the persuasive essay in functional perspective
TRANSCRIPT
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles
The Persuasive Essay
In Functional Perspective
A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the
Requirements for the degree Master of Arts in
Teaching English as a Second Language
By
Denise Therese Perez
1997
ii
iii
To My Mother and My Husband,
Who made it possible.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
DEDICATION………………………………………………………….. iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………….. vii
ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………. viii
Chapter
1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………….. 1
Context of the Problem…………………………………………. 1
Research Questions……………………………………………... 1
Rationale………………………………………………………... 2
Relevance to TESL……………………………………………... 3
Methodology……………………………………………………. 6
2. LITERATURE REVIEW…………………………………………….. 9
One Genus, Many Species…………………………………….. 10
A Brief History of the Confusion
Between Modes versus Aims
of Discourse…………………………………………………… 13
Persuasion: A Social Semiotic Perspective…………………… 17
Kinneavy’s Aims of Discourse………………………………... 21
3. DATA ANALYSIS………………………………………………….. 32
Part I: Persuasive Genres …………………………………… 32
Advertisements………………………………………. 36
v
Letters to the Editor………………………………….. 41
Letters to Constituents………………………………. 47
Editorials……………………………………………... 50
Feature Story ………………………………………... 58
Speeches……………………………………………... 60
Journal Articles………………………………………. 58
Summary of Text Characteristics……………………. 72
4. DISCUSSION……………………………………………………….. 80
From Pathos to Logos………………………………………… 80
Persuasive Texts………………………………………………. 80
Charge to the Reader vs. Thesis………………………………. 87
Means of Persuasion: Back to Pathos
and Logos……………………………………………. 88
Generic Variation: Optimal versus
Obligatory Elements………………………………… 89
Contextual Factors:
The Rhetorical Square………………………………. 92
Exposition versus Explanation………………………………... 95
Support and the Expository Essay…………………………… 101
Formal Logic………………………………………………… 101
5. CONCLUSION……………………………………………………. 104
Persuasion and Academic Discourse………………………….104
Components of Persuasion: A Summary……………………. 107
Generic Structure Potential of Academic Essays……………. 108
Predictability………………………………………………… 109
vi
The Undergraduate Persuasive Essay:
Is It Really a Genre?…………………………………… 111
“Real” Academic Genres…………………………………….. 114
The Undergraduate Persuasive Essay ……………………...... 117
Kinneavy’s Value in Current Rhetorical Theory ………….… 117
Kinneavy Revisited and Revised …………………………… 118
Kinneavy’s Original Aims of Discourse……………………... 119
Katherine Rowan’s Amendments……………………………. 120
A New Schema………………………………………………. 121
Dominant Function: A Caveat………………………………. 122
Teaching Strategies: A Final Word…………………………. 123
6. REFERENCES…………………………………………………….. 126
vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my sincere appreciation to all four members of my committee:
Dr. Marianne Celce-Murcia, Ms. Christine Holten, Dr. Charles Batten, and Dr. Assif Agha.
In particular, my gratitude goes out to the chair of my committee, Dr. Marianne Celce-
Murcia, for her unfailing patience, support and guidance. Not only has Dr. Celce Murcia given
me unique insights into writing theory as seen from a discourse perspective, her wisdom and
dedication to this project have made me a better writer. I would also like to thank Christine
Holten and Professor Batten for their extraordinary encouragement, and Professor Agha for his
much valued participation in my project.
viii
ABSTRACT OF THE THESES
The Persuasive Essay
in Functional Perspective
by
Denise Therese Perez
Master of Arts in
Teaching English as a Second Language
University of California, Los Angeles, 1996
Professor Marianne Celce-Murcia, Chair
Introducing college-level ESL students to the genre of the persuasive essay is, by all
accounts, a crucial task (Connor & McCagg, 1983; Purves & Purves, 1986; and Spack, 1988). It
is also a difficult one, given that no one has yet performed a definitive anatomy of this genre
(Peters, 1986). Because there is no one universal, agreed upon structure to pass on to students,
instructors have traditionally been limited when it comes to teaching persuasive writing. In
general, they seem to take one or two approaches: reduction of the genre into easily acquired
formulae, or instruction through models. Both of these methods, however, bring with them some
problems. In terms of the first approach, breaking down the persuasive essay into its basic
ix
components, students are usually taught the following skeletal elements: claim, three supports,
and counter-argument (c.f. Yarber, 1985; and Axelrod and Cooper, 1991). One may well ask,
however, whether any such essay structure exists in the real world. The other alternative,
teaching students through models, is also problematic. On the basis of what criteria, for
example, can we decide whether a model is “good”; how can students distill, from the
hodgepodge of essay styles found in typical readers, the “essential” elements which go into
successful persuasive writing? Then there are issues of context. As Kynell (1992) rightly asks,
is the use of professional writing excerpts as examples of specific rhetorical modes really wise,
given that the original models were not written with that intention (7)? Rousculp & Welsh
(1992) among many others echo this concern (3). Finally, one must ask whether the persuasive
essays students are required to write in the Academy share the same basic generic structures as
the mostly non-academic persuasive models they are asked to imitate. This study will attempt to
provide at least tentative answers to these questions. Specifically, in what follows, I will attempt
to lay forth a generic structure potential for the academic persuasive essay, indicating, as far as
possible, both optional and obligatory elements. In my conclusion I will contend that, while the
Halliday/Hasanian framework of functional analysis (Halliday & Hasan, 1989) is not
incompatible with written genres such as the persuasive essay, other paradigms, most notably
Kinneavy’s model of discourse (somewhat modified), can better aid our understanding, and
hence our ability to teach, persuasive writing.
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
Context of the Problem
In a recent discussion about the newly annotated bibliography, Research in the
Teaching of English (RTE), Russell K. Durst, co-author of the document, noted the need for
more studies of written text structure. Looking towards pedagogical application in composition
classes, Durst (1990) writes: “We . . . need more studies looking not just at types of writers . . .
but at types of writing, or genres . . . so that we can learn more about the kinds of text structures
writers use,” (400). This demand for more information about written discourse genres coincides
with a new focus on generic structure in general in certain schools of functional grammar, that of
Halliday and Hasan (1989) being chief among them. By studying the academic persuasive essay
from a functional perspective, I seek to accomplish two things: a) to uncover more precise
information relative to a fundamental Anglo-American text structure, and b) to sound the depths
and test the limits of one very important genre-based functional grammar theory.
Research Questions
More specifically, this study will attempt to answer the following questions:
1. Given that the function of the persuasive essay is to sway the reader, how is this
accomplished in academic versus non-academic contexts? Can one use a contextual
configuration to predict an essay’s macrostructure?
2
2. What is the generic structure potential (GSP) of the academic persuasive essay? What
are its salient features? Which of these are optional, which obligatory to the
configuration of this genre?
3.
4. Can answers to the above questions help ESL teachers instruct students more effectively
in a module requiring them to write a persuasive essay?
Rationale
Halliday and Hasan (1989) have put forth an exciting new paradigm by which to study
discourse genres. They take up the notion that genres are a product of social and cultural
experience, and use it as one of the chief motivations for their work. While their research has
largely been focused on spoken discourse, their ideas, it would seem, hold at least as much
promise for discovering the structures of written texts. Scholars are just beginning to become
aware of this promise. Swales (1990), for instance, drawing in large part on the work of Halliday
a) Given the broad goal of persuasive rhetoric, is it indeed possible to determine a
GSP for the academic persuasive essay? If not, how does this affect the notion
of genre analysis?
b) Is the academic persuasive essay really a genre? Or does it entail several
genres? If so, what are they?
3
and Hasan, has put forward a brilliant functional analysis of the scientific research report.
Conrow (1992), in a less massive endeavor, has had similar success in applying
Halliday/Hasanian principles to her study of the genre of the critical review. For this present
project, I am interested in seeing whether Halliday and Hasan’s framework, based on their work
in 1989, might shed some light on the persuasive essay, a perhaps less well defined genre of
written discourse.
Relevance to TESL
According to Halliday (1989), most L1 discourse conventions, i.e., tone, register,
organizational models, etc., are assimilated without instruction through culture. “[T]hey . . .
have to be learnt, of course,” says Halliday, “but – like walking and running – they are learnt
young and without the benefit of instruction,” (xv). Those who are not native to a culture can
most often pick up spoken discourse conventions with practice, given the pervasiveness of
accessible oral models. In the case of written discourse, however, the situation is different. The
intricate communicative codes unique to written texts are less accessible, less ‘in the air,’ than
oral forms; they also, in many cases, differ in aim, audience variables and in grammatical
structure. Briefly, one may say that written discourse differs from its oral counterpart in four
ways. It differs in 1) sentence level structure – written structures are often more nominalized,
hence more cognitively difficult to process than oral discourse structures, (see Halliday, 1989);
2) audience – the audience of written texts dos not share the same time or space as the writer of
the text, often leaving the novice writer with only a vague, unclear notion of her readers (Peters,
1986); 3) purpose – written discourse most often serves different purposes than spontaneous
speech (Purves & Purves, 1986); and, finally, 4) written organizational patterns – written
4
conventions, that is, genres, tend to be unique, having few parallels in the spoken realm
(Halliday, 1989).
The first two of these four differences seem to arise due to differing cognitive variables.
That is, since one’s audience is displaced in time and space in a written context, it follows that
one must use more explicit nominal references as well as more logical connectors in order to
help a distant interlocutor comprehend one’s message. It thus seems necessary in written
discourse to compensate for the lack of prosodic and non-verbal communicative signals normally
available to speakers expressing themselves through verbal channels. With regard to the last two
of the differences mentioned, however, these seem to be more culturally determined. As Purves
& Purves (1986) note, it is “culture” which in the end “establishes standards for ‘good writing,’
and all that that phrase entails with respect to orthography and penmanship, diction, syntax,
grammar, structure, genre and format,” (p. 193, italics mine).
Thus, it seems clear that the rhetorical situation characteristic of written discourse
differs vastly from what one finds in the oral realm. Rarely for example in the spoken realm,
would one find a student pretending to speak to a congressman, when in reality she is speaking
only to her teacher. This rhetorical situation however is very common in an undergraduate
writing classroom in the performance of a typical persuasive essay assignment. Freedman
(1996), for her part, characterizes just this sort of decontextualized discourse as “epistemic” in
nature. “Ultimately,” Freedman states,
I argue that the social action undertaken in [law school] writing is
typical of that undertaken in much school writing, in that its purpose
is epistemic – not in the sense of producing knowledge new to the
reader, but rather in the specialized sense of enabling its writer to see
and interpret reality in new ways; in that these ways are the ways of
currently constituted communities of scholars, the purpose of, and the
action undertaken in, such writing is social and cultural as well. (92)
5
Thus, the reality, both in Academia and in the ‘outside world’ seems to be as Halliday
(1989) suggests, specifically, that the very act of writing can and does change the rhetorical
situation fundamentally, creating not only new contexts and new rhetorical challenges for the
writer, but also new genres.
The net result of these basic, if sometimes subtle, differences between oral and written
discourse is that the latter must for the most part, and to most novice writers, be explicitly taught,
both to L1 and L2 speakers. While it is true, as Hairston (1986) claims, that the elements of
persona, purpose and message may in some cases change little whether one speaks or writes, we
can see in the above case of undergraduate level academic writing that this is not always the
case. This is especially true in the area of written genres, which for the most part differ
significantly from their oral counterparts – if indeed they have counterparts. In the case of L2
speakers, most have already learned complex rhetorical patterns in their native tongue; thus,
when their native rhetorical norms differ from those of the target language, they must re-learn
generic structures, as well as the possibly unique L2 contexts where they are appropriate. As
researchers have discovered, one of the premier instances where such cross-cultural rhetorical
‘relearning’ must take place is in the area of expository/persuasive writing.1
Such scholars as Kaplan (1986), Purves & Purves (1986), Takala, Purves &
Buckmeister (1982), Connor & McCagg (1983) and Khalil (1989) have dealt at length with
issues of contrastive rhetoric in genres related to expository writing. They conclude, in short,
that non-native speakers, to be proficient in their L2, must learn this L2 in a variety of levels, that
of “genre” being the most abstract and difficult. It would seem, then, that a better understanding
1 Of course, in the case of those L2 students learning written rhetorical patterns for the first time, only doing so in a
non-native context, the task is no less crucial for the instructor. In this instance, the instructor’s responsibility is the
more familiar one of socializing the student into written discourse conventions in general, just as is done for first
year L1 students at American universities.
6
of English generic structure could clearly benefit non-native speakers seeking written proficiency
in English. ESL students in particular need to be introduced more effectively to the genre of the
persuasive essay, as proficiency in this very culture-specific genre can often be crucial in
determining academic success at the tertiary level.
Methodology
This study will be devoted to an analysis of what constitutes persuasive discourse per
se, focusing primarily but not exclusively on written discourse. In terms of methodology I will
trace suasive techniques and elements as they appear throughout a continuum of persuasive
genres. The genres were chosen on a scale of seemingly simple to complex. I begin with
analysis of written advertisements and end with a breakdown of the suasive elements found in
academic journal articles. My goal is to situate the undergraduate persuasive essay as a genre
within this continuum. Two speeches, which combine both oral and written elements, are also
considered. Because the speeches were composed in written format before they were delivered,
and are not spontaneous productions, I consider them as primarily written texts. The same could
also be said of the Chevron advertisement, which has a nearly identical audiovisual counterpart
generated for the medium of television. All of the above-mentioned genres are unified under
one theme: the environment. A common theme was selected so as to be sensitive to the various
incarnations a similar message may assume. In terms of analysis, the major Halliday/Hasanian
functional categories are explored, namely, manifestations of field, tenor and mode.
Specifically, under mode, I consider whether language use is constructive or ancillary
relative to the given text; that is to say, whether language is used alone to communicate
the message contained in the text, or whether other, extra-linguistic signals are the
7
primary communicators of the idea, with language merely assisting in this goal (for
example, the use of printed words in a television commercial, or a printed caption under
an elaborate graphic serving to advertise a product). In this category, to follow Halliday
and Hasan more closely, one might also have considered such issues as theme/rheme, and
cohesive and structural devices. The former, however, do not weigh heavily in this
study; structural devices will be considered as ideational here, and thus will fall under my
discussion field.
Tenor in the Halliday/Hasanian framework refers to who is taking part in the discourse
and the means by which such relationships are verbally instantiated (for a complete
discussion of this framework, see chap. 2, figure 1). Under tenor I will analyze the
following interpersonal strategies: presence of rhetorical questions, exclamations,
imperatives, first/second person pronouns, references to common ground (between writer
and reader), and use of degree of probability modals. In this category I also consider
appeals to pathos and appeals to ethos, as well ass the charge to the reader.
Finally, under field, my chief interest lies in the central theme of the piece under
evaluation, and exactly how this idea is realized through language. In this regard, Peters
(1986) breaks interesting ground in her study of dominant function in student writing by
linking the traditional rhetorical idea of theme with the relatively novel concept of field
of discourse (171). “The importance of having . . . a theme,” writes Peters, “has always
been acknowledged in our rhetorical tradition (see Couture 1985: 68).” She continues:
… So far, however, the communicator’s theme or proposition has
been little discussed in relation to the functional model of language;
8
little effort has been made to distinguish a communication’s theme or
proposition as it relates to the field or subject matter of the discourse,
the tenor or relationships established between discourse participants,
or the mode or method of textual presentation.” (171)
Peters draws an interesting conclusion in this regard, which I will discuss further on.
She also very perceptively links macro- and micro-structural elements such as logical
connectors with the concept of field in that they “mobilize the text’s theme,” (174)2
In this study I will consider under the rubric of field, the quality and degree of
support found in each text. In addition I will look for suasive position taking markers in
the guise of a) taxonomic terms to classify raw material (i.e., the writer’s specific
choice of words from the larger pool of synonyms the writer could have used, and what
this says about the writer’s stance, subjectivity, objectivity, etc., and b) value laden
descriptors, that is, basically, adjectives or other parts of speech used exclusively to
instantiate the writer’s system of values, her point of view. Finally, I will consider
logical connectors – macro or global structural devices (terms such as “first,” “second,”
“another objection,” etc.) All of these categories will be discussed in more depth in my
introduction to the chapter on Data Analysis. The general idea for the above framework
comes from Peters’ 1986 study of student academic writing, although I have greatly
modified analytical categories to suit my present needs.
2 Peters however seems a little ambivalent regarding macro-and micro-structural elements: for while she clearly
realizes their critical value in instantiating the theme which she considers to be the essence of the text, (and, thus, an
ideational feature), she still categorizes these elements primarily as textual strategies akin to cohesion. A solution
might be to categorize micro- locally cohesive structural elements as textual elements, and concede more central
importance to macrostructural, or globally cohesive elements, classifying them as part of the text’s field.
9
Chapter 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
If one quickly scans the content of UCLA freshmen writing courses, one might safely
conclude that persuasive writing constitutes perhaps the fundamental writing form in the
Academy. One need only peruse the course syllabi in Writing Programs or the syllabi from the
35 and 36 composition-level courses in the ESL program to become aware of this fact. Indeed,
of the five sequential L1 writing courses taught at UCLA, from English A, an introduction to
university discourse, to English 131A-J, Advanced Exposition, the two most popular courses,
English 2 and English 3, strictly emphasize persuasion. The preparation begins in English 2 with
analysis and critique of university-level texts. The emphasis in this course, as one reads in the
UCLA catalogue, is on “revision for argumentative coherence and effective style.” The real
practice with argument, then, comes with English 3, the official freshman English requirement,
whose main goal is to introduce students to “[r]hetorical techniques and skillful argument.” Of
the 26 course syllabi I reviewed from English 2 and 3 courses, prepared for Fall 1991, all courses
assigned either persuasive essay assignments exclusively or combinations of summary,
comparison/contrast, definition, etc. type of assignments leading up to argument papers. There is
a very similar breakdown in the ESL section of the TESL & Applied Linguistics department,
with: a) ESL 35 (the equivalent of English 2) preparing students through summary and analysis
skills to approach persuasive writing; b) followed by ESL 36, the ESL counterpart to English 3,
whose primary focus is on persuasive writing, critiques, and a persuasive research paper.
10
One Genus, Many Species
Given the prime importance of persuasive writing in Academia then, one would assume
that there is a general consensus among scholars and teachers as to what this genre actually
entails. One is somewhat surprised, therefore, to discover in the expert journals in the field that
this is not the case. Indeed, not only does there seem to be no consensus among writing
specialists as to what actually constitutes academic persuasion per se, there seems to exist a
fundamental uncertainty among experts as to how even to define “academic writing” in general.
Peters (1996), for example, seems to group all academic writing under the concept “academic
genre,” or more generally, “the genre of academic discourse,” thus coining a new term.
Interestingly, though, the only writing she points to as exemplifying this “genre” are essays of
argument and critique. For her, then academic writing is persuasive writing. This contrasts with
DiPardo (1990), who instead sees “expository” writing as definitive of academic discourse.
DiPardo defines the latter as “autonomous, written, formalized text” (65), which is
depersonalized and decontextualized. She bemoans the fact that such writing “even today
constitutes the prime goal of writing instruction,” (65). It is unclear whether DiPardo would
include under this category the persuasive essay.
It could be that the looseness with which the term “genre” is bandied about in
composition journals reveals an underlying disarray among scholars over what we are actually
teaching in college. For most of us, the only “genre” we have some confidence with is the
“essay” per se. “The essay is a powerful modern genre,” say Shumaker, Dennis and Green
(1990: 136), “a major vehicle for public discourse.” Not surprisingly, there exists a long
tradition of defining the essay genre, most of which distinguishes between the ‘formal’ and
‘informal’ subtypes, with academic discourse falling under the ‘formal’ category. Interestingly,
11
however, within this categorization the informal, or personal, essay has a much clearer history
than the formal essay. Jim Krusoe (1994: E1) points to the difference between the two,
describing the personal essay as,
A different animal from its cousin, the formal one, that object of well-
meant punishment by generations of kindly English teachers. Where
the logic of the latter is meant to be airtight and its structure rigid and
unshakable, the structure of the personal is far loopier, more like a
poem’s . . . it is a playful tweak on the nose of those awful, earnest
authors of news-magazine opinions, which have names like “speaking
out” and “my turn.”
According to Holman and Harmon (1986: 187), the informal essay began in aphoristic and
moralistic writing, modified by the interjection of the personal element. Montaigne, the 16th
century French moralist, originated the genre, which was then further developed by Bacon,
Cowley, Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, La Bruyère, and the Victorians. The popularity of the
informal essay can be seen in the current popularity of Phillip Lopate’s (1994) The Art of the
Personal Essay, a wonderful anthology of prominent essays of this type from throughout western
history. In its evolution, the informal essay, say Holman and Harman (187), was “broadened and
lightened by free treatment of human manners, controlled somewhat in style and length by
periodical publication . . . [It] has developed into a recognizable literary genre, the first purpose
of which is to entertain, in a manner sprightly, light, novel or humorous.”3 This is to be
contrasted with the formal essay whose evolution, importantly, has been much less clearly
recorded. “Instead of crystallizing into a set literary type,” note the above two authorities, the
formal essay “has tended to become diversified in form, spirit and length, according to the
serious purpose of the author,” (p. 189). To sum up, the authors write:
3 Yet, if the informal essay can be considered a literary genre, there still seems little consensus on its form. Lopate
categorizes the essays in his anthology according to the following forms: Analytic Mediation, Book Review,
Consolation, Diary/Journal Entry, Diatribe, Humor, List, Lecture, Letters (Epistolary Essay), Mosaic, Newspaper
Column, Portrait and Double Portrait, Prose Poem and Reverie, Reportage, Valediction. Are these really “forms” or
does this constitute a classification according to function?
12
The technique of the formal essay is now practically identical with
that of all factual or theoretical prose writing in which literary effect
is secondary to serious prose. Its tradition has doubtless tended to add
clarity to English prose style by its insistence on unity, structure and
perspicacity. (189)
Once one moves beyond the formal/informal or personal distinction, the categorization
of possible subtypes of the essay as a genre becomes murky. Holman and Harmon, considered to
be experts by Lopate for one, come up with 20 distinctions, few of which apply to academic
writing. In a note of resignation the authors conclude: “obviously, classifying the essay has
eluded human skill,” (186).4
The fact that there is no current consensus on what exactly an essay is, however, has not
prevented academics from offering up ‘objective’ classifications of their own. Typically, a
library reference sheet from one Los Angeles junior college provides students with the following
supposedly standard divisions of the formal essay: the expository, the argumentative and
descriptive essay. Of these distinctions it might perhaps be fair to ask whether the last of these,
the “descriptive essay” has any real existence anywhere. In another classificatory judgment,
Stephen Wilhoit (1993), in a novel vein, makes the distinction between “academic source-based
writing” and “argumentation” essays (29), as if argumentation per se somehow precludes
working from sources. Derrida makes a similar, and I believe specious, distinction when he
differentiates between “the art of persuasion” and the sense of logical demonstration” (Olsen,
1990: 27).
4 Indeed, this confusion over the abundance of literary forms which comprise the “essay” has had undesirable
ramifications for university-level writing courses in general regarding what specifically should be taught in these
courses. Discussing their own field of “Advanced Composition,” Shumaker, Dennis & Green (1990) sadly conclude
that, “Unfortunately, the wealth of models suggests again that advanced composition may well prove impossible to
define once and for all,” (138).
13
Although the above classifications are related, Derrida’s is definitely one of the most
pernicious and abiding and, as we will see, has the greatest historical tradition. Because such a
distorted view of persuasion – one which separates suasion per se from logic – is so tenacious in
scholarly thought, persisting among scholars from Aristotle up until modern-day Kinneavy, I
believe it is of value to examine why this view has held such sway.
A Brief History of the Confusion between Modes versus Aims of Discourse
If one wishes to understand the modern day distinction (and confusion) between
exposition and persuasion, one needs to understand the rhetorical tradition of Aristotle and the
faculty psychology theories of the Enlightenment.
Aristotle and the classical rhetoricians who followed him were the first to make the
distinction between persuasive discourse and didactic discourse, the former being considered
manipulative and not subject to the rules of strict logic. At this point, persuasion was mainly an
oral phenomenon and continued to be so throughout the Middle Ages; speeches were constructed
spontaneously by means of memorized “stases” of argument which were learned at the schools.
It is fascinating how the first new “scientific” account of persuasion reinforced this
ancient tradition. George Campbell in his Philosophy of Rhetoric in 1776 was the first
rhetorician to base his ideas of persuasion on the cognitive theories that became known as faculty
psychology. Campbell, in Lockean tradition, understood the mind to be composed of four
faculties: the intellect, the imagination, the will, and the feelings or emotions. One could
perhaps call him the first functionalist – in a very distant way, an intellectual predecessor of
Halliday and Hasan – for he was definitely the first to categorize discourse according to the
function it served relative to something else, in this case the mental faculties. Thus, discourse
14
which enlightened was seen as appealing to the intellect, that is, that was its function, and on
down the line. There was discourse which pleased the imagination, that which moved the
passions and that which influenced the will. This latter was considered to be persuasive, and
here, just as with Aristotle, persuasion is seen as divorced from the intellect.
While Campbell’s chief preoccupation was with the function of discourse, this cannot
be said of those who followed him, who began a tradition of substituting the means of discourse
for the ends. Thus, after Campbell, a fascination began with “modes of discourse,” that is, the
ways in which one appeals to the intellect, emotions, etc. –the traces of which one can still see
today in the misconceived “descriptive” essay category discussed above. In other words, a trend
emerged in which modes began to be seen as ends in themselves. The present-day modes of
discourse, narration, description, exposition and argument, made one of their first appearances in
George Gregory’s 1808 textbook Letters on Literature, Taste and Composition, an important
predecessor to Bain’s work in 1866. In almost modern format, Gregory presents description,
narration, exposition, argumentation and oratory as the principle modes of discourse, which he
relates to the faculties of the mind. This whole idea, however, is only treated in passing in the
book. The modes take on many incarnations up until the 20th century. One of the most popular
appears in 1834 with Samuel Newman’s Practical System of Rhetoric. In this text, the most
widely used rhetoric in America between 1820 and 1860, Newman, much like Gregory, puts
forth the descriptive, narrative, didactic, argumentative and persuasive modes as the five possible
categories of discourse. Here “didactic” is used in place of the more common term “expository.”
Most importantly, as Connors (1981) points out, Newman, as Gregory before him, but having
much more influence than the latter, “separates persuasion of the will from argument to the
logical faculties,” (emphasis mine) (445). This trend continued throughout the 19th century. One
15
cannot leave the 1860’s, as Newman’s influence was beginning to wane, without mentioning
George Quackenbos. This scholar seems to depart from the rest by offering a more reasoned
view of argument, although his view doesn’t seem to have taken hold. Quackenbos, in his 1863
text Advanced Course of Composition and Rhetoric, puts forth a seemingly contemporary
academic description of argument, namely, “a statement of reasons for or against a proposition,
with the view of inducing belief in others,” (D’Angelo, 1984: 35). Here he seems to de-
emphasize the passion and deceit intimated by other contemporary theorists. Importantly,
Quackenbos contrasts his view of persuasion with “exposition,” which he defines as “explaining
the meaning of an author, in defining terms, setting forth a subject in its various relations or
presenting doctrines, precepts, for the purpose of instructing others,” (35) – again, a very modern
definition.
If Newman was the first to popularize the modes throughout ante-bellum America, Bain
was the first to systematize them in the post-Civil War epoch. As Connors points out, modal
terms in Bain’s influential 1866 English Composition and Rhetoric “inform long sections of his
discussion,” (Connors, 1981: 444). Bain’s modes – description, narration and exposition
belonging to the intellect, argumentation pertaining to the will, and poetry addressing the
imagination – have endured to the present day (rigidifying, perhaps, our current views of
persuasion vis-à-vis exposition). In this case, while the modes themselves as classifications in
Bain’s paradigm are not new, their use as an organizing principle in a textbook and as a full-
fledged teaching paradigm are. Indeed, the modes as Bain conceptualized them coincide with
the emergence of the first freshman English composition courses as we know them today, both
being the result of a new shift in American colleges, a shift away from classical analysis of
16
argument, eloquence, style and belletristic focus, and towards a more varied scientific curriculum
(Connors: 446). Jon Harned (1985) sums up Bain’s significance nicely:
Up until the publication of Alexander Bain’s English Composition
and Rhetoric in 1866, most American college textbook rhetorics were
organized around belletristic discourse classifications; that is, they
divided up the subject of writing into established literary forms such
as orations, history, romance, treatises, sermons and the like. Bain’s
textbook brought about what we now, thanks to Thomas Kuhn, refer
to as a paradigm shift, sweeping away these belletristic schemes and
substituting five forms – Description, Narration, Exposition,
Persuasion and Poetry – that, with the exception of poetry, have
survived up to the present in Freshman Composition and are known in
the trade as the Modes of Discourse. (1985: 42)
One cannot speak of a total decline of modes per se as there are still too many
contemporary textbooks like Langan’s College Writing Skills with Readings (1993), which
organize themselves around the modes. Here one can still find fossilized assignments that call
for descriptive and narrative essays as genres, ignoring the function which the description or the
narration must in fact be subordinated to. Nonetheless, with the emergence of paragraph
emphasis and unity at the turn of the century (c.f., the “big four”: Barrett Wendell, John Genung,
Adams Sherman Hill and Fred Newton Scott), and then the emergence of single mode texts
shortly thereafter, most notably texts concerned only with techniques of exposition, the modes
lost much of their prominence. In the 1930’s composition as a discipline began to
professionalize itself with scholarly journals and conferences uniting professionals and creating
more accessible forums for new ideas. Thesis texts emerged in the 1930’s; general semantics
and communication theories informed writing paradigms in the 1940’s; and in 1950 George
Campbell’s very primitive notion of writing function comes full circle with the publication of
James McCrimmon’s Writing with a Purpose, quietly setting the stage among a host of other
17
developments for contemporary focuses on function in discourse (c.f., James Britton (1970) and
his triad of poetic, expressive and transactional discourse; James Kinneavy’s A Theory of
Discourse (1971), James Moffett’s (1983) notion of spectrum discourse – recording, reporting,
generalizing and theorizing; etc.).
Given such a great evolution from Aristotle’s view of rhetoric to the very sophisticated
cognitive and social theories of discourse that we have today, it is ironic that many scholars
nonetheless maintain the classical, limited view of persuasion, most notably Kinneavy, to whom
I shall return. The truth is, beyond the obscure John Bascon, who in 1873 declared that oratory
(i.e., persuasion) “may find its object in the understanding, in the emotions or in the will,”
(D’Angelo, 1984: 37), thus providing the most far reaching view of persuasion yet, most
scholars, or at least those who have given any thought to the matter, retain a somewhat uneasy,
undefined view of the relationship between persuasion and exposition.
Persuasion: A Social Semiotic Perspective
One might well wonder how Halliday and Hasan’s (1989) views of discourse hook
together with all of the above. To understand Halliday and Hasan, one needs to change gears
and shift from a cognitive view of discourse to a social-semiotic one. In brief, the social
semiotic perspective taken by Halliday and Hasan seeks to explain, in the words of Deborah
Brandt, “how social life is embedded in and perpetuated by discourse, (1986: 143) or in other
words, how social life determines everything about discourse, most particularly generic structure.
Actually, for Halliday and Hasan, the influences go both ways; indeed these two scholars see
context and text as interwoven in a kind of symbiotic relationship, where social contexts
18
permeate texts and texts permeate social contexts. In the words of Hasan, “[T]here is. . . a two-
way relationship between text structure and [social situation]: the ongoing structure of the text
defines and confirms the nature of the [social situation], while the latter acts as a point of
reference for deciding what kind of elements can appropriately appear when, where and how
often (1989: 70). On a macro scale, as Halliday says, the wish of the two scholars is to examine
“the systematic relation between the social environment as a semiotic construct on the one hand
and the semantic system and functional organization of language on the other,” (Halliday and
Hasan, 1980: 13-14). At a more simplistic level, the two scholars seem fascinated by the
element of prediction in social interaction, which is the single greatest factor in enabling,
Halliday believes, mutual intelligibility. Halliday puts it this way:
What is remarkable is how often people do understand each other
despite the noise with which we are continually surrounded. How do
we explain the success with which people communicate? The short
answer, I shall suggest, is that we know what the other person is going
to say. (9).
Specifically, Halliday believes that when confronted by a specific social situation we do
three things: a) we note what is going on (i.e., assign to the situation a “field”); b) we recognize
the personal relationships involved (i.e., assign to the situation a “tenor”); and c) we see what is
being achieved by means of language (i.e., mode) – hence the “function” in their functional
approach. Armed with this information we then make predictions about the kinds of meaning
that are likely to be foregrounded in that particular situation. In short, we sort of activate a verbal
schema of what is taking place which tells us what we ourselves should say and how we should
say it. And what the verbal schema in fact is is an oral discourse genre. It is interesting,
however, that Halliday and Hasan choose one of the most basic of possible oral discourse
situations to illustrate their ideas, for example, the sales encounter. Hasan, in discussing the
19
social variables of a sales encounter successfully predicts the oral generic structure for that
particular situation. The question is, is this possible with more complex situations and genres?
To answer this question, we have to go back to their theory in more detail. Halliday and
Hasan (1989) refer to social situations as “Contextual Configurations” or CCs. In the words of
Hasan: “A contextual configuration . . . is a specific set of values that realize field, tenor and
mode,” (55). Once we sort of “plug in” the above values or variables of a given situation, we
should be able to predict what Hasan refers to as a “text’s” Generic Structure Potential. Again,
Hasan: “If a text can be described as ‘language doing some job in some context,’ then it is
reasonable to describe it as the verbal expression of a social activity . . . So it is not surprising
that the features of the CC can be used for making certain kinds of predictions about text
structure,” (56). These predictions of course relate to the particular genre in question. Thus, one
should be able to predict four generic features: 1) obligatory elements, i.e., what must appear to
make a genre a genre; 2) optional elements, 3) any required sequencing of the above vis-à-vis
each other; and 4) the possibility of iteration.
If one looks more closely at how Halliday and Hasan define context of situation,
however, one soon becomes aware of extreme vagueness in their categories. Please see figure #1.
20
Figure #1 (Adapted from Halliday & Hasan, 1989, p. 12)
Context of Situation
Three Features
Field – refers to what is happening, to the nature of the social action that is taking place:
What is it that the participants are engaged in, in which the language figures as some
essential component?
Tenor – refers to who is taking part, to the nature of the participants, their statuses and
roles: what kinds of role relationship obtain among the participants, including
permanent and temporary relationships of one kind or another, both the types of speech
role that they are taking on in the dialogue and the whole cluster of socially significant
relationships in which they are involved.
Mode – refers to what part the language is playing, what it is that the participants are
expecting the language to do for them in that situation: the symbolic organization of the
text, the status that it has, and its function in the context, including the channel (is it
spoken or written or some combination of the two?) and also the rhetorical mode, what
is being achieved in the text in terms of such categories as persuasive, expository,
didactic, and the like?
Specifically, if one looks at the definition of mode, one finds that Halliday and Hasan take for
granted basic generic functions, namely those relating to persuasive and expository genres,
without first defining what these entail. Indeed, it is to discover exactly what these entail that is
the main goal of this study. Thus, for this investigation, it would seem that Halliday and Hasan’s
paradigm approaches the object I wish to analyze from too much of a distance.
There does exist an alternative functional paradigm, aimed, it would seem, at the right
level, and which, I believe, shed some much needed light on the topic under consideration here,
the persuasive essay. This is James Kinneavy’s (1971) theory of discourse aims.
21
Kinneavy’s Aims of Discourse
When Kinneavy’s work, A Theory of Discourse, appeared in 1971 it had enormous
impact. It was embraced in the seventies by such leading rhetorical theorists as E.P.J. Corbett
(1992), Jim Corder (1996), Frank D’Angelo (1976), and Ross Winterowd (1975). It provided,
notes Fulkerson (1984), the conceptual basis for several modern textbooks as well as for
individual courses and composition programs. It became part of the canon that “any well
prepared college composition teacher must know,” says Fulkerson, and became required reading
for two NEH seminars. In the 1980s the book came out in paperback and then, for all intents and
purposes, seems to have been forgotten.
This is a shame, for there is much of value in Kinneavy’s approach. Kinneavy bases his
ideas of discourse on a communications triangle involving the speaker/writer, (the encoder); the
hearer/reader (the decoder); the language of communication (the signal); and, finally, reality, or
what is referred to (see figure #2).
Figure #2 Kinneavy’s Communication Triangle
Signal Encoder Decoder
Reality
22
This four-way communications network is built upon similar theories put forth by Plato (the first,
second, and third person view of discourse), Bühler (cited by Halliday and Hasan, 1989) and
Jakobson (1960) among others. From this basic network, Kinneavy builds a whole system of
discourse which elegantly showcases types of discourse based on the communications variable
most foregrounded by the speaker/writer.
Kinneavy situates his schema within a complete social framework of discourse not
incompatible with that of Halliday and Hasan. Thus, Kinneavy sees type of discourse as being
determined by language pragmatics, a phenomenon related directly to how and why people
actually use language. Kinneavy explains, “Taken together, the syntactics and semantics of the
language constitute the language as a potential tool” (22). What is critical is how people use this
tool.
Discourse study then is the study of the situational uses of the
potentials of the language… [it is] characterized by individuals acting
in a special time and place; . . . it establishes a verbal context and it
has a situational context and cultural context. (22)
This seems an exact parallel to Halliday and Hasan’s contextual configuration. “We study
language partly in order to understand language and how it works, and partly to understand what
people do with it,” writes Halliday (Halliday & Hasan, 1989: 44). “All use of language has a
context,” Halliday continues.
The ‘textual’ features enable the discourse to cohere not only with
itself but also with its context of situation. We have analyzed the
context of situation into three components, corresponding to the three
metafunctions [i.e., field, tenor, mode]. This enables us to display the
redundancy between text and situation – how each serves to predict
the other. (45)
23
Like Kinneavy, Halliday and Hasan imagine the relationship between language and ‘real life’ to
be a series of concentric circles: First one has a “context of situation” (45), the immediate
instance in which language is being used; this in turn is enveloped in an overarching “context of
culture” (46). Both of these areas then are shot through with historical precedent, which
Halliday and Hasan call “intertextuality.” Not unlike Bahktin’s (1981) concept of heteroglossia
(but conceived here as a discourse phenomenon rather than a purely linguistic phenomenon),
Halliday and Hasan define intertextuality as follows:
We have spoken of [context of situation and context of culture] as
‘determining’ the text, stressing the predictability of the text from the
context. ... But in fact the relationship between text and context is a
dialectical one: the text creates the context as much of the context
creates the text. ‘Meaning’ arises from the friction of the two. This
means that part of the environment for any text is a set of previous
texts, texts that are taken for granted and shared among those taking
part. (47)
In fact, this view of language has even more in common with Vygotsky (1934) than with
Bahktin. For while it is Bahktin’s insight that language, being shot through with historical
usages and already fashioned meanings, constrains an individual’s original power of expression,5
Vygotsky makes clear that each individual in certain ways creates language as much as language
creates or determines the utterances of each individual. “Word meanings develop,” (212) writes
Vygotsky. In everyone’s mind, Vygotsky notes, senses of words “combine and unite . . . The
senses of different words flow into one another – literally influence – so that the earlier ones are
contained in, and modify, the later ones.” Vygotsky gives the following example of this
5 Consider Bahktin’s own words on the subject in his essay the Dialogic Imagination, in Discourse in the novel,
(1981, p. 276). “Indeed, any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as it
were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist – or
on the contrary, by the “light” of alien words that have already been spoken about it. It is entangled, shot through
with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents. The word, directed toward its object,
enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in
and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: and
all of this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression
and influence its entire stylistic profile.”
24
potential for word creation in language in general, and in each individual’s mind in particular.
“Thus, a word that keeps recurring in a book or a poem sometimes absorbs all the variety of
sense contained in it and becomes, in a way, equivalent to the work itself. Titles like Don
Quixote, Hamlet and Anna Karenina illustrate this very clearly; the whole sense of the work is
contained in one name.” (247).
In the same way that actual words, burdened as they are with their unique histories and
at any point in time fixed meanings, comprise the language which each member of society is
obliged to use, so actual texts, each genre with its unique history, comprise the rhetorical tools
each individual in society has access to in order to express herself through language. Language
use is not heroically ‘free’ in society, but rather consciously or not language becomes packaged
in the specific genres which a culture, through its history and immediate necessity, has crafted.
And, of course, new genres, like new words, are created all the time. This is Halliday and
Hasan’s view of intertextuality. It is a shame that they do not develop it more.
Instead, Halliday and Hasan seem content to view the impact of culture in a global
sense. In their work Language, Context and Text they sadly limit themselves to examples of a
child’s discourse while playing, or a customer’s discourse at a service encounter. It seems from
their 1989 work at least, that Halliday and Hasan are happiest when they can factor out any trace
of cultural “intertextuality” and see only the basic needs of the individual, and how the individual
seeks to satisfy these needs through language. I believe that it is here where Kinneavy’s more
historical view of concrete rhetorical traditions, created in response to very complex individual
needs in society, is more helpful as a guide in understanding my topic of modern persuasive
discourse situated in the Academy.
25
Please see figures #3 and #4 for a visual layout of Kinneavy’s global understanding of
discourse.
Figure #3*
Kinneavy’s Concept of Discourse
Context: Place of Discourse
in Language Study
Language Metalanguage
Reality
*(Adapted from Kinneavy, 1970, p. 21)
Given this map of Kinneavy’s overall understanding of discourse, one may locate a
major difference between Kinneavy and Halliday and Hasan. The latter, from the examples they
give in their 1989 work, seem to look only at situational or cultural influences on discourse.
Kinneavy takes these factors largely for granted in his book, understanding them as the sine qua
Signal Decoder Encoder
Pragmatics
Situational Context
—Personal and social
motivations for speaking,
reading, etc.
Cultural Context
— Larger social reasons
motivating science,
propaganda, literature,
comparative ethno-
science, etc.
— Large Social Effects of
the above
— Taste in the above
— Traditions
— Genres
— Period Characteristics
26
non of any discussion of discourse. Kinneavy, then goes on to consider other discourse
constraints, which he classifies as lying under the rubric of “pragmatics.”
It is here, I believe, that Kinneavy factors in Halliday and Hasan’s idea of intertextuality
by actually viewing the history of each genre of discourse concurrently while analyzing the
immediate aims, available modes, media, etc., of the individual seeking to express himself
through language. Halliday and Hasan create a framework for this but they don’t really follow
through. Below is a fuller view of Kinneavy’s idea of what constitutes discourse “pragmatics,”
basically, the variables which shape an individual’s specific use of language at a specific time.
One cannot readily perceive the idea of “intertextuality” in this schema, but it clearly underlies
the structure. Each mode Kinneavy considers, as well as each rhetorical aim he presents, has
been discussed and formulated in various ways since Aristotle. It is Halliday and Hasan’s failure
to introduce discussion of many of these variables – the established modes of discourse in
English, for example – which leaves gaps in their work. Figure #4*
27
Kinneavy’s Concept of Discourse Pragmatics
Most important to Kinneavy’s system is his quantification of the aims of discourse,
which emanate from the components of the communications triangle. Thus, his main focus
is on the particular rhetorical goal a speaker/writer wishes to achieve by her use of language,
among which he recognizes four principle goals or aims. Discourse, for example, whose
main focus is on the encoder is deemed expressive discourse; that which is focused on the
decoder is persuasive, that whose primary focus is on “reality,” and which thus de-
emphasizes the encoder and the decoder is “reference” discourse; finally, that discourse
which foregrounds the language per se of the message, is literature. Importantly, for
Signal
Encoder Decoder
Reality
Syntactics Phonology
Morphology
Syntactics
Semantics Meaning
Psycho-linguistics
Reference Pragmatics
Arts & Media Reading
Speaking
Writing
Listening
Modes Narration
Description
Evaluation
Classification
Aims Reference
Persuasion
Literature
Expression
*(Adapted from Kinneavy, 1970, p. 25)
28
Kinneavy, it is the aim of discourse which then determines everything else about it: its form
of logic, its organization and its style.6 In other words, it is the immediate aim of discourse,
as Kinneavy strictly defines it, which accounts for a text’s generic structure. This is to be
contrasted with Halliday and Hasan’s more loosely conceived ‘context of situation.’ In
reality, instead of being considered as an alternate paradigm, perhaps Kinneavy’s work can
be seen as a sort of fleshing out of the very good ideas which Halliday and Hasan articulate
in more general terms.
In Kinneavy’s system the modes, (i.e., narration, description, classification, and
evaluation) are tools; they can be used in the service of any aim of discourse. For a
breakdown of Kinneavian aims of discourse (61), please see Figure #5.
6 A claim which has not gone unchallenged (c.f., Fulkerson, 1984)
29
Figure #5 — A Theory of Discourse, 1971: the Aims of Discourse
Individual
Conversation
Journals
Diaries
Gripe sessions
Prayer
Social
Minority protests
Manifestoes
Declarations of independence
Contracts
Constitution of clubs
Myth
Utopia plans
Religious credos
Scientific Exploratory Informative
Referential Discourse
— Proving a point by arguing from
accepted premises
— Proving a point by arguing from
particulars
— A combination of both
— Dialogues
— Seminars
— A tentative definition of…
— Proposing a solution to
problems
— News Articles
— Reports
— Summaries
— Nontechnical encyclopedia articles
REALITY
SIGNAL
ENCODER DECODER
Literature
Expressive
Discourse
Persuasive
Discourse
Advertising
Political speeches
Religious sermons
Legal oratory
Editorials
Short story Drama
Lyric TV Show
Short narrative Movie
Ballad, folk song Joke
30
With specific regard to persuasive and referential discourse, Kinneavy offers the
following definitions. In terms of discourse focused on the decoder (i.e., persuasive
discourse), all other variables pale in comparison. Thus, “what is essential is that the
encoder, reality, and language itself all become instrumental to the achievement of some
practical effect on the decoder,” writes Kinneavy (39). Persuasion involves the “direct
inducement to some kind of action (intellectual, emotional, or physical),” according to
Kinneavy, who states that it “therefore differs from science and literature,” (219). Unlike
science, persuasion values “probabilities more than truths,” and therefore cannot be
supported on the basis of pure logic. Instead, suasive support, for Kinneavy, who is
obviously greatly inspired by Aristotle, deals with “apparent proof” or the enthymeme.”
Here Kinneavy approvingly quotes Aristotle’s rhetoric: “The duty of rhetoric,’ he says,
‘is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in
the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a
long chain of reasoning,’” (220). Predictably, then, Kinneavy takes the final step of
equating persuasion with emotional appeal. “A further specific differentia of persuasion
from reference discourse is the usual presence in persuasive discourse of emotional terms
and references,” (220). The examples Kinneavy provides of possible genres in this
category are advertisements, political speeches, religious sermons, legal oratory, and
editorials. Predictably, academic essays are not included in this rhetoric. . .
Finally, reference discourse for Kinneavy is everything that persuasive discourse
is not. It is objective, well-reasoned, well supported by empirical fact or deduction and it
is not emotional. It is, in short, everything an academic persuasive essay should be.
31
This seeming shortcoming in Kinneavy’s paradigm has not escaped notice. In his
brilliant critique of Kinneavy, Fulkerson (1984) points this out: “Kinneavy denigrates persuasive
discourse, implying that shallow emotional appeals, deception, and illogic are among its primary
features,” (49). “Undoubtedly,” continues Fulkerson,
Much sham reasoning exists in contemporary persuasion, but it does
not seems helpful to equate persuasion with propaganda… while
elevating into the status of science any discourse that attempts careful
reasoning. (50)
Clearly, Kinneavy’s work is based on previous theorists, not empirical evidence. Fulkerson, in
his critique says as much: “Instead of a finished taxonomy upon which we build curricula and
syllabuses, Kinneavy has provided a complex set of hypotheses to be tested, used, and modified
through rhetorical criticism,” (Ibid).
In a word, that is what the following section of this paper will attempt to do. Based on
evidence supplied from seven representative persuasive genres, I wish to carefully analyze the
components of real persuasive texts and distill from them those elements which compose their
generic structure. I will then apply the principles which can be gleaned from this analysis to a
reformulation of the Kinneavian paradigm to include the undergraduate persuasive essay.
32
Chapter 3
DATA ANALYSIS
Persuasive Genres
In this section I analyze seven persuasive genres, 13 texts in all,7 taking for the
most part two examples from each genre8 from which I hope to trace a progression of
suasive techniques as I move from simple to complex. The genres are: magazine
advertisements, letters to the editor, a congressman’s letter to constituents, editorials, a
feature story, speeches, and academic journal articles. To control for topic, “The
Environment” was chosen as a theme unifying all thirteen texts. It is a topic, I believe,
given to both emotional as well as detached scientific treatment; it is also a popular topic
in freshman writing courses. I will analyze all functional categories in the above texts,
i.e., field, tenor and mode, and my chief interest in the pieces will be to ascertain the
following elements: a) the charge to the reader; b) presence of formal logic and/or
scientific exposition in the text; which is related to c) type and degree of support in the
text; I will also be looking for d) type and degree of emotional appeal, both pathos-based
and ethos-based; and e) interpersonal strategies: i.e., presence of rhetorical questions,
exclamations, imperatives, first/second person pronouns, and common ground indicators,
and finally, f) suasive position-taking markers, both i) taxonomic terms to classify raw
material (see next page for a fuller description of all categories presented here) and ii)
value laden descriptors. I will also mark the role which language is playing in the text,
7 Numerical breakdown: two advertisements; 2 letters to the editor; one Congressman’s letter to constituents; three
editorials; one feature story; two speeches; two scientific journal articles. 8 With the exception of two genres, the letter to constituents and the feature story, of which I will study only one
representative text.
33
that is, whether it is constitutive, or the only means of communication in the text, or
whether it is ancillary. Let’s look at these categories in a bit more depth.
I: Field
Again, the most relevant aspect of field, for this study, lies in the central theme
of each text under evaluation, and how this theme is presented. This entails considering
the use of logic, support, and macrostructural elements.
Formal Logic and/or Scientific Exposition
According to Kinneavy (1971), scientific discourse is distinctive in its
rigid use of formal inductive and deductive logic, the latter devolving from
absolute premises. This is contrasted with the “enthymeme,” which Ramage and
Bean (1992) define as
an incomplete logical structure that depends for its completeness on
one or more unstated premises. These unstated premises serve as the
starting point of the argument and therefore should be assumptions,
values or beliefs granted by the audience. (97)
Kate Ronald (1987) rounds out the definition by differentiating the enthymeme
from the syllogism. Thus, the enthymeme is understood as a syllogism with one
proposition suppressed. More importantly, however, it is said to differ from the
syllogism in that
it addresses matters of probability, it need not adhere to strict rules of
validity, and it employs ethical and emotional as well as logical
proofs. It serves persuasive purposes in those wide areas of human
affairs for which formal logic does not apply, including many
business and technical situations. (43)
In this study, it is therefore important to trace whether pure logic or enthymemic logic is
employed in the texts to confirm or refute Kinneavy’s characterization of persuasive
34
discourse. In addition to type of logic, Kinneavy differentiates scientific from persuasive
discourse in terms of style. Thus, scientific discourse is characterized by use of 3rd person,
density of presentation, use of scientific coinages or jargon, whose goal is that of
“instruction rather than persuasion, clarity rather than adornment, denotative rather than
connotative,” etc. (172). These are also things I will be looking at in my study.
Amount and Kind of Support
In this category I wish to trace the amount and kind of proof or
demonstration of the truth given to claims made. It is important to note because
unsupported claims usually sell themselves on the power of emotion alone and are
of course not considered scientific.
Persuasive Position-Taking Markers
Interesting also is the presence in texts of subtle forms of value
judgments – i.e., taxonomic terms to classify raw material and value-laden
descriptors. This will be interesting to follow in the more “objective,” detached
journal articles in my generic spectrum.
Again, some of the framework above has been taken from Pamela
Peters’ 1986 study of student writing; however, it has been greatly expanded and
modified largely with Kinneavian concepts. Also, unlike Peters’ study, the present
analysis will be largely qualitative and exploratory. At the end of the thirteen
analyses I will summarize the results.
35
II: Tenor
In evaluating aspects of the interrelationships made apparent in the text between
the writer/speaker and the reader/audience, I will consider the following elements:
Charge to the Reader:
The central difference made between scientific or didactic discourse
versus persuasive discourse – the distinction made from ancient times up to and
including Kinneavy – is that the main concern of persuasion is to incite the
reader/audience to some action. As stated above in my discussion of Kinneavy,
the action desired on the part of the reader may be either intellectual, emotional or
physical. On the other hand, scientific discourse, it is asserted, has next to no
concern with the reader, only with the “reality” being discussed. Thus, I believe it
to be important in analyzing the following persuasive texts to determine what
effect the writer wished to have on the reader, (i.e., what, in other words, the writer
charges the reader to think, feel, or do). Are all persuasive texts really reader- (or
decoder-) based, as Kinneavy asserts? Conversely, are all ‘expository’ texts
primarily reality-oriented?
Type and Degree of Emotional Appeal
Here, as opposed to the above category, I seek to determine to what
extent suasion is based in the text on appeals to emotion or bald appeals to the
credibility of the writer.
Interpersonal Strategies
This category, unlike the others, is taken from Peters (1986), who in her
study of persuasive components looked for things such as reference to common
36
ground, rhetorical questions, exclamations, imperatives, degree of probability
modals and first and second person pronouns. Like Peters, I consider these to be
crucial components of persuasion and am interested in seeing how they are
distributed throughout the genres I am studying.
III: Mode
With regard to mode, my chief concern will be whether use of language is
ancillary or constitutive. As previously mentioned, I consider all texts collected here to be
primarily written texts.
I: Advertisements
In her study, Peters is largely concerned in the area of persuasive discourse with
tracing the elements that are effective in getting the theme across, (1986). The same
concern is fundamental in all advertising. In both the Chevron ad and the 50 Peaks Hiking
Boot ad, emotion is the prime means of suasion.
1) Do not disturb, (May 1, 1995: 62). Chevron magazine advertisement in
Newsweek, 85 words.
Summary: This advertisement wishes to instill on the part of the reading
public confidence in the company and admiration for the company’s
compassionate stance on environmental issues. The ad consists of a full-page
picture of a large fish on a fertile ocean floor, with the text embedded in this
piece of artwork.
i) Field
Thesis: Chevron does not disturb nature.
Amount and Kind of –
a) Formal Logic and/or scientific Exposition: 0
37
Notably, there is no attempt made at formal logic in this advertisement, no
induction, deduction, etc. There is of course an implicit cause and effect assumption
underlying the ad, i.e., because we are so environmentally conscious, you should buy our
product. Thus, the logic of the ad is enthymemic.
b) Support: 0. There is also a notable lack of support to back the central claim
in this ad. How does the reader know that Chevron has not disturbed the ecosystem along
the Dugong Reef? The reader must take the claim in the ad at face value.
Persuasive Position-Taking Markers
c) Taxonomic Terms to Classify Raw Material: 0. As expected, there is no raw
material here to classify.
d) Value Laden Descriptors: At the most basic level the ad uses highly
emotionally charged vocabulary: “liquid glass” (– the ocean is crystal clear, totally
unpolluted), “coral treasure,” “cradles life that is so delicate,” “harm it forever,” etc.
The vocabulary here is emotionally packed with concepts of good and evil. Chevron is
“good.” Do not consider it to be an evil polluter.
i) Tenor:
Charge to the Reader: Trust Chevron; implicit charge: buy Chevron gasoline.
Interpersonal Strategies: In her study, Peters calls “interpersonal strategies”
those strategies which a writer uses to connect/relate to the reader. The assumption is that
such strategies are absent in the more reference-focused scientific discourse and much
more present in heavily persuasive discourse. As expected, the latter part of the
assumption proves true in the case of advertising. One way of connecting writer and
reader present in the Chevron ad is to establish some “common ground” between the
38
two. Here, Chevron posits that all readers value pristine nature, that no reader will want
an oil company to destroy nature. The purpose of the ad is to assure the reader that
Chevron too holds these values, and will protect the reader’s values. This particular ad
uses only one other means of directly impacting the reader, the rhetorical question, but
the question here is central to the ad itself: “Do people go out of their way to avoid
crowds?” To understand the rhetorical importance of this question, however, we must
address the subject of ethical emotional appeals.
Appeals to Ethos: From Aristotle onwards, “ethos” has had the rhetorical
meaning of the speaker’s (or writer’s) personal integrity. Effective orators/writers, it
seems, have always known that establishing the reputation of honor and trustworthiness of
the “messenger” has enormous persuasive impact on the message one is trying to convey –
hence the expression ‘take my word for it.’ In terms of the Chevron ad, the entire ad is an
appeal to ethos. Thus, while the underlying message of the advertisement is: buy our
product, nowhere is this stated in the text. Instead, the text seeks to instill the reader’s
confidence in the company by establishing the fact that Chevron goes out of its way to
protect nature: i.e., “Do people go out of their way to avoid crowds? —People Do.”
(Chevron logo). All other things being equal, the assumption is, the consumer will, as a
result of seeing this ad, choose the environmentally safe Chevron product instead of
another brand which may not be so environmentally conscious. Thus, the entire verbal
text of the Chevron ad consists of an ethical appeal, although this is not the only type of
appeal made.
Appeal to Pathos. There is one central appeal made to the “pathos” or to the
emotions, feelings of the reader here as well. Above all, a feeling of well-being, of things
39
being as they should be, is invoked by the picture of the ad depicting a happy, thriving
ocean scene. This sense of well-being is then reinforced by the story-like wording of the
text “Below the liquid glass, below shadows and air, breathes a neon city where eels roar
and turtles fly.”
iii) Mode: Language
In this ad, language plays an ancillary role, that is, it is not the only means by
which this ad communicates its message. Here the words are embedded in a full-page
picture. In both ads, the picture adds to the emotive power of the text.
2) Hi Tec 50 Peaks Hiking Boots, (February 1992: 69). Advertisement in Sierra
magazine,
84 words.
Summary: This ad describes the company’s innovation with boots; the
enjoyment and use of these boots is linked by the advertisers with the fate of
the national parks.
Thesis: 50 Peaks hiking boots are the best; therefore, they will “last forever.”
Amount and Kind of –
a) Formal Logic and/or scientific Exposition: 0
b) Support: 0. Only the claim is made: 50 Peaks . . . taking the hiking boot to
new heights through a combination of technology, design, and trail-tested materials to
provide the best boot for all your outdoor adventures.”
Persuasive Position-Taking Markers
c) Taxonomic Terms to Classify Raw Material: 0
40
d) Value Laden Descriptors: use of superlative: “best boot”; expressions
connoting exhilaration and fear: “new heights,” “help save”; and absolutes: “enjoy
forever.”
ii) Tenor:
Charge to the Reader: Buy our boots/help save the national parks.
Interpersonal Strategies: There is a clear common ground of values presupposed
by this ad, which is made possible by the specialized nature of the publication it is in.
Because this magazine, Sierra, symbolizes environmental consciousness, the
advertisement assumes that their goal to preserve U.S. National Parks is shared by the
reader. It is this assumption that makes the advertisement work. (The phrase “our
national parks” is mentioned twice.) In addition to common ground expressions, there are
five imperatives in the ad: “enjoy forever”; “then enjoy the beauty of our national parks”;
“look for details”; “find out how”; and “take the step.” These of course connect writer and
reader by directly addressing the latter.
Appeal to Ethos: Hi Tec 50 Peaks boot company establishes its ethical credentials
by showing, like Chevron, how it is saving the environment. Thus, if readers go to the
store outlet they can “find out how [they] and Hi Tec can save our National Parks.” This,
it is to be imagined, is a good reason to go to the store and buy their boots.
Appeal to Pathos: There are three emotional appeals in this ad, the first being an
appeal to the reader’s visual and physical pleasure. Immediately the reader is struck by
the beautiful picture on the page and lulled into thinking that she should be climbing the
mountains portrayed there. “Enjoy forever,” says the ad. The ad then instills in the reader
41
a desire for adventure. The 50 Peaks product is touted as the best boot “for all your
outdoor adventures. Whatever your mountain. . . . 50 Peaks.” In a quick about-face,
finally, come the subtle arousals of fear and guilt in the reader, as the ‘enjoy forever’
message becomes qualified by the “saving” the parks message. The reader is seized by
the uneasy feeling that inaction on her part, that is, failing to visit the boot store, will lead
to a loss of the parks. As with the Chevron ad, this hiking boot ad artfully manipulates the
reader.
iii) Mode: Language
Ancillary – Like the Chevron ad, the Hi Tech ad is embedded in a picture. The
upper part of the ad consists of a snapshot of a mountain sunset; the bottom section shows
a pair of boots superimposed on a sandy trail which is marked by the rugged footprints of
the boots. The logo “50 Peaks: Hi Tec” is also superimposed, all of which is surrounded
by a border composed of the names of the 50 national parks in America. The entire ad
plays with the name of the boots and the 50 national parks the advertisers wish to be
associated with; thus, when the ad says “enjoy them forever,” we do not know whether it
is the boots or the national parks that are being referred to.
II: Letters to the Editor
Because of the greater length afforded to this genre of persuasion, there is much
more latitude for letter-to-the-editor authors to develop their message. As expected, in the
two letters I analyzed a variety of persuasive strategies were utilized.
42
3) Harkin, J. (April 22, 1994: 12A). Beware of the latest anti-environmental strategy
[Letter to the Editor]. USA Today. Approx. 260 words.
Summary: The letter informs the public about a strategy called the “wise
use” movement, which, according to the writer, is meant to harm or
circumvent existing environmental laws. Writer wants readers to actively
block implementation of the wise use “takings” idea.
Field:
Thesis: The reader should make sure that legislators vote no on the “wise
use” bill.
Amount and Kind of –
a) Formal Logic and/or Scientific Exposition: two definitions — “With a
common-sense sounding name, the wise-use movement is a coalition of over 500 major
mining, logging, oil, gas and commercial interests”; “Takings is an idea resulting from a
radical interpretation of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees just
compensation when the government confiscates property”; cause and effect — “because
of this situation, environmental gains may be curtailed”; deduction — use of example (see
below).
b) Support: two hypothetical examples — “For example, a company forbidden
to dump toxic waste into a public water supply would have to spend money to upgrade its
pollution-reducing capabilities”; “Under the takings concept, taxpayers would have to pay
the company for its ‘losses.’”
Persuasive Position-Taking Markers
c) Taxonomic Terms to Classify Raw Material: 0
d) Value-Laden Descriptors: The adjectives in “common sense sounding
name.” Use of quotation marks to undermine the validity of a concept: “’wise-use’”; the
43
politically loaded term “green agenda,” which is also in quotation marks. “Radical
interpretation,” “this stealth campaign,” negative terminology is used well when
describing those whom the writer opposes.
ii) Tenor
Charge to the Reader: (explicitly stated) “Do what you can to make your
legislators aware of this stealth campaign against our planet Earth,” i.e., write to your
congressman and tell him why you are against the “Wise Use” scheme.
Interpersonal Strategies:
Common ground is established between the writer and the reader through the use
of the first person plural “we.” i.e., “Just when we [emphasis mine] thought there was
something to celebrate this Earth Day…” Here the author is in effect creating an
audience by addressing herself only to those people who share the same pro-
environmental values as she. This strategy of tapping into the values of the reader, which
we also saw in the above two texts, illustrates well Burke’s idea of the essence of
persuasion, that is, identification between writer (speaker) and audience. As Kinneavy
(1971) puts it: “the decoder is, presumably, divided in attitude from the encoder; otherwise
there is no point to persuasion. Thus the purpose of persuasion is to achieve identification
of speaker and hearer, according to Burke. This persuasion of the hearer may be to some
new intellectual conviction, or to new emotional attitude, or it may be a direct inducement
to physical action,” (219). In this case, as in the above two, the writer does not wish to
change attitudes, but rather appeals to those in the audience who share the same values
and cites them to action. And again, this incitement to action, unlike the situation in the
Chevron text, is explicit and in second person: “do what you can.” Finally, one must note
44
the two imperatives in this text, the one just mentioned and the one in the title: “Beware
of ....” All of these elements connect the writer directly to the reader and allow the former
to have sway in the text.
Appeal to Ethos: Another weapon in the author’s arsenal of persuasion is the
latter’s credentials. By using the above-mentioned “we” in the opening “just when we
thought . . . “ the author not only identifies with the reader as being in the same camp, but
notifies the reader of her authority in this matter: the author is pro-environmentalist and is
obviously well-informed in environmental issues. This is a good instance of Halliday’s
“radical” view of functionalism in language in the sense that it shows how even one word
can perform overlapping functions in a text.
Appeal to Pathos: The emotions roused in this text are those of fear. The
reader’s concern is touched off by the very title of the letter, “Beware of” and remains the
central issue of the text. The writer’s chief antagonists, the mining, logging, oil, gas and
commercial interests, are portrayed as corrupt enemies of the reader. Thus such language
as “scheme,” “tactics,” “radical,” to characterize the anti-environmentalists maintain the
reader’s feelings of distrust and apprehension throughout the text.
iii) Mode: Language
—Almost Constitutive. Embedded in the text is a symbol of a green earth with a
leaf in the center. This, of course, is a non-verbal element of persuasion. If the leaf
graphic was added by the editors, however, then one could say that the language is entirely
constitutive.
45
4) Reilly, W. K. (August 15, 1992: 18). Memo on Rio Summit focused on U.S. gains
[Letter to the Editor]. The New York Times. App. 264 words.
Summary: this letter is both a critique of the media, which the writer believes
to be unfair in its reporting, as well as a somewhat emotional defense of
Bush’s environmental policies.
i) Field:
Thesis: The press is not giving fair coverage to the Bush administration’s
positive environmental record.
Amount and Kind of
a) Formal Logic and/or Scientific Exposition:
There is a 27 word summary of the author’s memorandum in this letter, a major
point of the text.
b) Support: examples of successes (69 words); quasi-support: adducing of
verifiable claims based on the authority of the writer, (63 words), much more support
would be needed to make this “scientific” however.
Persuasive Position-Taking Markers
c) Taxonomic Terms to Classify Raw Material: 0
d) Value-Laden Descriptors: Morally charged words: “the problem Bush has
experienced is getting fair coverage”; “a fair reading makes clear ...”; “a responsible
course of action”’ “a bold initiative”; “the distortion of the intent and content of my
memorandum”; “the conference was a success”; comparatives/superlatives: “stronger
laws,” “spends more money.”
46
ii) Tenor:
Charge to the Reader: implicit charge — Don’t trust the media; support George
Bush.
Interpersonal Strategies: There are very few general interpersonal strategies in
this letter. The only ones of mention are the two first person references: “my,” “that we
ultimately did not sign.”
Appeal to Ethos: There are two types of ethical appeal present in this text. The
first, oddly enough, is the theme itself of the letter. Thus, if one counts the number of
words which function as bolstering up the reputation of the writer, and hence the Bush
administration, one could say that 67% of the letter consists of a direct ethical appeal. The
first part of this appeal can be seen in the paragraph defending a letter written by the
author previously: “The distortion of the intent and content of my memorandum on the
Earth Summit in Rio to Environmental Protection Agency employees is symptomatic of
the problem the Bush administration has experienced in getting fair news coverage for an
environmental record that is substantive, significant and impressive,” (46 words). The
second thematic ethical appeal points to the technical accomplishments of the Bush
administration compared with those of other nations at the summit: “The United States
has stronger laws, spends more money and takes the protection of endangered wildlife
more seriously than any other country on earth. That we ultimately did not sign this
convention reflects serious concerns relating to financing and protection of intellectual
property rights that had nothing to do with protecting biological diversity,” (63 words).
The second type of ethical appeal implicit in the letter rests on the credentials of
the writer, William K. Reilly, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
47
Appeal to Pathos: The emotions of the reader are only tangentially engaged in
this letter by the brief references to the audience’s sense of fair play. That is, the writer
wishes to present himself as an aggrieved party who has been victimized by hostile
players (i.e., the media and the environment). This can be seen in the wording: “the
distortion,” and “a fair reading.” These expressions are meant primarily to evoke
agreement, but they probably also to some extent evoke sympathy from the readers for a
victim of injustice.
iii) Mode: Language — Constitutive
III: Letter to Constituents
This item is similar to the political infomercials and advertisements typically run
on television. Here Congressman Waxman seeks to inform his constituents of the
positive role he is playing on their behalf in Washington. He discusses two main issues in
the letter: healthcare and environmental successes. Here I focus only on the portion of the
newsletter that deals with what Waxman is doing to keep our air and water clean. Of
interest is how this letter might differ structurally from regular Letters to the Editor and
Editorials which often are just as politically charged.
5) Waxman, H. (March 1994). Keeping Our Air and Drinking Water Clean; this
sample is taken from Mr. Waxman’s monthly Letter to Constituents, approx. 200 words.
i) Field:
Thesis: Waxman assures us that our drinking water is safe and our air is healthy
to breathe.
48
Amount and Kind of:
a) Formal Logic and/or Scientific Exposition: 0 — The letter is informative, not
explanatory or expository.9
b) Support: 0 — There is no support given for any of the claims.
Persuasive Position-Taking Markers
c) Taxonomic Terms to Classify Raw Material: 0
d) Value-Laden Descriptors: “I strongly oppose this effort”; “one of my
proudest achievements,” “I’m concerned that ...”
ii) Tenor:
Charge to the Reader: a) explicit ethical charge: have confidence in Henry
Waxman; b) implicit transactional10 charge: reelect Waxman.
Interpersonal Strategies: Waxman employs three interpersonal strategies:
common ground reference, use of imperatives, and first/second person pronouns.
Common ground is established through the “here and now” effect of present and present
perfect verb tenses. This is reinforced by Waxman’s use of the first and second person:
“our drinking water is safe,” “our air is healthy to breathe,” “we will continue oversight to
ensure...” “I sponsored,” “I strongly oppose,” “I count it as,” “one of my proudest
achievements,” and “I’m concerned that ...” With the use of “we” Waxman eliminates the
distance between himself and the reader. Waxman also appeals to all readers’ basic
values, i.e., “[a]ssuring that our drinking water is safe and our air is healthy to breathe ...”
Waxman then reaches out to the reader and shakes him up as it were with his use of modal
9 For a fuller discussion, see p. 80
10 I use the word “transactional” here in the Brittonian conative (1970) sense in which the speaker uses language to
get the addressee to do something, as reported by Halliday and Hasan (1989: 17).
49
imperatives: thus, “[n]ow, specific measures must be implemented and actual controls
installed.” His absolute injunctions show the reader that he is in control. They also touch
upon the readers’ fears that if these things are not done, the reader will suffer. One must
note that the emotional component of this letter lies principally in the fact that Waxman
provides no support for his claims. He generates an urgency in his message to
constituents by alarming them with no evidence and basically tells them that to avert
disaster they must put faith in his actions. Emotion is involved here, not reason.
Appeal to Ethos: Basically, the overriding message of this letter is an ethical one,
despite its purported public health/environmental significance. In sum, Waxman portrays
himself as a savior of the people. This is seen through the pictures shown on the page and
throughout the wording of the letter. Thus, Waxman shows himself as opposing the
weakening of “essential legislation”: “I strongly oppose this effort [i.e., to dilute certain
legislation]” he writes, “and will continue to work to renew the Safe Drinking Water Act
without weakening the law’s public health protections.” He’s an enactor of basic
legislation: “The landmark Clean Air Act of 1990 took ten years to enact into law,” he
points out, “and I count it as one of my proudest achievements in Congress.” Finally,
Waxman has it made known that he is a sponsor of basic legislation: “In 1986, Congress
passed legislation I sponsored that established a system for keeping contaminants out of
drinking water and ensuring the public was notified if standards were violated.”
Appeal to Pathos: As mentioned above, the emotional impact on the audience is
twofold: 1) the ad arouses the readers’ fears of bad drinking water and fears that 2) the
legislation preventing this evil is coming under attack – “Now that the law is under attack
by water companies seeking to relax its requirements.”
50
iii) Mode: Language
—Almost Constitutive: there are accompanying pictures of Waxman on the
pages.
IV: Editorials
Compared with newspaper letters to the editor and political letters to constituents,
there seem few novel traits to be found in the “editorial” genre. Of note in all the above
are possibilities for structural and stylistic variation.
6) ‘Greening’ of Vermont (June 29, 1993: 18). The Christian Science Monitor. approx.
520 words.
Summary: this editorial advocates and defends a broader-based
concept of environmental issues, namely, the inclusion of an area’s
“beauty” and “serenity” as environmental concerns. These are
being threatened, according to the author, by megamalls and discount
stores.
i) Field:
Thesis: We must begin to reconsider environmental issues on a broader basis:
considering such elements as beauty and serenity as parts of the environment to be
protected.
Amount and Kind of:
a) Formal Logic and/or Scientific Exposition: (0). There is not a great deal of
definition, induction, rigorous deduction etc. to be found in this text. It is largely
informative: fact plus interpretation.
51
b) Support: All claims here are either supported or attributed to an authority. It
is, for example, the “National Trust for Historic Preservation” which has placed Vermont
first on their endangered state list; it is the President of the National Association whose
fears are discussed; it is the Chamber of Commerce who calls the placement of Vermont
atop the list as a “gross overreaction,” and finally it is “critics” who have brought forth the
remaining facts presented. One also finds an example by analogy here. Quotation,
therefore, is the chief source of support for this text.
Persuasive Position-Taking Markers
c) Taxonomic Terms to Classify Raw Material: 0
d) Value-Laden Descriptors: this text is marked not so much by individual
adjectives that weigh the writer’s opinion, but by complete sentences that simply express
value judgments – exactly what one would expect to find in editorial writing.
ii) Tenor:
Charge to the Reader: Expand your concept of environmental issues and
measures, i.e., agree with the claims made here.
Interpersonal Strategies: Two main interpersonal strategies are pursued here: 1)
establishment of common ground between encoder and decoder; and 2) direct address
through rhetorical questions. First of all, one must note that the text is framed in a ‘here
and now’ scenario meant to include the reader. “At a time when the list of endangered
species and habitats seems to grow longer by the day,” opens the article, “Americans have
become accustomed to hearing environmental alarms.” This opening, however, not only
succeeds in constructing a shared time between the reader and writer, it also addresses the
reader’s probable state of mind. According to Katherine Rowan’s explanatory theories
52
(1988), this approach of first approximating the reader or learner’s current understanding
of an issue and then expanding from there is a perfect example of the “transformative”
approach to explanation. That is, instead of just presenting new facts to the reader in what
is referred to by Rowan as a “quasi-scientific” approach to explanation, the writer seeks to
transform the reader’s present concept. This requires the writer (or speaker) to know or
guess at the reader’s/learner’s starting base of knowledge. As I will argue later, this
approach to explanation also applies to persuasion. You can see the writer actually
slipping into the mind of the average reader and expressing his probable questions in the
form of rhetorical questions in the text. Thus, “But who could have predicted that the
latest candidate for protection is the verdant landscape of an entire state?” can be seen as
the reader’s probable response to (and surprise at) the information thus far presented.
There are two other strategic rhetorical questions which do the actual “transforming.” The
first of these again takes the reader’s point of view: “Is this first-place standing a ‘gross
overreaction,’ as the head of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce has charged?” The
second then subtly introduces the writer’s point of view which he will try to persuade the
reader to adopt: “Or is it a legitimate way to help environmental groups capture public
support as they guard against overdevelopment?” Finally, the answer the writer gives
eliminates any point of contention between the reader and writer. Thus the answer:
“Probably both”; and the mechanism of persuading the reader is now in full swing. Of
course, such a “transformative” view of learning or in this case persuasion, simply gives a
name to the age-old injunction of the rhetors to understand your audience and to frame
your discourse with them firmly in mind.
53
Appeal to Ethos: 0
Appeal to Pathos: The chief emotion evoked and exploited in this editorial is the
reader’s fear. Clearly, one need only separate out the urgent and unsettling vocabulary
used throughout the text, to see that the writer’s goal is on an elemental level to alarm the
reader. A sampling of the typical call of alarm seen in many of these texts is evident
below. Thus, in this case at risk is
The verdant landscape of an entire state . . . the whole state is at siege
. . . Vermont, all 9,609 square miles of it, has just been placed at the
tip of the 1993 list of ‘Most Endangered Historic Places’ . . . The non-
profit group’s concern that a proliferation of megamalls and chain
discount stores threatens the area’s beauty and serenity . . . It sounds a
warning . . . Once a rain forest has been felled, for instance, its
ancient trees and complex ecosystems are gone – for good. . . . Closer
to home . . . there’s no going back to a bucolic state . . . ‘Save the
cows’ . . . if it alerts people a problem before it’s too late for anything
but regrets.
iii) Mode: Language – Constitutive
7) Porter, E.J. (June 29, 1993: 20). View from Capitol Hill: Earth Summit goals
essential. The Christian Science Monitor. Approx. 520 words.
Summary: Informs the reader of the newly agreed upon Earth
Summit accords; points out a problem with enforcing these
agreements. Draws an analogy with the Helsinki accords and
proposes establishment of a monitoring committee.
i) Field:
Thesis: The goal of the Earth Summit accords are worthwhile; we now need to
establish a new organization to enforce these accords.
Amount and Kind of:
a) Formal Logic and/or Scientific Exposition: 0. (enthymemic logic)
54
b) Support: 0. (The only support is implicit in the writer’s authority.)
Persuasive Position-Taking Markers
c) Taxonomic Terms to Classify Raw Material: 0
d) Value-Laden Descriptors: Superlatives and adjectives of emphasis: “one of
her greatest success stories . . . historic conference . . . the consequences of failing to
enforce them are enormous . . . there are new and urgent challenges.”
Again, in this type of genre, most value judgments are spelled out in complete
sentences, as there is very little raw data to qualify adjectivally.
ii) Tenor:
Charge to the Reader: Support the idea of establishing a monitoring commission
for the Earth Summit agreements.
Interpersonal Strategies: Two principal interpersonal strategies are pursued:
establishment of common ground inclusive of the reader and use of the first and second
person pronouns. As in the above editorial, the common ground established here is one
of time reference, specifically, reference to current events. Thus: “This month we are
celebrating . . ..” The ‘here and now’ aspect of the current events timeframe is reinforced
by use of the present perfect: “I have introduced legislation . . .. The solidarity between
writer and reader is then solidified through a heavy use of the pronoun “we.” Thus, the
above we in “this month we are celebrating . . .” as well as the following: “This must not
be the legacy we leave to future generations ... The Cold War is behind us... As we join
people around the world . . . we must recognize . . . demanding our leadership . . . our
commitment to human rights . . . will we have the foresight . . . our global environment . . .
enjoyed by our children and our grandchildren . . . every day that we delay . . .” etc. One
55
also sees strategic use of the rhetorical question in the conclusion to this editorial: “Will
we have the foresight to do the same for the global environment?”
Appeal to Ethos: There is a strategic ethical appeal-by-association in this
editorial. The writer here likens his proposal to a very successful proposal in the past, the
proposal to establish the Helsinki commission, which was brought together by Millicent
Fenwick. The writer here capitalizes on her success: “My late colleague, UC Rep.
Millicent Fenwick (R) of New Jersey, had an answer: the Helsinki Commission. Her
proposal for this joint legislative-executive branch organization has been one of this
century’s greatest success stories… I have introduced legislation to do for the Earth
Summit what Ms. Fenwick did for the Helsinki Accords....”
Appeal to Pathos: Again, a large component of the persuasive power of this text
lies in its arousal of the reader’s fears; these are underscored by a dramatic emphasis on
the importance of the issue as well as its urgency. “The agreements produced at UNCED
have the potential to change the course of history. However, the consequences of failing
to enforce them are enormous. Every day that we delay, scarce natural resources
disappear, the fragile ecosystems that sustain the earth are savaged, and the human
suffering exacerbated by our neglect multiplies. This must not be the legacy we leave to
future generations.” The writer points to other possible disasters if his ideas are not
adopted. These include “global climate change, ocean pollution, deforestation,
biodiversity loss, and persistent poverty.”
iii) Mode: Language – Constitutive
56
8) Don’t water down the crucial desert bill (April 18, 1994: B6). The LA Times.
approx. 610 words.
Summary: a controversial desert bill has moved to the House: action must be
taken quickly before “the congressional session expires in the fall” and the
package collapses. Use of battle terminology.
i) Field:
Thesis: Voters need to force legislators to adopt the California Desert Protection
Act now up for vote in the House of Representatives.
Amount and Kind of:
a) Formal Logic and/or Scientific Exposition: 0. This is a largely factual, not
theoretical piece.
b) Support: Fact based, more value judgments and narration in this piece than
claims made needing support.
Persuasive Position-Taking Markers
c) Taxonomic Terms to Classify Raw Material: 0
d) Value-Laden Descriptors: Adjectives of emphasis, adjectives denoting
positive and negative value judgments: “the Senate bill is a modern landmark . . .
nearsighted opponents . . . were visionaries”; “opponents are likely to try to water down
the already much compromised legislation”; “an obnoxious provision”; “also there is the
danger that . . .”; “the crucial desert bill.”
ii) Tenor
Charge to the Reader: Take political action.
Interpersonal Strategies:
57
─common ground: Use of the ‘here and now’ strategy. The full discussion is
put forth in present tense: “The House now takes up its version.”
─rhetorical question: (an indirect assertion) “It is known today as Central Park,
and who would deny that New York’s 19th Century leaders were visionaries?”
─imperatives (or modal equivalents thereof): 1) Don’t Water Down the Crucial
Desert Bill (title); 2) It must be swift, (i.e., let’s make this swift); 3) We must not miss it,
(i.e., don’t miss it); 4) Care needed . . . (make sure that legislators are careful).
Appeal to Ethos: It must be noted that this editorial is speaking to a certain
segment of readers only, those who espouse environmental goals and find favor with
democratic figureheads. Given these readers, two ethical appeals are present in the
editorial: 1) The picture of Dianne Feinstein, which adds authority to the appeal, and 2)
Verbal appeals to sympathetic figureheads; “But with two California Democrats holding
Senate seats, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and a sympathetic Democrat in the
White House, the seemingly moribund bill came to life even in the face of opposition from
some congressional Democrats. Feinstein, the main backer...”
Appeal to Pathos: There are two main emotional appeals made to the reader – 1)
appeals to fear: “But the eight-year battle is not over . . . opponents . . . are likely to try
to water down the already much compromised legislation”; “the bill could be hobbled”;
and 2) the message of urgency: “It must be swift, for if the House fails by summer to take
the bill to conference with the Senate, the package could collapse before the congressional
session expires in the fall”; “Much the same opportunity offers itself to 20th Century
California. We must not miss it.”
58
iii) Mode: Language – Almost Constitutive. The ad shows a picture of Diane Feinstein
with the caption: “Champion of the Desert Bill.”
V: Feature Story
The feature story is a newspaper genre intended to give a more thorough
treatment of a particular subject matter than a mere news article can. My question is: how
persuasive is a feature story?
9) Knickerbocker, B. (Jan. 12, 1993: 8-9). Environmentalism extends its reach. The
Christian Science Monitor. Approx. 1,452 words.
Summary: The thesis of the text is that: “[t]he environmental movement in
the United States today stands poised to have greater influence than ever
before.” The article describes and analyzes the extent and future of the
current U.S. environmental movement. The style is largely informative, not
expository.
i) Field:
Thesis: (verbatim from opening paragraph) ─ “The environmental movement in
the United States today stands poised to have greater influence than ever before.”
Amount and Kind of:
a) Formal Logic and/or Scientific Exposition: 0
This article is informative with an approving viewpoint, no exposition involved.
b) Support: 100% of claims are supported ─ mainly quotes and facts,
marshaled after each claim, either straightaway or later on.
Persuasive Position Taking Markers
c) Taxonomic Terms to Classify Raw Material: “in return,” “for example,”
“but,” repeated several times.
59
d) Value-Laden Descriptors: Several: “the environmental movement in the
United States stands poised to have greater influence than ever before . . . it has seen
extraordinary growth... This is the fasted growing political movement in the country . . .
all over the country some of our best volunteers . . . were environmentalists.” Note the
explicit viewpoint in the conclusion.
ii) Tenor:
Charge to the Reader: No explicit charge; underlying assumption that the reader
approves of all the facts presented in the piece; secondary charge (*not central charge of
the piece) to environmentalists: Continue the job and address the criticism brought up in
the article.
Interpersonal Strategies: As mentioned above, this analysis, much like the Hi-
Tec boot advertisement and the Desert Bill editorial, presupposes or addresses itself to an
audience who favors environmentalism. The only interpersonal marker found in this text
is, in terms of values, a rather neutral rhetorical question: “Just how effective has all this
activism been?”
Appeal to Ethos: 0
Appeal to Pathos: Very little. Presence of superlatives which generate
excitement on the part of the reader. See Persuasive Position Taking Markers below.
iii) Mode: Language: Almost Constitutive. (Includes a picture of Alaska’s Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge.
60
VI: Speeches
The two speeches analyzed here were definitely composed beforehand and thus
cannot be considered as spontaneous oral discourse. I find them worthy of study as they
represent two dimensions: a written editorial-like text plus a direct interpersonal element.
How will the speeches differ from editorials?
10) Ling, J. T. (June 2, 1993). Design for the environment: the challenge for the year
2000 and beyond. Vital Speeches of the Day, City News Publishing Co., (Inc. 1911),
Mount Pleasant, S.C.; approx. 3,136 words.
This presentation was given by Joseph T. Ling, 3M Vice President,
Environmental Engineering and Pollution Control. Delivered before the
National Industrial Waste Minimization conference, Taipei, Taiwan, June 2,
1993.
Summary: The thesis is that production and resource conservation are
inseparable if first world society is to sustain its current standard of living. If
such a concept is not adopted, resources will diminish. The speech provides a
background of the environmental movement and a critique: production is not
incompatible with environmental goals. Three concepts are presented:
“conserver society,” sustainable development, and design for the
environment.
i) Field:
Thesis: We need to become a “conserver” society – not overly environmental,
not blindly capitalistic, but rather, striking a mean between these two positions.
Amount and Kind of:
a) Formal Logic and/or Scientific Exposition: 0. Text is informative with a
viewpoint, not expository.
b) Support: facts, anecdotes. Facts are based solely on the authority and
knowledge of the speaker.
61
Persuasive Position-Taking Markers
c) Taxonomic Terms to Classify Raw Material: “first,” “second,” “thus”
d) Value-Laden Descriptors: Entire text is value-laden
ii) Tenor:
Charge to the Audience: The audience is an audience of experts in the industrial
waste management field; the speaker wishes them to adopt the idea of a “conserver
society.”
Interpersonal Strategies:
This speech begins with a recounting of the common history between speaker
and audience: a background of the environmental movement is provided and a discussion
of the current situation for all present. Present tense verbs are plentiful as well as present
perfect. As in many of the previous texts there is a heavy use of first person. Unlike the
editorials, however, the entire speech is given in first person with excursions into third
person. There are 15 instances of “I,” 14 of “we” indicating speaker + public, and 3
instances of “we” referring to the speaker and his company. This is the first text marked
by the appearance of personal anecdotes. In addition to common ground indicators, the
speaker also makes use of several modal equivalents of imperatives. Thus: “We also
must not lose sight of the environment,” (i.e., don’t lose sight of); “We need to sustain the
environment . . . absolutely everything that goes into the north side of a factory should
come out of the south side as a product . . . all sectors must cooperate... The public must
demand... Government must consider... Industry must design...” (i.e., Sustain the
environment! Make sure that everything that goes into the north side...; Cooperate!
Demand! Consider! Etc.). Finally, the speaker asks two rhetorical questions, a) asking
62
the reader to corroborate his claim, and b) elucidating a new topic: “After all, what is
waste but a defect in the manufacturing process?” and “What do I mean by ‘Design for the
Environment?’ All of these things are meant to engage the reader directly into this topic.
One could characterize all these as decoder-oriented elements.
Appeal to Ethos: There are six mentions made about the speaker’s own
exemplary experiences in the 3M company. These are meant as direct support of his
claims as well as a bolstering of the authority of the speaker.
Appeal to Pathos: 0
iii) Mode: Language: (Ancillary11)/Constitutive
11) Evans, B. (January 13, 1993). The Endangered Species Act: implications for the
future. Vital Speeches of the Day, City News Publishing Co., (Inc. 1911), Mount
Pleasant, S.C.; approx. 5,280 words.
This presentation was given by Brock Evans, Vice President for National
Issues, National Audubon Society. Delivered before the Rotary Club of
Seattle, Washington, January 13, 1993.
Summary: This speech is a plea to save the endangered species and
ecosystems of the planet. The entire text is incredibly calibrated to break the
audience’s resistance to the message, stir up their deepest fears and untapped
reservoirs of self-interest, deflect biases, minimize negatives, and clear up
misconceptions. The listeners here, businessmen, are inherently hostile to the
unfriendly economic message of the speaker; the speaker thus tries in every
way possible to identify with them: flattery, admission of the lack of
popularity of the message, anecdotes which indicate that the speaker is in tune
with where the audience is at, that is, identifies with their interests (sports is
one example) and fears.
11 In this unique type of discourse, the written speech, I believe the function of language to be both ancillary and
constitutive in nature, depending on how the audience receives the message. In its original context the audience of
the two speeches here studied had recourse to aural and visual signals put forth by the speaker – i.e., stress,
intonation, gestures – which furthered the communication of the latter’s message. This clearly makes the language
of the discourse ancillary in nature. From my current perspective as a reader, however, not having been present at
the Rotary Club in Seattle when this speech was given, the language is purely constitutive in nature.
63
i) Field:
Thesis: We must continue to support, and even expand, the Endangered Species
Act.
Amount and Kind of:
a) Formal Logic and/or Scientific Exposition: Problem-Solution format,
enthymemic logic.
b) Support: Heavy factual support; credible due to authority of the speaker.
Persuasive Position-Taking Markers
c) Taxonomic Terms to Classify Raw Material: 0
d) Value-Laden Descriptors: Saturated with value-laden commentary if not
isolated adjectives.
ii) Tenor:
Charge to the Audience: A) Don’t weaken the Endangered Species Act; and B)
Help us save the environment: “We can do better than we have done so far. But we all
have a duty to do better, now that we understand what the Endangered Species Act is all
about. We have a duty to face this biodiversity extinction crisis head on, and do everything
we can to prevent it. It is no longer a matter just for biologists, physicians, or
environmentalists – I say it is a matter for everyone in this room to be concerned. And
perhaps you even more, as community leaders, so successful in your own businesses and
professions – because you have great influence and people listen to you. . . . Well, our
time has come; this crisis is our crisis, and this is our moment in history – not some other
time, not in the past and not in the future – but now. The extinctions are going on now,
64
not in some other time, and not in some other place. Our time has come. . . . I believe that
it is the duty of every one of us here to do everything in our power to pass on every
species and every acre that we possibly can into the future. . . . If we can succeed in this
venture at this moment in our history, that, I say, will be our gift of love, not only to the
whole American people, but to all future generations across the planet. I am very
optimistic that we can do it if we all work together. Thank you.”
Interpersonal Strategies: The speaker here uses 11 rhetorical questions, 12 quasi
imperatives (i.e., let’s, we need to, we must, etc.), 81 first person singular, 100 first
person plural, and 9 second person references, and consistent present and present
perfect tenses. At every moment the speaker is reaching out to his audience and urgently
trying to persuade them by relating to them.
Appeal to Ethos: Three main ethical appeals are presented here: 1)
demonstration of the sincerity of the speaker’s sentiment “and those of you who know me
know my passion for this special Northwest land . . ..”; 2) demonstration of depth of
sentiment: “[my passion] goes even deeper, for it caused me to leave a law practice here
in order to devote my life to fight and help keep ou8r way of life, keep the Northwest the
special place it is . . . [it has taken me] finally into ‘exile’”; and 3) commitment to his
environmental goals.
Appeal to Pathos: Of all the texts in this study, this speech goes furthest in
emotional appeals to persuade. The strategy is as follows:
1) Flattery of the Audience. I.e., The Rotary Club is a prestigious group,
Seattle is the most beautiful part of the country.
2) Identification with the audience. The writer/speaker shares the same home,
will suffer with the necessary reforms, shares certain values (i.e., distrust of
Washington), common desire among environmentalists and businessmen
65
alike to see antagonistic controversies end.
3) Understands audience’s values. This theme is not fun, sports is more fun;
speaker/writer understands the audience’s antipathies, given recent history,
towards this subject, airs out the understandable point of view of the
developers, etc.
4) Seeks to personify, in a positive way, the opposing camp; self-deprecation. “’Hey, things really are getting better around here’ I thought to myself; this
time they are waving at me with all five fingers, instead of the usual single
one.”
5) Introduces theme reluctantly. Seeks out the audience’s sympathy in not
condemning the bearer of bad news.
6) Defines what the Endangered Species Act is not.
7) Arouses an Apocalyptic fear in the audience: There is a need to address the
theme now because:
The ideas it represents are concepts of great power and great significance to
our common future as a human society... The issues it deals with . . . are,
literally, matters of life and death…. It is really about something much larger,
it is about this whole planet of ours, this little blue planet that is our only
home, and the only one that we will ever really have.... Because, you see, the
Endangered Species Act is really about a crisis of worldwide proportions – an
extinction crisis…. [Extinction] of all species is taking place so fast that
evolutionary response and ecosystem reorganization is impossible.... This
crisis is one that, therefore, affects our whole planet; it affects our health, it
affects our food, and therefore our whole survival as a human race.... Millions
upon millions of other acres are now also gone, and with them, millions and
millions of Yew trees are also gone – in fact, about 95 percent of the original
Northwest forest has now vanished off the face of the earth, never to return
again . . .. Across the globe the same thing is happening….” etc.
8) Instills the idea of irremediable nature of the losses. Five major instances
of emphasis on the concepts “forever,” and “never again” etc.
9) Caters to the audience’s sense of self-interest. Writer/speaker notes that
medicines will vanish undiscovered harming people and crops. Personal
anecdote of a friend’s child who was saved by a medicine found in some old
forest – now threatened.
66
10) Makes analogies. This technique is chosen so that the general audience can
grasp the undesirable limitations of the current act.
11) Begins and ends speech with tales of the speaker’s/writer’s personal
epiphanies. Writer/Speaker recounts tearful experiences evoking empathy
and respect.
iii) Mode: Language: (Ancillary12/Constitutive
VII: Journal Articles
Given Kinneavy’s classification (1971), one would expect scientific journal
articles dealing with the environment to most probably be reference type discourse. One
would expect rigorous logic and lack of emotion in treating the subject matter here. In my
study, I was very interested in verifying whether this was indeed the case.
12) Francis, G. (1993). Ecosystem Management. Natural Resources Journal: The
North American Experience Managing International Transboundary Water Resources; The
International Joint Commission and the International Boundary and Water Commission,
Part 2. Vol. 33, No. 2; Approx. 9,389 words.
Summary: This article consists of a highly complex and detailed review of
ecological ideas at all levels, historical, ontological, epistemological, etc., and
the advocating of certain of these ideas as applying well to management of the
Great Lakes region. The notion most discussed in this study, for which the
preceding discussion forms mainly a background, is that of “ecosystem
management,” which presents certain problems with respect to boundaries.
As the author points out, “[b]oundaries associated with jurisdictions,
administrative districts, and ownerships artificially transect ecosystems,”
(344). This is especially true of the international boundaries that transect the
Great Lakes region. The article advocates the continuing role of an
international joint commission in keeping a global view of the Great lakes
region and facilitating projects which enable ecosystem management to
continue there.
12 Please see footnote eleven on page 57 for discussion of this classification.
67
i) Field:
Thesis: We must continue to embrace the idea of “ecosystem” management and
apply these ideas to management of the Great Lakes region.
Amount and Kind of:
a) Formal Logic and/or Scientific Exposition: This is not a theoretical document
as much as it is a problem-solution paper. As such, it is descriptive and suggestive more
than analytical. In other words, this paper is not primarily dependent on principles of
formal logic. The paper does, however, demonstrate many of the characteristics which
Kinneavy would label as “scientific style.” Thus, the article is written entirely in third
person; there appears a density of concepts presented with well over 30 needing discussion
and elucidation. While there exist a great many specialized terms which are explained to
the reader, as this is a survey of broad scope of ideas, a great many terms remain
unexplained, revealing the specialized audience for which this piece is written. Clearly
there is no adornment in the language, no metaphors, symbols, or connotations which
contain important implicit meanings in the article. In terms of audience, while the article
is written for environmentally conscious readers, nonetheless the writer of the piece does
seek to persuade the reader to adopt certain views largely by means of value-laden
descriptors.
b) Support: All claims made in this paper are supported, here by 123 footnotes
documenting scientific studies one might look up to corroborate the author’s points.
Persuasive Position-Taking Markers
c) Taxonomic Terms to Classify Raw Material:
68
This article is quite dense with taxonomic terms classifying raw material. Ideas
here are all labeled. Thus, schools of thought are labeled, concepts are labeled, etc. There
is a rigid hierarchical organization of the text according to the various taxonomies of the
ideas presented.
d) Value-Laden Descriptors
As there are very few explicit value judgments made in this text, the author’s
political orientation as it were is revealed primarily through unstressed modifiers. Thus,
one is notified that the author values the ideas of ecophilosophy through the wording of
this almost neutral statement: “The importance of ecophilosophy for ecosystem
management lies in the critical reexamination it brings to bear upon the assumptions
underlying management. More deference is required towards Nature...” This is perhaps
the most marked value judgment statement in the text. Most other statements of value are
more subtle. “Four ‘schools’ to which ecosystem managers might turn for guidance are
as
follows...” Thus, unlike in previous texts, expressions of value in this academic article lie
in subtle modals and in a very denotative type of language generally. The writer’s
subjectivity is disguised almost to the point of annihilation. It takes a skilled reader to
penetrate to the subjective point of view in this article.
ii) Tenor
Charge to the Reader: (Note: This is an article written for experts in the field.)
There are two charges to the reader. 1) Set goals and mobilize citizens. “The challenge
now is to define some overall goal for the conservation of biodiversity, refine the
information system needed to provide a Great Lakes bioregional perspective on priorities
69
for further conservation actions, and mobilize conservation agencies and citizen groups to
take further measures”; and 2) The IJC (International Joint Commission) should exercise
oversight in helping to “stimulate the ‘horizontal’ networking relationships required to
overcome the boundaries [around the Great Lakes area] that impede ecosystem
management on a regional scale.”
Interpersonal Strategies: 0
Appeal to Ethos: 0
Appeal to Pathos: 0
iii) Mode: Language: Constitutive
13) Hamlett, J.M. & Epp, D.J. (1994: 59-66). Water quality impacts of conservation
and nutrient management practices in Pennsylvania. Journal of Soil and Water
Conservation, 49; approx. 4,519 words.
Summary: This study shows how a microcomputer model, CREAMS, was
used to measure the impact of two different land management practices.
Traditional manure and fertilizer application practices were compared with
an “improved” high management system that incorporated “best timing”
placement and types of nutrient additions. The CREAMS model verified
increased percolation, decreased runoff, reduced sediment exportation from
and other positive results using the new land management system.
i) Field:
Thesis: Nutrient Management Programs (NMPs), as measured here by a precise
tool of measurement (CREAMS), is the best one so far, and has the best results when used
in conjunction with the older form of land management “best management practices,” or
(BMPs).
70
Amount and Kind of:
a) Formal Logic and/or Scientific Exposition: Since this is a formal study, this is
the first text analyzed here which is purely inductive. Data has been carefully collected
and analyzed, presented in graphs and tables; conclusions have been carefully drawn
based entirely upon the data provided. This soil conservation text also possesses many of
the features distinctive of a “scientific” writing style: use of passive voice, de-emphasis of
agent, use of specialized jargon, density of concepts presented, etc. The two journal
articles are thus very similar in style.
b) Support: Like the previous text this one also cites a number of relevant studies
as support. All assertions are 100% supported.
Persuasive Position-Taking Markers
c) Taxonomic Terms to Classify Raw Material: Interestingly, few terms were
used to classify the data here. Data is simply presented and interpreted. The main
classifications to be found in this text consist in the terrain there analyzed, i.e., sediment
basin, parallel terraces, filter strips, etc.
d) Value-Laden Descriptors: 0. (Unless words such as “reduced” “effective”
etc., are considered. These occur in full value-judgment statements and are not
“descriptors” per se.)
ii) Tenor:
Charge to the Reader: Be aware of these new practices and encourage their use.
“If each farmer/landowner implements practices that reduce transport potential and
efficiently use nutrients, they can have much better control over nutrient losses.”
71
Interpersonal Strategies: 0
Appeal to Ethos: 0
Appeal to Pathos: 0
iii) Mode: Language: Constitutive
72
Summary of Text Characteristics
Theme: The Environment
______________________
1) Ads:
i) Chevron [84 words]
Thesis: Chevron does not disturb nature.
Appeal to Pathos/ethos: 100% Pathos/Ethos-based. Main emotions:
reader wellbeing, agreement with reader values; several interpersonal
strategies.
Support: None; Formal logic: none.
Charge to the reader: Kinneavy’s “emotional” charge (p. 39), explicit:
“Trust Chevron”13
ii) Hi Tec 50 Peaks boots [109 words]
Thesis: 50 Peaks hiking boots are the best; therefore, they will “last
forever”
Appeal to Pathos/ethos: 100% Pathos/Ethos-based. Main emotions: fear
of losing national parks; several interpersonal strategies employed.
13 Categorizing specific “charges to the reader” takes us into the realm of speech act theory. Together, all the
charges to the reader classified in this paper could fall under the category of “directives.” This term, taken from
Searle’s 1976 work as discussed by Levinson (1983), constitutes one of the five kinds of actions which, according to
Searle, one can perform in speaking. Briefly, these consist of: representatives, directives, commissives,
expressives, and declarations (Levinson: 1983: 240). Of these, the most important with regard to a statement’s
persuasive effect on the reader would be Searle’s classification of directives, defined by Searle as speech acts which
constitute “attempts by the speaker to get the addressee to do something...” (Levinson, 240). Kinneavy, without
mentioning speech act theory specifically, goes on further to classify “directives” as it were into three sorts, as
discussed in this paper on p. 24. Thus, according to Kinneavy (p. 39) persuasive discourse may induce the reader to
intellectual, emotional or physical action, categories which I use in my analysis in the chart above.
73
Support: None. Formal logic: None
Charge to the reader: (physical) “Buy product.”
2) Letters to the Editor
i) Beware of the latest anti-environmental strategy, by Jean Harkin
[approx. 260 words]
Thesis: The reader should make sure that the legislators vote no on the
“wise-use” bill.
Elements of pathos: arousal of readers; fear; ethos: appeal to politically
popular authorities; numerous interpersonal strategies employed.
Support: examples; enthymemic logic: explicit cause and effect reasoning,
definitions.
Charge to the reader: “Write to your congressman, persuading him against
the ‘wise use scheme.’” (physical)
ii) Memo on Rio Summit focused on U.S. gains, by William K. Reilly [approx.
264 words]
Thesis: The press is not giving fair coverage to the Bush administration’s
positive environmental record.
Direct ethical appeal: (defense of Bush environmental policy); little
pathos-based persuasion.
Interpersonal strategies: Few.
Support: Some; enthymemic logic.
74
Charge to the reader: (implicit, intellectual) Support the Bush
Administration’s environmental policies and procedures.
3) Letters to Constituents: Henry Waxman, March 1994; [approx. 200 words]
Thesis: Waxman is assuring reader that our drinking water is safe and our
air is healthy to breathe.
Elements of pathos: evocation of fear of bad drinking water)/ Ethos:
Waxman’s positive handling of the problem.
Support: Summary facts based on the official’s authority; no proof or
demonstration.
Charge to the reader: a) (emotional) explicit: “Have confidence,” b)
implicit (intellectual, physical): “Reelect Waxman.”
4) Editorials:
i) The Greening of Vermont, anonymous [approx. 520 words]
Thesis: We must begin to reconsider environmental issues on a broader
basis; considering such elements as beauty and serenity as vital parts of the
environment to be protected.
Appeal to Pathos: Begins and ends with pathos, fear arousing quotes from
those who believe that Vermont is the most endangered historical place in
the U.S.
Appeal to Ethos: None.
Support: All claims supported or attributed to authorities in the discussion.
75
Charge to the reader: (intellectual) “Accept the claim that the historical
‘serene’ state of Vermont is being overdeveloped at a dangerous rate.”
ii) Earth Summit goals essential, by Edward Porter [approx. 520 words]
Thesis: the goals of the Earth Summit accords are worthwhile; we no need
to establish a new organization to enforce these accords.
Appeal to pathos: readers should fear (there is a potential for disaster)
Appeal to ethos: author’s credentials established; author has solution.
Support: Support is based on writer’s authority – his credentials as
Congressman from Illinois, his being a member of the Helsinki
Commission, etc. (No attributions)
Charge to the reader: (intellectual) Support the idea of establishing a
monitoring commission for Earth Summit agreements.
iii) Don’t Water down the Crucial Desert Bill [approx. 610 words]
Thesis: Voters need to force legislators to adopt the California Desert
Protection Act now up for vote in the House of Representatives.
Appeal to pathos/ethos: Great appeal to both: fear, positive congressional
leadership
Support: citation of facts
Charge to the reader: (physical) “Take political action.” Note: The writer
assumes that the intellectual viewpoint of reader mirrors his own; no
intellectual appeals are made for the reader to agree with the writer.
76
5) Feature Story: Environmentalism extends its reach, by Brad Knickerbocker
[approx. 1,452 words]
Thesis: “The environmental movement in the United States today stands
poised to have greater influence than ever before.”
Pathos: 0 (minimal: use of superlatives to inflate importance of issue);
Ethos: 0
Support: 100% of claims are supported – mainly quotes and facts,
marshaled after each claim, either straight-away or later on.
Charge to the Reader: No explicit charge to general reader; a direct plea to
a fraction of the readers, namely, environmentalists, to “continue the job”
and address the criticism brought up in the article.
6) Speeches:
i) “The Endangered Species Act: Implications for the Future,” by Brock
Evans [approx. 5,280 words]
Thesis: We must continue to support, and even expand, the Endangered
Species Act.
Audience: Potentially hostile – the audience for this speaker is the pro-
business Rotary Club.
Pathos: Saturated. (An artwork of pathos-based persuasion.)
Appeal to Ethos: None.
Support: facts, cause and effect, approx. 1/3 of speech.
77
Charge to the reader: (intellectual/physical) Go out and become
environmentalists; use your power to influence society.
Density of Concepts: 1 major concept: definition of the meaning of the
Endangered Species Act.
ii) “Design for the Environment: The Challenge for Year 2000 and
Beyond,” by Joseph Ling [approx. 3,136 words, not counting footnotes]
Thesis: We need to become a “conserver” society – not overly
environmental, not blindly capitalistic, but rather, striking a mean between
these two positions
Audience: Friendly
Pathos: 0
Appeal to ethos: 6 times – the credibility of the author and his company, 3M
Support: Very factual; authority of author, 3M Vice-President,
Environmental Engineering and Pollution Control, implicitly appealed to as
providing credibility of factual statements.
Charge to the reader: (intellectual) Adopt the idea of a “conserver
society.” The audience is the “National Industrial Waste Minimization
Conference,” Taipei.
78
7) Scholarly Articles
i) “Ecosystem Management” [approx. 9,389 words]
Thesis: We must continue to embrace the idea of “ecosystem
management” and apply these ideas to management of the Great Lakes
region.
Audience: Friendly, i.e., environmentalists
Appeal to Pathos: None; Interpersonal strategies: None
Appeal to Ethos: Credentials and accomplishments of International Joint
Commission often invoked.
Support: Not a “claim-support” format; rather, elaborate definition of
concept, the typical “scientific” style of discourse within the Kinneavian
framework; 124 dense footnotes.
Charge to the reader: (intellectual/physical) “Be aware of various
environmental approaches; use this one in your political action.” Political
actions outlined.
Density of Concepts: over 30 concepts presented, defined, discussed;
extremely dense, compact scientific style.
79
ii) Water Quality Impacts of Conservation and Nutrient Management
Practices in Pennsylvania, by J. M. Hamlett and D.J. Epp [approx. 4,519
words]
Thesis: Nutrient Management Programs (NMPs), as measured here by a
precise tool of measurement (CREAMs) is the best one so far, and has the
best results when usedin conjunction with the older form of land
management “best management practices,” or (BMPs).
Audience: Expert
Appeal to Pathos: 0
Appeal to Ethos: 0
Support: 100%. Use of formal logic.
Charge to the reader: (intellectual/transactional) “Be aware of these
practices and encourage their use.”
Density of Concepts: Over 15 concepts presented; use of tables and
graphs; compact scientific style.
80
Chapter 4
DISCUSSION
From Pathos to Logos
The above analysis, while too brief to provide a full structural breakdown of all the
genres discussed, does uncover, I believe, the chief elements of each genre. It also lays bare, if
one looks at the overview of the features analyzed, a revealing progression of key characteristics
as one goes up the list. As may already be clear, the genres studied here seem to shift from
attempts at persuasion entirely based on the reader’s emotions to those principally aiming at the
reader’s logical faculties – a shift, one might say, from pathos to logos.
Persuasive Texts?
Before I address this shift, however, it may be important first to mention a more
fundamental characteristic of the above data, namely, that all of the above texts are also shown
by analysis to be indeed persuasive in nature. This can most readily be seen by the presence of
some specific charge to the reader, either implicit or explicit, evident in all the texts, including
the feature story. Let’s examine these “charges” more closely.
According to Kinneavy (1971), who, as we have seen, bases his distinctions on
Aristotle, the existence of a charge to the reader is the chief determinant of whether a text is
“referential” or “persuasive.” To use his terminology, if the text has as its primary function to
incite the reader to some action (intellectual, emotional or physical), then it must be seen as a
discourse which is based on the reader or “decoder” and is thus persuasive in nature (39). All of
the above texts fit this description. In my study, I have analyzed all three types of charges, using
Kinneavy’s terminology. Most of the texts have “physical” charges to the reader; that is, they
incite the reader to take some physical action. A minority of the texts have only intellectual or
81
emotional charges to the reader. About a third of the texts do two things: charging the reader
both intellectually and/or emotionally as well as physically to take some action. This can be seen
in figure #6. Note that implicit charges have been put in parentheses.
82
83
Here, two things must be taken note of. Firstly, the two main types of charge to the
reader, the intellectual (/emotional) and the physical, bring us to the distinction made by
Newman, Gregory and all of the 19th century scholars of the Aristotelian tradition who, as
D’Angelo pointed out, “separate persuasion of the will from argument to the logical faculties.”
The logic, of course, ran that the latter type of discourse is ‘didactic’ or informative, not
persuasive in nature. My data, however, show this to be a specious distinction. Indeed, both
types of arguments, those aimed at modifying the reader’s will as well as those seeking to
modify the reader’s intellectual orientation, can – and indeed must – be considered as
persuasive discourse. To see why this is so, one most look closely at the scientific articles here
analyzed.
Again, one must go back to Kinneavy, who gives the most modern slant on the age-old
argument that scientific discourse is essentially reality-oriented and not reader-oriented. As I
mentioned earlier, according to Kinneavy, since scientific articles contain formal logic and
condensed style, and, more importantly, because they de-emphasize interpersonal strategies and
emotion, focusing primarily on the subject matter being discussed, such discourse cannot be
characterized as fundamentally persuasive. Instead Kinneavy characterizes all scholarly
discourse in general, and scientific writing in particular, as referential in nature. If one looks at
the scholarly articles studied here, however, this categorization is incorrect. While the scientific
articles considered here do in many ways correspond to Kinneavian expectations, they cross
Kinneavy’s lines in one important area: in the physical and intellectual charges to the reader
present in both texts. Both the “Ecosystem” and the “Water Quality” articles, despite their
highly scientific and condensed style, clearly charge their readers in concrete ways, in both cases
urging the reader of the text to do something, on the basis of an intellectual acceptance of the
84
facts and premises clearly laid out and implicitly suggested in the article. All of the data in both
articles seem to be carefully marshaled in ways that support the author’s implicit suggestion that
the reader take some specific action. Specifically, the “Ecosystem” article ends with a section
entitled: “Beyond the Rhetoric.” Here the author suggests that existing jurisdictional boundaries
should be eliminated so that species whose ecosystems transcend boundaries can be better
conserved. That we need to conserve these species is the premise of the article; how we may do
so is concretely discussed in the conclusion. Essentially the article asks the reader to accept the
work done by the authors of the article (the IJC) and help expand it through their own academic
work. The “Ecosystem” article concludes as follows:
To provide broad guidance for what should be
sought through these various agreements, an
Ecosystem Charter for the Great Lakes-St.
Lawrence was proposed. It draws upon the
principles of sustainability for guiding human
actions within their Great Lakes Ecosystem home,
and points to some directions which ‘ecosystem
management’ should take…. This could help
stimulate the ‘horizontal’ networking relationships
required to overcome the boundaries that impede
ecosystem management on a regional scale….
Perhaps this is an idea whose time has come.
(Francis, G., 1993: 345)
In similar fashion, the concrete intellectual charge to the reader in the “Water Quality Impacts”
article is to be aware of two differing practices. The implicit physical charge to the reader,
however, which is clearly suggested based on this data is that the reader encourage the use of
both of these practices in combination. The article concludes as follows: “BMPs, as well as
NMPs, are effective in reducing total nutrient losses, particularly when surface transport
pathways are predominant. Specific control objectives such as runoff, erosion sediment, or
85
nutrient reduction should be identified and BMPs and NMPs selected accordingly,” (Hamlett,
J.M. & Epp, D. J., 1994: 66)
How can one not consider these articles to be persuasive? These texts do far more than
explain certain concepts.
Here one could argue that the journal articles might indeed be persuasive, but are not
fundamentally or primarily persuasive. “Of course,” says Kinneavy (1971), direct inducement of
the reader to some kind of action (intellectual, emotional or physical) “may be achieved by
scientific proof, or an exploratory process, or even by literature. But … persuasion of the
decoder is indirect and secondary in these latter aims of discourse” (219). This claim, I believe –
again if one considers the two journal articles I studied – is also inaccurate, as the work of
contemporary scholars bears out.
IN their article “The Stases in Scientific and Literary Argument,” (1988) Fahnestock
and Secor go far to refute the long-held idea that scientific discourse is not primarily concerned
with issues of value or of influencing the reader to take certain actions. It is the means by which
scientists persuade which seem objective, not the aim of the discourse itself. In their novel
approach, Fahnestock and Secor resurrect for purposes of analysis the classical stases of rhetoric.
As they point out, the ancients relied upon a memorized categorization of recurrent kinds of
issues, which have become known as “stases,” to construct their typical courtroom arguments.
These “issues” or stases followed a logical hierarchical order such that simple questions had to
be addressed before more complex ones in the discussion of an issue. The stases, thus, consisted
of the following questions needing to be addressed, regarding any matter, in the following order:
1) Questions of Fact, 2) Questions of Definition, 3) Questions of Cause, 4) Questions of
Procedure, and 5) Questions of Value. Interestingly, when they apply the stases of argument to
86
literary versus scientific articles, Fahnestock and Secor come to the following revelation.
Literary articles, the two scholars conclude, seem primarily concerned with the upper stases, that
is questions of value; this is to say that literary criticism is primarily involved with value
judgements of aesthetic merit whereas “arguments of science are quite clearly conducted in the
lower stases, unconcerned in the body of the text with questions of value. Yet, if one considers
the implications of the two types of articles, scientific and literary, the literary article seems in
the end to be more purely referential in nature than its scientific counterpart. Secor and
Fahnestock (1988) put it this way:
An even more striking difference between the two
disciplines emerges when we ask what the
implications of these arguments are [emphasis mine]
in terms of the full stases. What happens when we
ask what impact they are going to have on their
disciplinary audiences? One can easily predict that
the science articles will lead to specific proposals and
altered actions (though perhaps not by the scientists
who wrote the articles. The article on salt marshes,
for example, primarily concerned with the techniques
of a particular set of experiments, concludes that the
process it has uncovered could have ‘profound
consequences for the cycling of energy and material
in wetlands’ (Luther et al., 1986, p. 748). It would be
hard to imagine a similar consequence for future
action following a reevaluation of the Intimation Ode
(p. 441).
In fact, though, Secor and Fahnestock are only half right, for points of view in literary
criticism can have equally pragmatic effects in certain circles in terms of validating current
literary theories, e.g., deciding which views are relevant, and determining which works merit
inclusion in a teaching canon based on their relevance, etc. In short, I believe that all arguments
do have direct social or intellectual impact (otherwise, they wouldn’t be arguments; they
wouldn’t have theses and support, etc.). It is a myth, in other words, to separate out any
87
argument as purely referential in aim. The key here is the word “argument.” In this study, if
the presence of charges to the reader in the texts analyzed comprises an acceptable litmus test to
gauge whether the texts are primarily persuasive or not, the conclusion is that all of the essays,
because they do possess clear charges to the reader, are indeed fundamentally persuasive in
nature. One possible exception here could be the feature story, which many might argue to be
primarily informative. This, however, would be an incorrect conclusion, a point to which I will
return.
Charge to the Reader vs. Thesis
Up to now we have only considered one element of persuasion – albeit the one
considered by many to be the most important – the charge to the reader. This, however, is to
ignore the second crucial element possible in determining the functional nature of a text, the
thesis. Indeed, in all the above texts where the charge to the reader is not per se physical, but
rather “intellectual,” that is, when the text does not primarily urge the reader to action but rather
persuades the reader of a thesis, the classical scholar gets completely confused. Kinneavy
embodies a kind of schizophrenia typical of Aristotelian scholars when it comes to classifying
discourse which argues something intellectually, i.e., persuades the reader/hearer “to some new
intellectual conviction.” Thus, if a text has scientific structure and style, that is, it demonstrates
pure inductive and deductive reasoning together with specialized and condensed language – but
has a physical charge to the reader which serves as the primary aim of the text, then, as we
have seen, that text cannot be scientific according to Kinneavy. On the other hand, Kinneavy
characterizes as “persuasive” any text whose primary function is to encourage agreement with a
claim (i.e., “induces” the reader to some kind of “intellectual action”) (219). Scientific or
academic texts, however, which do just that, are considered as referential, not persuasive
88
discourse. Hence the two journal articles here, both of which depend on inductive reasoning
and are based on carefully collected data, and both of which, I have argued, serve i) to incite the
expert reader to accept claims made and ii) to take specific actions, are not according to
Kinneavian categories scientific or persuasive. In this paper I will argue that they are both.
At this point I believe that we can already delineate two alternative obligatory element
sin defining persuasive discourse: the existence of a physical charge to the reader and/or the
presence in a text of a thesis – the “thesis” being nothing more than an intellectual or emotional
charge to the reader. Persuasive discourse, of course, consists of more, but these are the two
most fundamental elements, and they appear in all the texts studied here.
Means of Persuasion: Back to Pathos and Logos
Given, then, that we have established the fundamentally persuasive nature of all of the
texts studied here (including the feature story which has a thesis, namely, the title of the article)
the question becomes: how do the authors seek to persuade their readers/audience? It is this
that determines the fundamental difference between texts.
A continuum seems to exist in my data from those texts whose primary means of
suasion consists in emotional appeals to those whose modus operandi consists of appeals to the
reasoning faculties. This seems to be part of the generic structure potential for each of the
genres, with some genres showing more room for variation than others. Both advertisements,
for example, rely entirely on emotion to induce the reader to act. The emotion involved almost
always includes both pathos – or emotions aroused by the writer in the reader herself (i.e., fear,
delight, security) – and ethos, which is the ‘take it from me’ appeal to the writer’s integrity and
honesty. Interestingly, the Chevron ad is mainly ethos-based: “Do people really…? People
Do.” Thus because Chevron is so environmentally conscious, the reader can trust Chevron to
89
do the right thing all the time. The reader should thus buy Chevron gasoline. There is also, of
course, pathos in the ad which is discussed in the data section of this study. The Hi Tec ad, on
the other hand, bases itself primarily on pathos, namely, fear. Thus, the reader should buy the
boots because if they don’t, they may soon have no natural parks to exercise them in. As it
turns out, this appeal to the reader’s fears is the chief emotion exercised in all the texts in this
study which deal with the environment. Indeed, there are perhaps few such highly charged
political topics which can arouse the public’s primal fears the way that discussions of the
environment do. Again, like the Chevron ad, the boot ad admixes the two elements, pathos and
ethos. The ethical argument in this ad has the reader buy boots from this company and not from
another, because Hi Tec is doing the right thing for the environment. Such elements occur with
greater or lesser frequency up through and including the speeches, but disappear altogether in
the journal articles. Thus, despite their obvious suasive goals, the journal articles seem
definitely more reference-oriented than the other genres – another point to which I will return.
Generic Variation: Optional and Obligatory Elements
While the advertisements have “emotion” as the most important part of their generic
structure potential, other genres such as letters to the editor, editorials and speeches seem to
show emotion as an “optional” element. This reinforces my belief that in these genres, as
opposed to the advertisement and the journal article on either extreme, the writer’s approach is
much freer. Much as Schumacher et al. (1989) conclude in their study of journalistic genres,
letters, editorials and speeches seem much less “genre-controlled” than regular news stories for
example. In their interesting study of news story- versus editorial-writers, Schumacher et al.
note the huge mental “wrestling” the editorial writers have to go through in order to produce
90
their pieces. Experienced writers of news stories, on the other hand, seem to sail through their
task in much less time and with much less revision and planning. This is a consequence of the
tight news story “schema” these writers are able to instantiate in order to produce their prose,
the schema of the “inverted pyramid.” In sum, according to Schumacher et al. (1989) news
story writers perform four predictable activities when writing their pieces. They 1) use a pre-
organized structure (the inverted pyramid) into which information is inserted, 2) use a priority
list of information (information must appear in order of importance), 3) use a tight set of
linguistic and rhetorical constraints, and 4) demonstrate a considerable concern with accuracy,
(400). As opposed to their news-writing colleagues, the editorial writers, it seems, face quite a
few more decisions: the editorial writer “may refer to facts, but the major purpose is not to
introduce them to the reader.” Instead, the editorial involves an exhortation to accept the
writer’s opinion. The style of the editorial, the authors of the study conclude, “is thus much
more open than the news story and may necessitate greater concern with how to present a case
in the most convincing manner,” (393). This, I believe applies to all persuasive writing, even to
journal articles which have a clearer structure than most other persuasive genres. In sum,
persuasive writing in general, and the editorial, letters to the editor, and speech-genres in
particular, seem to be somewhat more open-ended tasks than the primarily informative writing
genres are.14
One can see the wide scope for decision-making within the genres studied here if one
looks at the journalistic genres studied for this project. In terms of the letters to the editor, for
example, we have basically two antitheses. The “Beware” letter clearly relies on the reader’s
14 As Katherine Rowan, however, makes clear in her article, “A Contemporary Theory of Explanatory Writing”
(1988), both persuasive as well as explanatory writing, the latter being a subcategory in her schema of informative
writing, involve quite extensive audience appraisals and considerations of audience knowledge and expectations on
the part of the writer. A fuller discussion of Rowan’s ideas will be found later on in this section.
91
emotions to get the point across. Thus, the writer begins and ends the letter on a note of fear
and alarm (i.e., do this or else…), which effectively stir the reader. The “Rio-Summit” letter, on
the other hand, couldn’t be more emotion-free. In a somewhat impassioned tone the author
proceeds to set the record straight, as it were, with facts and predictable value judgments based
on those facts. A similar dichotomy exists with the editorials. Here we have the “Greening of
Vermont” and “Don’t Water down the Desert Bill” texts representing the emotional end while
“Earth Summit Goals essential” presents the more fact-based emotion-free end of the spectrum.
Finally one has speeches, with “Design for the Environment” calmly and enthusiastically
presenting fact exemplifying theory, and “The Endangered Species Act” on the other end setting
off any number of emotions in a similarly professional audience. (There is, however, an
important distinction to be made between the two audiences, which I will discuss next.)
One can conclude this discussion of generic variation on a cognitive note. If one looks
at the many cognitive studies made on writers up to this point (see Piazza (1987) for a nice
survey), it seems clear, in Sartrean terms, that persuasive writers are truly “condemned” to be
free. That is, a persuasive writer’s bane does seem to be the myriad choices available to him
when given a persuasive writing task. We can see this in the texts studied here. However,
while a writer may freely choose a largely pathos-based persuasive strategy, for example, or
instead opt for a more emotion free strategy, her choice is definitely shaped by other things,
namely, the nature/urgency of the topic, the nature of the audience being addressed, and the
writer’s own purpose. This brings us to Hairston’s (1986b) rhetorical square. The author might
also be constrained by precedent, or Halliday and Hasan’s (1989) often overlooked concept of
“intertextuality.”
92
Contextual Factors: The Rhetorical Square
Surprisingly, many experts on writing show a reductionist tendency to assign all
elements in a writing task as being decided upon and determined by only one factor. This is one
of Kinneavy’s fatal flaws. As Fulkerson (1984) points out, Kinneavy never supplies any
empirical evidence to support his claim that it is the writer’s aim which determines everything
else about a piece of discourse, namely its structure, logic, organization and style. Fulkerson, in
his turn, quite correctly points out that the nature of one’s audience is perhaps more important in
determining how one goes about organizing and shaping a text. But, like Kinneavy, Fulkerson
stops there. It is the audience – and only the audience – that colors the decisions we make as we
write, he asserts. Halliday and Hasan, for their part, take the more global view in asserting that
it is the social situation which determines the complete makeup of any text. Unfortunately,
however, they provide only simplistic, if not somewhat far-fetched, examples of contextual
determinants, (e.g., the transparent example of the sales encounter at a market). Here purpose,
audience and context are wonderfully clear and direct. Written academic discourse situations
are invariably more complex.
Hairston (1986b), I believe, presents the most realistic schema of interlocking variables
which affect writers. Her schema, the rhetorical square, shows four interdependent factors
which can, in varying degrees, determine a writer’s decisions. See figure #7.
Figure #7
The Rhetorical Square
message
audience
purpose
persona
93
The beauty of this approach to understanding discourse variables lies in the fuller
understanding of context which it exhibits. Thus purpose alone cannot guide all of our writing
decisions, nor can a full understanding of the audience pre-decide all issues of organization or
style. Rather, it is all these things, which in turn interrelate in complex ways with the very
nature of the message that form the parameters for decision making that each writer faces.
One can definitely see that the interesting interplay of the above factors influenced the
structure and style of all of the pieces here studied. In terms of the two speeches made, for
example, both the nature of the audience and the message itself were the prime deciding factors
as to how many and which emotions might be necessary to make the speech effective. This is
the opposite of Kinneavy’s idea. Thus, in reality, considerations of audience, message and
writer’s purpose had to be calibrated in the speaker’s mind beforehand for each speech studied
here respectively, in order for the given speaker to make the correct rhetorical decisions, which
in turn enabled him to achieve his aim. This, rather than the writer’s aim alone (Kinneavy) – or
for Fulkerson the audience alone – determines how the message and audience would be
handled. This calibration is exemplified in the “Design for the Environment” speech. Here the
message was not a threatening one for the entrepreneurial audience [we don’t need to stop
producing our product to protect the environment]; therefore, the audience could be considered
friendly. Because of these two factors, then, [i.e., message + audience] the speaker could adopt
a colleague-like persona and use minimum emotion to encourage his audience to adopt his
ideas. This approach was not possible with the Endangered Species Act speech. In this case,
the different message of the speech [i.e., let’s rein in our urges to develop land] changed all the
dynamics for that particular speaker. Like the Design for the Environment audience, the
businessmen of the Seattle Rotary Club were professional. The difference with the Design
94
speech was that the audience in this case was hostile to the message: businessmen from the
Seattle Rotary Club do not wish to hear that they should sacrifice their potential development
earnings for some lofty goal. As a result of this mix of audience and message with the second
speech, the speaker here fine-tuned a work of emotional art to try to sway his listeners. Unlike
the former speaker, the environmentalist before the Rotary Club could take no common ground
for granted and thus had to take extreme rhetorical measures to establish a common ground and
make palatable and absolutely necessary his message of industrial restraint. Thus in his speech
Brock Evans flatters, frightens, moves and cajoles his audience to accept the course of action he
suggests based on the claims he makes; none of these emotional moves are present in the
Design for the environment speech.
With the speeches, the audiences were similar but the messages were different. With
the advertisements, the messages coincided while the audiences diverged. The Chevron ad, for
instance, was placed in a general audience magazine (the Atlantic). Because the writer of the ad
could not assume shared environmentally conscious values in all the readers of the piece, the
writer appealed to two divergent emotions: the desire for the environmentalists in the audience
to safeguard the environment (which Chevron says it does in the ad), and the more selfish desire
among others in the reading public to profit from a thriving environment. This was the second
angle inserted in the ad for the sportsmen in the crowd. The Chevron message was thus mixed:
you should buy Chevron gas for two reasons – to save the environment or to vouchsafe the
existence of fish in your fishing hole, whichever you prefer. The Hi-Tec boots ad, on the other
hand, could count on a homogeneously pro-environmental audience. It used this advantage to
manipulate this audience through the unified, powerful emotion of fear. If you really want to
save the national parks, the message is, come to the store and do something about it. In other
95
texts in my data, sometimes the message alone decides the audience. Thus, in the case of the
Earth Summit letter, the official involved wished to present his side of the story in a factual way
to the world. He singled out an audience, communicating only with those interested in this
somewhat obscure issue. In this case, the message was inherently “intellectual” and no appeal
to emotion was made.
In all the texts I studied then, some unique calibration of all four rhetorical factors
determined the emotional/factual makeup of the message. It is clear, however, that the
messages themselves might have been constructed differently, with different approaches taken.
Indeed, because most persuasive genres are not in fact “genre-controlled” but are instead
somewhat open ended, the persuasive endeavor must, in the end, be considered more of an art
than a science. This is true even in the most scientific texts, which is something I hope to show
in my conclusion. The “art” in persuasion comes with correctly assessing both message,
writer’s purpose, and impact on audience, calibrating the writer’s persona accordingly, and then
creatively using this information to formulate the most effective persuasive message. No
simplistic consideration of aim, audience, or social context alone will account for all the myriad
decisions which create effective persuasive pieces of writing.
Exposition versus Explanation
In terms of generic structure potential discussed up to now, so far I have covered two
important elements for the persuasive genres: 1) charge to the reader or thesis, and 2) generic
variation of optional elements; this consists of development through fact (logos) or through
emotion (pathos). Advertisements generally have a physical charge to the reader and develop
the persuasive message emotionally. Letters to the editor, letters to constituents, editorials, and
96
speeches may have a physical or intellectual charge to the reader (or both), and may develop the
message either primarily through emotion or through facts or both. Journal articles we have
seen primarily seek to persuade a specialized audience of a thesis, but more often than not also
contain an important physical charge to the reader or important implications for the reader to
take some physical action explicitly mentioned in the conclusion. Also importantly, and distinct
from all the preceding genres, journal articles not only do away with emotional appeals, they
rely on exposition to further their theses. This differs from the simple presentation of fact
characteristic of the other genres. Let’s consider this in a little more depth.
Kinneavy separates reference discourse into three categories: scientific, informative,
and exploratory discourse. See below:
Figure #8: Kinneavy’s Reference Schema (1971)
The interesting distinction is between the first two, with exploratory discourse serving the more
marginal –albeit important—role of raising research questions or questioning existing
paradigms. Scientific discourse is a more common and critical subtype of reference discourse
and while primarily shaped like exploratory discourse, according to Kinneavy, “by the goal of
representing reality” it is secondarily concerned with the goal of furnishing proof for some
claim; this of course is normally what is considered to be expository discourse. Informative
Reference
Scientific Informative Exploratory
97
discourse, in contrast, while again primarily concerned with the “reality” end of the
communication triangle, secondarily serves to make the claims that were ultimately ‘proven’
through science accessible to lay readers/hearers; these texts are therefore more concerned with
issues of daily life. These are the three reference discourse types put forth by Kinneavy. Since
1971, however, Katherine Rowan (1988) has made some important amendments to Kinneavy’s
frame4work for informative discourse which have had some impact on my ideas about
persuasion.
Rowan first of all refines and extends Kinneavy’s category of informative discourse by
carving it into two subdivisions: informatory discourse and explanatory discourse, which, as
she points out, are very different. Informatory discourse, says Rowan, “is designed to create
awareness of previously unknown facets’ of some phenomenon which is already familiar to
readers. “Traditional ‘hard’ news articles, weather reports, computer manuals, and instructions
for playing games” are all examples of such discourse. “Explanatory discourse, on the other
hand,” says Rowan, “presents concepts that are not, for most lay readers, understandable when
simply asserted. Instead, it concerns phenomena about which lay readers have some awareness
but not full understanding.” (34). Examples of this kind of discourse given by Rowan are
magazine articles discussing how new tax laws will affect citizens or a weather service
pamphlet distinguishing the magnitude of earthquakes from their intensity. In each case, the
reader is aware of the existence of tax laws and earthquakes but does not know how they work.
According to Rowan, one can explain how something works in three ways: you can elucidate
the phenomenon, you can explain it in a quasi-scientific way, or you can transform the readers’
understanding of the concept. These are the three types of explanatory discourse. I will talk
just a bit more about them, as they are relevant to my claims about persuasion.
98
Elucidating explanations are the simplest. They are the terms defined in the glossary
section of a textbook and are basically definitions of words. These also appear in encyclopedias
and explanatory magazine articles (Rowan: 1988, p. 36). A more complex kind of explanation
is the quasi-scientific type which seeks to clarify the meaning of a “group of propositions.”
“Quasi-scientific explanations are most appropriately used,” says Rowan, “when individual
terms and assertions are understandable to readers but the way in which these assertions cohere
or are related is difficult to grasp,” (36). Examples of this type of discourse given by Rowan are
textbook sections that discuss the outbreak of the American Civil War by comparing and
contrasting two theories that account for its occurrence, newspaper and magazine accounts of
the 1986 space shutt6le disaster, etc. The problem with this type of explanation, says Rowan,
occurs if the reader already has some erroneous pre-conceived or intuitive notion about how a
thing works which somehow does not mesh with the neutral explanation given. This person
needs a more tailor-made explanation that will clear away her own mental obstacles to
understanding a counterintuitive reality. The type of explanation that can do this is, according
to Rowan, the transformative explanation, which is used to help readers grasp implausible ideas.
If a person does not first understand, for example, that light reflects back on objects and does
not merely shine on them, to explain the properties of light through an analogy with a bouncing
ball is not the most effective strategy for the explainer. This strategy would be quasi-scientific.
Instead, Rowan points out, the explainer needs to overcome the learner’s main problem with the
implausibility of light being an object like any other –i.e., transforming the learner’s intuitive
but erroneous understanding, before going any further in explanation. “Transformative
explanations are less common than elucidating or quasi-scientific explanations,” says Rowan,
99
“because the classification of an explanation as transformative depends on knowing whether or
not lay audiences generally have erroneous theories about the phenomenon being explained,”
(37).
What do these distinctions have to do with persuasive writing? Rowan it must be
remembered still relies on Kinneavian categories, refining and expanding them. Therefore
Rowan, like Kinneavy, makes the important distinction between explanation/information on the
one hand and persuasion on the other. The above ideas, she says, can help “guide writers’
initial decisions about the sort of discursive goal they want to pursue, that is, persuasion,
explanation, and so forth,” (50). With all the above, Rowan contrasts exposition, which, for
Rowan, is an act which involves “searching for an answer to a scholarly question,” with
‘explanation,’ which she counters,’ “[helps] lay audiences understand established answers to
these questions,” (28). I propose a slightly altered classification.
Figure 9: Rowan’s System of Reference Discourse
(1988, p. 39)
15
15 This type of discourse, the only one of Rowan’s I have not gone into, describes discourse which basically restates
a given text. “Summaries, abstracts, and translations are examples of this discursive form,” states Rowan, (32).
Reference
Types of
Reference
Types of
Informative
Types of
Explanatory
Informative
Explanatory Informatory
Transformative Quasi-Scientific Elucidating
Exploratory Scientific
(Exposition) Representative
100
On the basis of the data in this study, I believe exposition, defined as Kinneavy and
Rowan do, to be intrinsically persuasive in function, for exposition seeks to persuade the
scholar, by means of exhaustive data, of a particular line of reasoning. One of Kinneavy’s
conflicting points of view actually endorses this position, as I have pointed out above. That is,
Kinneavy believes that inducing a reader to accept a certain claim is a persuasive function.
What Kinneavy wrongly or by oversight denies is that this is also a scholarly function and in
fact defines exposition. Exposition, which is academic persuasion, should be distinguished, I
believe, from non-academic approaches to persuasion, the latter which are informatory or
explanatory in approach, as opposed to expository. Thus, I believe Rowan is on the right track
but falls short when she categorizes informatory and explanatory discourse as purely referential
in nature. Considered in and of themselves, of course, they are; however, when mixed together
with a point of view, informatory and explanatory discourse may also be components of non-
academic approaches to persuasion.
With regard to expository writing, after careful analysis, it seems most precise to
consider this to be a form of persuasive discourse, or, more specifically, an academic or
scholarly means of persuasion.
In all the texts I studied, only one was purely expository. This was the research article
on new approaches to soil conservation (i.e., the water quality article). The Ecosystem piece is
a strange breed in that it seems expository (no emotion, replete with 123 academic citations),
but it doesn’t exactly prove a claim. Instead, it explains the current ideologies influencing the
environmental movement, describes what a certain commission is achieving and advocates an
expanding role for this commission. All the other pieces were either informatory modes of
persuasion (Chevron, Hi-Tec, Memo on Rio Summit, Waxman’s letter to constituents, the
101
“Greening of Vermont” editorial) or informatory/and explanatory pieces (the “Beware of the
latest anti-environmental strategy” letter, the “Earth Summit Goals” and “Don’t Water Down
the Crucial Desert Bill” editorial, the feature story, both speeches, and the “Ecosystem
Management” journal article). Not any one piece contained only explanatory discourse, as there
was always some new information being disseminated, and always a persuasive aim informing
the piece as a while. To complete this discussion of exposition versus explanation/information,
I would like to briefly mention support in the texts I analyzed.
Support and the Expository Essay
Along with the continuum in my data from pathos-based to logos-based means of
persuasion, one also finds a continuing presence of support for assertions made. Definitive
support (if such a thing exists) is found only in the water quality journal article, with the
Ecosystem article in a sort of expository-explanatory limbo. In reading the overall data one thus
goes from the advertisement which provide no support, to letters to the editor, which at least
begin to provide examples, to editorials through speeches which all provide supporting facts,
most of which, however, must be taken on the word of the author. One finishes with journal
articles, complete with extensive tables and footnotes, these latter rigorously interpreted. At
least one of the journal articles constitutes the prototype of the expository essay.
Formal Logic
It goes without saying that none of the texts studied here (with the exception of the
“Water Quality” article) involve formal logic. This is not to say that the reasoning in these
other pieces is “illogical,” only that the logic employed is not elaborate per se. For Kinneavy,
102
the use of formal logic versus “enthymemic logic” is crucial and alone may categorize a text.
Thus, formal logic usually signals expository or “scientific” discourse, enthymemic logic
persuasive discourse. Kinneavy, as I mentioned, relies largely on Aristotle to make the
distinction between the two logics, the crux of which deals with the “absoluteness” of the
writer’s premises. A word on this might be helpful. “Aristotle,” says Kinneavy (1971),
discussion the enthymeme—
… considers rhetoric as dealing with the ‘approximately true,’ …
with ‘proof’ or ‘apparent proof,’ … with the ‘apparent
enthymeme,’ with ‘what seems probable… ‘ Aristotle’s two
‘logical’ proofs are not really logical in the scientific sense; they
only seem so. Example and enthymeme are not really
conclusive, as are real induction and deduction [emphasis
mine]… In view of all this, it seems fairly clear that persuasion
has to do with the ‘plausible’ with apparent proof and seeming
logic… Persuasion as such is averidical, neither true nor false…
[It operates] in the areas of attitude and opinion, not fact and
science. (220)
Such characterizations are a bit simplistic. Thus, the “Ecosystem Management” article,
although it uses scientific jargon and 123 dense scholarly footnotes, does not contain formal
logic as it is more definitional in character. For Kinneavy such an article would not be scientific
or persuasive. I believe it is both. In all the pieces studied here, whether the logic is
enthymemic or formal, I believe has little bearing on the persuasive or expository nature of the
texts. The existence of theses, charges to the reader and type and amount of support determine
the latter categories. Related to this question, it would be interesting to actually verify in
scientific texts how “absolute” the premises and conclusions in fact ar. I believe that
Kinneavy’s criteria for pure logic as alone denoting scientific discourse may apply only to
103
mathematics and symbolic logic. Clearly there are many scholarly departments at the university
which produce first rate “scientific” text whose logic is enthymemic.
104
Chapter 5
CONCLUSION
This paper began with some fundamental questions concerning the academic
persuasive essay. I wish at this point to present some tentative answers to those questions.
Persuasion and Academic Discourse
One of the first questions posed by this study was: How is persuasion accomplished in
academic versus non-academic contexts? The answer, it has been seen, lies in the presence or
absence of emotional appeals to the reader, amount of support for claims made, and amount of
explicit logical connectors as well as use of formal vs. enthymemic logic in the texts.
Specifically, we have seen that all the texts studied here were indeed persuasive in nature, given
that they all contained explicit or implicit charges to the reader. The charges however did vary
in terms of the extent to which they informed the texts in which they are present: in the ads, for
example, the charges to the reader could be seen as the most important component of the text; in
the feature article, by contrast, the charge to the reader is almost tangential to the text. All texts
also had a thesis, without which they could not be considered as a unified piece of discourse.
Where the texts varied were in the elements of logic, support, and in the specific type of appeal
made to the reader, which, together span the Halliday/Hasanian categories or field, tenor and
mode.
With regard to field, one finds that in non-academic persuasive discourse, there is very
little logical structure. In other words, there is practically no appeal made by the author to the
reader to logically arrive—by means of proofs and explicitly articulated warrants and
105
assumptions—at the desired conclusion. Instead, the authors of non-academic discourse, it
would seem, simply ask the reader to agree with them, or appeal in other ways to the reader’s
emotions. Perhaps, as Freedman’s very intriguing 1996 study shows, the antithesis for this type
of a-logical, non-academic approach to persuasion would be the discourse produced by law
students. La discourse, Freedman argues, is “ruthlessly logical,” (101). Freedman characterizes
it this way:
…[A]lthough all academic writing must be logical in
the sense that the conclusions must seem to be
connected in a reasonable basis to the premises, the
emphasis in writing for law is almost entirely on
presenting the reasoning processes themselves.
Every logical step must be articulated. In other
disciplines, logical leaps are possible: Connections
are more often accepted as shared knowledge
between reader and writer. In writing for law, the
whole point of the exercise is to present not so much
the logical conclusions, but rather the rationale for
these inferences. (1996: 101)
Thus, one could consider the discourse produced in law courses, in terms of logic, as
representing academic discourse perhaps at a rarified level, and therefore serving as a
counterpoint to much of the discourse studied here. According to Freeman, the writing of law
students is also characterized by the inclusion of all possible counterarguments to any claim
presented by the writer, and there is no room in this type of writing for digression of any kind.
(101) In non-academic discourse, none of these rules apply: one sees little consideration of
other possible points of view, and digression seems to be more readily acceptable.
Related to the element of logic in non-academic writing, I have also noted that support
for claims made is scant or non-existent here as well. One finds little classification of material
presented in this kind of discourse, and a prominence of value judgments throughout the texts.
106
This would complete my analysis of the Halliday and Hasanian elements of “field” considered
in this study.
In terms of “tenor” or interpersonal strategies, as mentioned above, there is a
predominance in non-academic discourse of value judgments and emotional appeals, although
the former also appears in academic discourse. In non-academic discourse there are also more
references to common ground, greater use of first and second person pronouns, rhetorical
questions, exclamations, imperatives and modal equivalents of imperatives; in other words,
writers of non-academic discourse seem to employ more interpersonal strategies than writers of
scholarly discourse do, an insight which Kinneavy (1971) was perhaps the first to clearly
quantify in his work. Among these interpersonal strategies, only the imperatives and modal
imperative equivalents are to some degree also present in academic discourse.
Finally, with regard to “mode,” one can say that in all the texts, language is the chief
conveyor of the ideas presented. Below is a summary of these results.
107
Components of Persuasion
A Summary
I. Field
0% Some 100%
ads letters (#1, #2) journal articles (#2)
letters (#3 to constituents) speeches (#2)
editorials journal articles (#1)
feature story
speeches (#1)
0% Some 100%
ads letters (#1, #2) feature story (facts)
letters (#3, to constituents) editorials (#1) journal articles (data)
editorials (#2) speeches
0% Some 100% ads journal articles
letters
editorials
feature story
speeches
journal articles
II. Tenor
ads ads
letters letters
editorials editorials
speeches feature story
journal articles speeches
journal articles
Formal Logic and/or Scientific Exposition
Explanation/Information
Continued, next page
Support
Physical charge to the reader
(i.e., “Do this action.”) Intellectual charge to the reader (i.e.,
“Accept this thesis”)
108
Components of Persuasion, cont.
ads
letters letters
editorials editorials
speeches speeches
journal articles
ads feature story
letters journal article
speeches
III: Mode: Language is Constitutive
All messages primarily communicated through language.
Generic Structure Potential of Academic Essays: Optional and Obligatory Elements
From the above chart, looking at the components of the speeches and academic journal
articles in comparison with other persuasive genres, it seems clear that the generic structure
potential of the academic persuasive essay is composed of the following elements: a thesis, a
charge to the reader, an invitation to the reader to follow logical reasoning, and support for all
claims made. This can be considered as a definition of expository writing in general and
comprises the obligatory elements of academic essays. Optional elements to the GSP of
academic writing would seem to be interpersonal strategies, which one can find in the quasi-
academic speeches but not in the journal articles, and explanatory development of material (as
opposed to exposition, c.f. p. 80 of this paper).
Appeal to Reader’s Pathos/ Writer’s
Ethos (emotion-based) Appeal to Reader’s Logic
Logos (fact-based)
Interpersonal Strategies Used Not Used
109
Predictability
A second question initially posed by this study was whether one could use a contextual
configuration to predict the macrostructure of an academic essay. The answer to this question, I
believe, is no.
As we have seen, the ability to predict a genre’s macrostructure by knowing the exact
contextual variables surrounding any given discourse is a major impetus behind Halliday and
Hasan’s (1989) theory of genres. “Because of the close link between text and context,” says
Halliday, “readers and listeners make predictions; they read and listen, with expectations for
what is coming next…. The whole point of a passage may be missed if the reader or listener does
not bring to it appropriate assumptions derived from context of situation,” (46). And to show the
validity of predicting genres from context, Halliday and Hasan successfully predict the structure
of the service encounter (54), and analyze the obvious logic of a little boy’s discourse regarding
a toy train he is playing with (29). Such simple discourse is a far cry from the complex and
intricate academic structures under consideration here. More importantly, what is missing from
the example of situation and genre that Halliday and Hasan explicitly consider in their work is
the factor of cultural precedent and idiosyncratic tradition, not to mention the unique creativity
of the author, that have as much to do with the particular constitution of a genre as situational
exigencies have.
With regard to the genres considered here, for example, I would not have been able to
predict, at the outset of this study, whether the two speechmakers whose work I later analyzed
would have recourse to the work done by other scholars in their attempts to persuade an educated
audience or not. As it turns out, citing the work of others was left to the writers of the journal
110
articles, and was not a modus operandi in the composition of the speeches. What was this the
case?
Obviously, one could cite here mere individual preferences, and I believe this definitely
to be a factor. I also believe, however, that we need to consider another important constituent of
context, one not fully developed by Halliday and Hasan, but one which could be invaluable in
explaining a good part of the data in this studay: that is, the consideration of tradition in the
genres here analyzed. Halliday and Hasan approach this consideration in their discussion of
intertextuality. “…[P]art of the environment for any text is a set of pervious texts,” notes
Halliday, (47), “texts which are taken for granted as shared among those taking part.” Halliday
continues, giving the example of intertextuality in a typical schoolroom:
Every lesson is built on the assumption of earlier lessons in which
topics have been explored, concepts agreed upon and defined; but
beyond this there is a great deal of unspoken cross-reference of
which everyone is largely unaware… This kind of
INTERTEXTUALITY, as it is sometimes called, includes … types
of logical sequencing that are recognized as valid… There are also
likely to be ‘coded’ expressions that are carried form one text to
another, more or less formulaic sequences that may signal what is
happening… At a deeper level the entire school learning
experience is linked by a pervading ‘intertextuality’ that embodies
the theory and practice of education as institutionalized in our
culture. (47)
Interestingly, this view of intertextuality corresponds closely with current views of
discourse communities (Swales, 1990; Bazerman, 1992; Freedman, 1996, among others), for
historically, it has been discourse communities who have set the generic traditions with regard to
written discourse. Swales (1990) is perhaps the most thorough in presenting the concept of
discourse communities as primary determinants of generic structures. Discourse communities,
according to Swales (p. 27) are characterized by6 the following:
111
They –
1. have broadly agreed-upon sets of common public goals;
2. have mechanisms of intercommunication among its members;
3. use their participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information
and feedback;
4. utilize and hence possess one or more genres in the communicative
furtherance of its aims;
5. in addition to owning genres, have acquired some specific lexis; and
6. have a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant
content and discourse expertise.
I believe that the discourse communities to which the writers of all the texts I studied
belonged, determined to a large extent the presence or absence of the generic elements found in
each text. To answer the question about prediction conclusively, however, I believe that there is
not enough evidence here to conclusively determine all of the subtle generic conventions specific
to each genre here studied. Nevertheless, it definitely seems clear that, for each genre
considered, there was more to the structure of the text than the immediate situation dictated,
which is all one could have predicted from Halliday and Hasan’s formal theory (1989). Clearly,
Halliday and Hasan need to formally factor in intertextual variables to arrive at a sound theory
for predicting complex generic structures, structures such as those characteristics of formal
academic essays.
The Undergraduate Academic Essay: Is It Really a Genre?
The analysis which forms the body of this study looks a wide gamut of persuasive
genres. My goal in the present section is to situate the undergraduate persuasive essay within the
continuum of these genres.
A more direct approach to classifying undergraduate academic genres would be to
study them directly. Unfortunately, though, when one looks at them under a microscope, they
112
seem to disappear as an entity. The fact is, student writing is an artificial creation and has no
generic structure, per se, outside of the professor’s directives unique to each assignment, the
discourse community to which the professor belongs, and the general directives to be found in
multitudinous freshman rhetorics. Freshman essays are basically heuri8stics given by teachers to
train students for real writing situations. To use Freedman’s term, they are “epistemic” (p. 92)
activities. Referring to undergraduate law essays, Freedman says: “Educationally, we must
recognize… that, although typical of much school writing, the social action evinced in the genre
examined differs from that of most workplace argument as well as the argument of much public
discourse,” (92). Anson and Forsberg (1990) are quite correct in characterizing the freshman
English writing class as a “dummy run” situation. Current interest in studying the features of
“real” discourse communities, for example, they say
Has led some researchers away from school settings, whose
discourse communities [are] inevitably defined by the
educational system … and whose writing tasks are typically
assigned by a teacher or researcher in order to accomplish a
pedagogical goal or provide data to answer a research
question…. For these scholars, school writing is often
rhetorically limited, used for what Britton, Burgess, Martin,
McLeod and Rosen (1972) have called ‘dummy run’ practice.
Without rich, varied audiences and purposes, the consequences
of such writing are substantially different from the writing
found in non-academic settings (202).
Reither (1993), in speaking of Burke’s scene-act ratio of understanding discourse, condemns the
quality of current freshman writing as a result of what freshmen are exposed to in their
composition classrooms.
The scene-act ratio gives us ways of thinking about the kinds of
scenes our courses offer our students. If we ask, “What kinds of
‘strategic answers’ are appropriate to the scenes that are our
classrooms?” the answer seems to be that our classrooms are ‘fit
containers’ for exactly the kinds of writing our students produce
in them. If we33 find that our students are not doing the kind of
113
writing we want them to—and not learning to write the ways we
want them too— the reason is likely that, by and large, the
students are designing their texts ‘strategically’ [i.e., they are
pursuing a reasoned rhetorical strategy] to encompass the
situations in which they find themselves –and our classrooms
are ‘unfit containers’ for the kinds of writing we want them to
do and learn. Our classrooms, that is, are getting precisely what
they deserve (112).
Other voices chime in when it comes to admitting the uncomfortable “vagueness”
necessarily inherent in most student writing assignments in general, especially in freshman
writing courses. In point of fact, in most freshman composition courses, students are never sure
what teachers are looking for, and therefore do not know how to be “effective.” “People read
texts with varying expectations and their judgments of merit vary as a result,” say Faigley &
Hansen (1985: p. 148). An English instructor will evaluate “according to how well [the student]
met the standards of a handbook notion of an essay; [the content instructor] evaluates according
to the depth of exposure to new knowledge,” (148). Perhaps the quintessential example of the
chameleon-like character of the ‘undergraduate student essay” is revealed in Mike Rose’s (1983)
article on remedial writing courses. There he relates a business professor’s dismay over the
writing style of his undergraduate English majors: “Students come to us writing over-academic,
highly embroidered prose,” writes Rose. “We, in turn, have to retrain them to write simple,
direct reports for companies, reports that someone will like reading,” (112). “In sum,” says
Rose,
Student writing at the college level is always contrasted with
what is expected in “real life” with “authentic” genres, and the
new approach in composition seems to be to get students to
actually confront and practice such real genres (112).
“This paper advocates research into the production of authentic genres in real contexts,”
concludes Johns in her article “Written Argumentation to Real Audiences” (1993: p. 76). She
114
advocates this link of research “to facilitate understanding of some of the general, community-
specific and task-specific aspects of audience awareness and argumentation that confront
writers,” [and] “give students experiences writing authentic argumentative texts to real
audiences,” (84-5).
“Real” Academic Genres
In sum, if one wants real authenticity in academic writing there is only one place to go:
to the professional journals who publish discipline-specific essays. Journal essays are, though
few undergraduates know this, the prototype, albeit much simplified, of the writing they are
expected to perform in college. The exact quantification of journal essay norms, however, has
so far proved elusive. The more one reads about discipline-specific essay norms, the more one
realizes that there is no such thing as “academic” writing in general, (as some writing scholars
cited at the beginning of this study believed), but rather there is “literary criticism,” or
“biology” or “sociology” essays. Each discipline has norms which some of us are aware of, and
which scholars upon careful analysis are just discovering.
Swales (1990) for instance, throws a monkey-wrench into Halliday and Hasan’s notion
of predictability in his analysis of scientific journal articles. Thus, far from Halliday and
Hasan’s (1989) notion of genre as a transparent entity which directly reflects, as much as
possible through language, the social situation to which it is responding, according to Swales, in
biology articles we find the opposite. Swales finds, for example, that although most scientific
discoveries begin as arbitrary and unplanned laboratory experiments, in writing they are not
presented as such. In fact, the genre of the scientific research paper itself transforms the
scientific experience, so that initial exploratory experiments become, when forced through the
appropriate generic conventions, products of unique foresight and vision. Text, then, in this
115
case, ceases to be a direct, transparent linguistic rendition of context, as genre itself imposes its
own values on the linguistic product. To take Halliday and Hasan’s social semiotic theory at
face value this should not seem possible. Sales’ findings are corroborated in Gragson and
Selzer’s article “Fictionalizing the Readers of Scholarly Articles in Biology,” (1990). There
again, the social context of the biology experiment is not mirrored in the scientific prose of the
subsequent article4, but rather it is created by it. Specifically, Gragson and Selzer discover that
by carefully choosing the wording of their articles, biologists create friends or enemies of their
audience; they decide what their audience is knowledgeable in, and what they need to explain to
them. The writers, in a very real sense, create their own audience.
There are any number of discipline-specific quirks and entire logical approaches which
cloud the concept of “academic writing” as an entity. Placing the topic sentence at the end
instead of at the beginning of a paragraph, for example, while fine for an English paper is
disastrous for sociology or science reports. ON the other hand, the use of passive constructions,
while avoided in the English department, is preferred in the sciences. Kinneavy (1971) is on the
mark in his observation that the sciences wish to de-emphasize the writer and reader
linguistically. However, even similar disciplines show different preferences. Thus, Rose (1979)
points out that while an individual’s reflections on personal events are considered legitimate
evidence in many areas of sociology and anthropology, they are considered much less legitimate
by behavioral psychologists (112). We’ve already discussed the different stases addressed in
literary articles of a critical nature versus scientific ones – that is, that literary writing concerns
itself more directly with questions of value while scientific writing spends a larger amount of
time in the lower stasic realms of definitions, causes, etc.
116
In addition to different stylistic and methodological assumptions, different disciplines
seem to differ in philosophy and logic. An unexpected result of this is the different use that the
different disciplines make of sources. Kaufer and Geisler (1991), for instance, seem to be the
first to have documented the up to now implicit pattern of citation that is always followed in the
social sciences. According to their schema, the social science writer argues his point on what is
considered the “main path” of argumentation. He will then reinforce this point by citing a
source he disagrees with (going down the faulty path) then explaining why the source is
incorrect. This brings him back to his own arguments (return path). This pattern of citing
sources will continue throughout the paper, usually with the unfavorable sources cited first,
dispatched with, and the favorable ones kept for last. The argument then ends with a crescendo
of agreement on the final page. While this citation procedure is fairly obvious in the social
sciences, Kaufer and Geisler find the whole process to be very obscure in philosophical articles
which, according to the authors, tend to deeply embed the faulty and return path structures. The
social sciences are thus more dialectical, using their citation practices “more for background and
support” than for contrast as citations tend to be used in philosophy. Finally, one might point
out Peck-MacDonald’s (1989) fascinating distinction between data-driven versus concept-
driven logical approaches. According to Peck-MacDonald, for example, the discipline of
literary criticism is a more data-driven exercise, very given to a writer’s forming of new
abstractions not yet adopted in the discipline. Here the abstractions come from the writer as she
develops ad hoc new categories to correspond to her novel interpretation of a work. This
approach is thus “upwardly diverging” in that the writer starts from the data and creates an
open-ended set of new concepts which she did not start out with. This kind of writing is
contrasted by Peck MacDonald to the more “conceptually-driven” writing common in the social
117
sciences. In this latter discipline, for example, it seems that new abstractions on the part of the
undergraduate student would not be welcome. Instead, the student is to take concepts already
argued about and accepted in the discipline and apply them. Thus, writing in English classes
versus social science classes require two different cognitive approaches to the situation on the
part of the student.
Where does this leave the undergraduate essay?
The Undergraduate Persuasive Essay
On the basis of the specificity of each academic discipline, I believe that the typical
undergraduate essay is also discipline specific. In the continuum of genres I have studied for
this project, therefore, I will rank the undergraduate essay as a subgenre of the discipline-
specific graduate essay it is really a facsimile of. It therefore will share the generic structure
potential of the particular discipline as well as the more general characteristics of journal
articles we have discussed above.
Kinneavy’s Value in Current Rhetorical Theory
There are two other issues with which I opened this study, which I wish to refer back to
here. The first regards Kinneavy’s place among current rhetorical paradigms in composition
theory, and the second concerns what we as teachers may glean from the present analysis.
In the final analysis, as I have mentioned before, the theories of Kinneavy and those of
Halliday and Hasan are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, I believe they are
complementary. The latter, at least from their 19l89 essay, seem to take a more global approach
and also seem more comfortable with spoken discourse. Kinneavy, on the other hand, provides
118
fascinating insights into written discourse, and does so in a framework which dovetails perfect
with that of Halliday and Hasan. Both sets of theorists take as a given the social nature of
discourse and the social exigencies and conventions which shape discourse. In an ideal world,
one could fuse the insights of these two works into a comprehensive discourse theory. Indeed,
this was Kinneavy’s ideal: that we in discourse could somehow move beyond our pre-
paradigmatic fractured state and create a new, unified paradigm for discourse.
While I believe this to be an achievable ideal in the not so distant future, I believe that
any current discourse theory embracing Kinneavian principles would have to be revised,
however, to reflect more accurate knowledge about academic persuasion. Specifically, we in
academia should acknowledge, based on empirical evidence, and based on current definitions of
persuasion, that expository discourse is inherently persuasive in nature; and that proving claims
by means of support and logic does in the end focus as much, or more, on the decoder (i.e.,
reader/listener) than it does on the reality being discussed. Expository discourse must be
recognized for what it is: an essentially polemic mode of discourse which argues for a specific
interpretation of reality. It is not simply a mirror of reality for the reader, as Kinneavy
apparently would have us believe.
Finally, any current acceptance of the Kinneavian framework would also have to
include the excellent insights into explanation and information put forward by Katherine Rowan
from her 1988 study, “A Contemporary Theory of Writing.” I believe that a viable revision of
Kinneavy’s framework is possible, and that such a framework might help current composition
instructors better apply Halliday/Hasanian principles in their own teaching of writing.
Kinneavy Revisited and Revised
In what follows I lay out a modified view of Kinneavy’s categories.
119
120
121
122
Dominant Function: A Caveat
Of course, there are many who would dismiss any attempt at categorization at all as, at
most, imprecise. Such scholars might claim that, if one seeks pure categorization, then all pieces
of discourse must be seen as mixed bags, much as are human beings. I am reminded of a
passage by Virginia Woolf in her essay “Street Haunting,” in which she both bemoans and
celebrates this fact.
…it is nature’s folly, not ours. When she set about her chief
masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one
thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder,
into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are
utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked,
variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run (In Lopate,
1994: 261).
In terms of this study, it has been rightly pointed out, for example, that to some extent all
discourse is persuasive, whether consciously intending to be or not. My own feeling is that,
while absolute categorization or genre description would be impossible, the effort to categorize
and describe is not in vain, and indeed is helpful, for such study reveals prevailing ideas about
discourse in whatever community one is in. The guiding idea in this study has been that of
“dominant function.” Thus, while there are certainly trace elements of persuasion to be found
even in the most objective-minded encyclopedic entry, traces of cultural value that seep into all
human reference to reality, nonetheless it may certainly be said that persuasion is not the
dominant function of that piece of discourse. Persuasion is, however, the dominant function of
much discourse, academic essays included. Given the subtlety of means by which we in any
given culture persuade, I believe it is worthwhile for students from other cultures and languages
to study and understand the persuasive techniques common to the cultures in which they wish to
function and express themselves. In terms of the Anglo-American undergraduate essay, as a
123
genre, one cannot overstress its importance to ESL students as a skill to be mastered relative to
their overall success at the university. I believe that the results of this study might be helpful for
teachers of these students in that it provides an overview of persuasive techniques that are
optional or obligatory to a wide range of genres. It is my hope that situating the undergraduate
academic essay within this overall persuasive framework may remove some of the mystery and
confusion which often surrounds this genre.
Teaching Strategies: A Final Word
If it is true that there is no one “generic” academic discourse, but rather only discipline-
specific discourses, then I believe it is time that we reconsider the old, and much debated,
Writing-Across-the-Curriculum programs of the 1970s. Perhaps when we see our tasks as
writing instructors as that of socializing our students into real discourse communities, rather than
trying to socialize them into some vague, non-existent Academic Community, as we in fact try to
do in most freshman writing courses, we will have more success in producing better writing –
because it will be more authentic– in the writing classroom.
Of course, student writing will never be entirely ‘authentic,’ because it is, after all, only
a heuristic for students. However, as Freedman makes clear, writing whose function is epistemic
or heuristic—in other words, whose fundamental purpose is to enable the writer to interpret
reality in new ways—has a social function as well. Referring to her study of undergraduate
students’ writing in an introductory law course, Freedman outlines the social nature of
“epistemic” writing:
To view the interaction [between student and teacher] as an
initiation rite clarifies a great deal that which has been troubling
to those concerned with writing pedagogy. Typically, as
Herrington (1985) observed, the writing that is elicited in
124
disciplinary courses is condemned for its rhetorical artificiality
(it asks students to tell the professor what the professor already
knows) as well as for the limited and limiting audience it seems
to imply (teacher as examiner). However, to suggest that such
assignments are pointless because they are artificial
rhetorically may be to miss the real point of what is going on
[emphasis mine]. What is going on is best understood as an
initiation rite—a rite that is created not just as a hurdle for
students to go through, but as a way of experiencing and
expressing those qualities that are necessary for, and
characteristic of, the initiates to the community.
Here Freedman is speaking about disciplinary writing courses. The task of socializing
students into authentic disciplines is more difficult in the typical, all-purpose English 1 course,
however. This is why I believe that we may need to return to the idea of basing generic English
1 courses on real genres, allowing students to read both primary texts for ideas on their topics,
but also journal articles which model accepted ways of arguing about those ideas.
It is interesting, when reviewing the ideas of so many excellent pedagogues, how the
idea of models in the teaching of writing remains so controversial. Derrida (1990), for one, for
as much as he favors exposing students to the original canon of literature which he was exposed
to, and which he ultimately “deconstructed,” is against teaching through models. “[Derrida]
cautions against imposing rigid schemes on writing students,” says Olsen, who interviewed
Derrida in 1990. Instead, Derrida suggests that “we continually question and destabilize the
authority of models of composition and that we seek to invent each time new forms according to
the situation,” (p.3). This, I believe, is fine for established scholars to do. Students, however,
just like Derrida, need to be first exposed to existing and accepted text structures, and the
philosophies that underlie them, before they can challenge them.
Hairston (1986a), it seems, would agree with this. Hairston praises the virtues of good
academic models which, among other things, teach students the use of examples and facts,
125
respect for the intelligence of their readers and the research required to persuade these intelligent
readers (187). I agree with Hairston that the content of writing courses should be writing; and
that themes should be chosen only secondarily to a) considerations of discipline-specific essay
assignments; and b) as examples of acceptable discipline-specific writing. For this reason, I
question the preponderance in most English 1 anthologies of what Kaufer & Geisler (1991)
might characterize as primary texts, that is, texts in which there are no references to other
sources. As Kaufer & Geisler make clear, all discipline-specific academic writing is “text-
bound”; this is the type of writing students themselves will be asked to produce. As a result, I
believe that students need to be presented with many text-bound models of academic discourse –
ideally texts taken from a variety of disciplines. A Writing-Across-the-Curriculum type of
freshman English course could best accommodate the models and general approach I believe are
necessary to meet writing students’ needs in today’s academe.
126
REFERENCES
Anson, C. M., and Forsberg, L. L. (1990). Moving beyond the academic community: Transitional
stages in profession writing. Written communication, 7, 200-29.
Axelrod, R.B. & Cooper, C.R. (1991). The St. Martin’s guide to writing. New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston.
Bahktin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Discourse in the novel (259-300). University of Texas
Press.
Bazerman, C. (1992). The informed writer: Using sources in the disciplines. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company.
Berrill, D.P. (1996). Perspectives on written argument. Cresskill: Hampton Press.
Brandt, D. (1986). Toward an understanding of context in composition. Written communication, 3,
139-57.
Britton, J. (1970). Language and learning. London: Penguin.
Britton, J., Burgess, T., Marin, N., McLeod, A. & Rosen, H. (1972). The development of writing abilities
(11-18). London: Macmillan.
Carson, J. G. (1993). Reading for writing: Cognitive perspectives. In J. Carson and I. Leki, Reading in
the composition classroom: Second language perspectives. New York: Heinle.
Connor, U. & McCagg, P. (1983). Cross-cultural differences and perceived quality in written paraphrase
of English expository prose. Applied linguistics 4, NO. 3, 260-267.
Connors, R.J. (1981). The rise and fall of the modes of discourse. College composition and
communication, 32, 444-55.
Connors, R.J. (1986). Textbooks and the evolution of the discipline. College composition and
communication, 37, 178-193.
Conrow, S. (1992). A case study of two second language writers in a genre-based composition class.
Thesis U. of California, Los Angeles.
Corbett, E.P.J. (1972). A theory of discourse. Freshman English News, 1, 12.
Corbet, E.P.J. (1981). John Locke’s contributions to rhetoric. College composition and communication,
32, 423-33.
127
Corder, J. (1976). Rhetorical analysis of writing. In G. Tate (ed.), Teaching composition: Ten
bibliographical essays (129-40). Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press.
Crowley, S. (1985). Invention in nineteenth century rhetoric. College composition and communication,
36, 51-60.
D’Angelo, F. (1976). Modes of discourse. In G. Tate (Ed.), Teaching composition: Ten
bibliographical essays (129-40). Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press.
D’Angelo, F. (1984). Nineteenth-century forms/modes of discourse: a critical inquiry. College
composition and communication, 35, 31-41.
D’Angelo, F. (1990). Tropics of arrangement: a theory of disposition. Journal of advanced
composition, 10, 101-0.
DiPardo, A. (1990). Narrative knowers, expository knowledge. Written communication, 7, 59-89.
Don’t water down the crucial desert bill. (1994, April 18) Editorial. The Los Angeles Times. B6.
Durst, R.K. (1990). The Mongoose and the rat in composition research: insights from the RTE
annotated bibliography. College composition and communication, 41, 393-408.
Evans, B. (1993, January 13). The endangered species act: implications for the future. Vital speeches of
the day, 339-344. Mount Pleasant: City News Publishing Co., (Inc. 1911).
Fahnestock, J. and Secor, M. (1988). The stases in scientific and literary argument. Written
Communication, 5, 427-43.
Faigley, L.A. & Hansen, K. (1985). Learning to write in the social sciences. College composition and
communication (Vol. 36). 140-9.
Fairbanks, A.H. (1993). The pedagogical failure of Toulmin’s logic. The writing instructor.
Francis, G. (1993). Ecosystem management. Natural resources journal, 33 (2): 315-45.
Freedman, A. (1996). Genres as arguments and arguments as genres. In D. Berrill (Ed.) Perspectives
on written argument, 17-33. Cambridge: Hampton Press.
Fulkerson, R. P. (1984). Kinneavy on referential and persuasive discourse: a critique. College
composition and communication, 35, 43-56.
Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Givon, T. (1984). Syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
128
Gragson, G. & Selzer, J. (1990). Fictionalizing the readers of scholarly articles in biology. Written
communication, 7, 25-58.
Greening of Vermont. (1993, June 29). Editorial. The Christian Science monitor, 18.
Hairston, M. (1986a). Using nonfiction literature in the composition classroom. IN B. T. Petersen (Ed.),
Convergences: Transactions in reading and writing. (179-89). Urbana, Il: National Council of
Teachers of English.
Hairston, M. (1986b). Contemporary composition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Hamlett, J.M. & Epp, D.J. (1994). Water quality impacts of conservation and nutrient management
practices in Pennsylvania. Journal of soil and water conservation, 49(1): 59-66.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1989). Spoken and written language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Halliday, M.A.K. & Hasan, R. (1989). Language, context, and text: Aspects of language in a social
semiotic perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harkin, J. (1993, April 22). Letter. USA Today.
Harned, J. (1985). The intellectual background of Alexander Bain’s “Modes of Discourse.” College
composition and communication, 36, 42-9.
Holman, C.H. & Harmon, W. (1986). A handbook to literature. New York: Macmillan Publishing
Company.
Jackobsen, R. (1960). Linguistics and poetics. In T. Sebeck (Ed.) Style in language. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Johns, A.M. (1993). Written argumentation for real audiences: suggestions for teacher research and
classroom practice. TESOL Quarterly, 27, 75-90.
Kaplan, R.B. (1966). Cultural thought patters in intercultural education. Language Learning, 16, 1-20.
Kaufer, D.S. & Geisler, C. (1991). A scheme for representing written argument. Journal of advanced
composition, 11, 107-22.
Khalil, Aziz (1989). A study of cohesion and coherence in Arab EFL college students’ writing. System,
17, No. 3.
Kinneavy, J.L. (1971). A theory of discourse. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Knickerbocker, B. (1993, January 12). Environmentalism extends its reach. The Christian Science
Monitor, 8-9.
129
Kruso, J. (194, February 27). Book review: Los Angeles times, B3.
Kynell, T. (1992). Imitation and the conceptualization of types: A look at sophistic specimens and
contemporary prose models. The writing instructor. Fall, 5-12.
Langan, J. (1993). College writing skills with readings. New York: McGraw Hill Inc.
Lanham, R.A. (1983). Analyzing prose. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Levinson, S.C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ling, J.T. (1993, June 2). Design for the environment: the challenge for year 2000 and beyond. Vital
speeches of the day, 629-632. Mount Pleasant: City News Publishing Co., (Inc. 1911).
Lopate, P. (1994). The art of the personal essay. New York: Anchor Books.
Lunsford, A.A. (1981). Essay writing and teachers’ responses in nineteenth-century Scottish
universities. College composition and communication, 32, 434-43.
McCrimmon, J. (1950). Writing with a purpose. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Miller, R.K. (1986). The informed argument. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Moffet, J. (1983). Teaching the universe of discourse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
O’Banion, J.D. (1982). A theory of discourse: a retrospective. College composition and
communication, 33, 196-201.
Olson, G.A. (1990). Jacques Derrida on rhetoric and composition: a conversation. The journal of
advanced composition, 10, 1-21.
Otte, G. (1992). Why read what? The politics of composition anthologies. Journal of advanced
composition, 12, 137-49.
Peck MacDonald, S. (1989). Data-driven and conceptually driven academic discourse. Written
communication, 6, 411-35.
Peters, P. (1986). Getting the theme across: a study of dominant function in the academic writing of
university students. In B. Couture (Ed.), Functional approaches to writing: Research
perspectives (169-84). London: Francis Pinter Ltd.
Piazza, C.L. (1987). Identifying context variables in research on writing: a review and suggested
directions. Written communication, 4, 107-137.
Piche, G.L. & Roen, D. (1987). Social cognition and writing: interpersonal cognitive complexity and
abstractness and the quality of students’ persuasive writing. Written communication, 4, 68-89.
130
Podis, J.M. & Podis, L.A. (1990). Identifying and teaching rhetorical plans for arrangement. College
composition and communication, 41, 430-42.
Porter, J.E. (1993, June 29). Earth summit goals essential. Editorial. The Christian Science monitor,
20.
Purves, A.C. & Purves, W.C. (1986). Viewpoints: cultures, text models and the activity of writing.
Research in the teaching of English Vol. 20, no. 2). 174-97.
Ramage, J.D. & Bean, J.C. (1992). Writing arguments. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company.
Reilly, W.K. (1992, August 15). Memo on Rio Summit focused on U.S. gains. Letter. The New York
times, 18.
Reither, J.A. (1993). Resituating discourse to motivate writing differently. Conference of college
composition and communication, notes.
Rose, M. (1979). When faculty talk about writing. College English, 41, 272-9.
Rose, M. (1983). Remedial writing course: A critique and a proposal. College English, 45, 109-128.
Rousculp, T. & Welsh, J. (1992). Balance in student-centered pedagogy. The writing instructor. (Fall),
3-4.
Rowan, K. E. (1988). A contemporary theory of explanatory writing. Written communication, 5, 23-56.
Searle, J.R. (1976). The classification of illocutionary acts. Language in society, 5, 1-24.
Schultz, L.M. (1994). Elaborating our history: a look at mid-19th century first books of composition.
College composition and communication, 45, 10-30.
Shumacher, G.M., Scott, B.T., Klare, G.R., Cronin, F.C. & Lambert, D.A. (1989). Cognitive processes
in journalistic genres: extending writing models. Written communication, 6, 390-407.
Shumaker, R., Dennis, L. and Green, L. (1990). Advanced exposition: a survey of patterns and
problems. Journal of advanced composition, 10, 136-49.
Smagorinsky, P. (1986). An apology for structured composition instruction. Written communication, 3,
105-21.
Spack, R. (1988). Initiating ESL students into the academic discourse community: How far should we
go? TESOL Quarterly, 22(1), 29-52.
131
Stotsky, S. (1987). Writing in a political context: the value of letters to legislators. Written
communication, 4, 394-410.
Swales, J.M. (1990). Genre analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Takala, S. Purves, A.C. & Buckmeister, A. (1982). On the interrelationships between language,
perception, thought and culture, and their relevance to the assessment of written composition.
Evaluation in education: An international review. Series 5, 327-42.
Taylor, G. and Tingguang, C. (1991). Linguistic, cultural, and subcultural issues in contrastive
discourse analysis: Anglo-American and Chinese scientific texts. Applied linguistics 12, 319-
36.
Toulmin, S.E. (1958). The uses of argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Varnum, R. (1992). The history of composition: reclaiming our lost generations. Journal of advanced
composition, 12, 39-55.
Vygotsky, L. (1994). Thought and language. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Walter, O.M. (1981). The value of the classics in rhetoric. College composition and communication,
32, 416-430.
Wilhoit, S. (1993). Critical thinking and the thematic writing course. The writing instructor, 12, 125-
33.
Wilkinson, A. (1996). Argument as a primary act of mind. In D. Berrill (Ed.). Perspectives in written
argument, 17-33. Cambridge: Hampton Press.
Winterowd, R. (1975). Contemporary rhetoric: A conceptual background with readings. New York:
Harcourt.
Woods, W.F. (1985). Nineteenth-century psychology and the teaching of writing. College composition
and communication, 36, 20-41.
Yarber, R.E. (1985). Writing for college. Glenview: Scott, Foresman and Company.