal student assessment of the you-attitude expressed in ten versions of the same
passage suggests that the various strategies for enhancing the you-attitude conveyed
by a text appear to have a cumulative effect, so that a greater sense of you-attitude
is created when more strategies are used.
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