OBJETIVOS DE REFERENCIA

The idea of rhetoric as applied to contemporary studies of academic discourse, and in particular to writing as communication, relates principally to ways persuasion is affected by audience through the two principal modes of speaking and writing. In the present study the term ‘rhetoric’ is crucial and already in previous sections of this thesis, its several occurrences (especially in its adjective form: ‘rhetorical’) suggest that I am using it in the context of how language is used by authors of scientific academic writing for persuasive and successful communication. This understanding of rhetoric is more broadly acknowledged by Bazerman (1988: 6), where he theorises about the role of rhetoric in the construction of knowledge and defines rhetoric within that context as “the study of how people use language and other symbols to realize human goals and carry out human activities”. But this notion of rhetoric has quite a long history, and at this point I intend to provide a brief historical account of the concept of rhetoric in

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discourse to properly contextualise its current place in scientific academic writing, the focus of this study.

2.3.1 A brief background to rhetoric

Modern studies of rhetoric, manifested in several treatises and handbooks (e.g., Corbett, 1965; Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969; Nash, 1989; Roberts and Good, 1993, Richards, 2008), show the most profound of rhetorical traditions to be the one situated in the West and whose beginnings can be traced back to ancient Greece in the fifth century BC. It is important to note that rhetoric had started off not as a discipline in its own right but as part of the discussions of the crucial issues of life that attracted the attention of Greek philosophers, a situation which eventually established rhetoric as an art, to be later further extended and formalized by Roman rhetoricians (Nash, 1989). Thus it is the Greek and Roman practices of the art in this early period that represent what has become known in modern studies of rhetoric as ‘classical rhetoric’. The notable figures who made substantial contributions to the development of classical rhetoric were the Greek philosophers the Sophists, Plato, Isocrates, and the Roman rhetoricians Cicero and Quintilian. But the one man whose influence on rhetoric has transcended generations even to modern times is Aristotle. In the words of Richards (2008: 41) “Aristotle is by far the most important theoretician of rhetoric to many historians”.

In large part classical rhetoric centred on public political speech and how well one’s ideas were organised into words and delivered to an audience with the aim of achieving a desired persuasive effect, although the art was later to find expression in other kinds of speeches, prefaces, prologues and openings of narratives (Perelman and

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Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969; Perelman, 1982; Nash, 1989). As Perelman and Olbrechts- Tyteca (1969: 6) observe, in classical antiquity rhetoric had as its primary object “the art of public speaking in a persuasive way: it was therefore concerned with the use of the spoken word, with discourse to a crowd gathered in a public square, with a view to securing its adherence to the thesis presented”. Persuasion was thus inseparably linked to the idea of rhetoric. The underlying assumption then, as is clearly the case in many domains of speaking and writing today, was that some people spoke better than others and therefore the “discipline was intended to prepare the novice for tasks that involved speaking in public…” with the ultimate goal of being effective in establishing proof or arguing persuasively (Nash, 1989: 6).

Central to classical theories of rhetoric were the ideas of ‘ethos’, ‘logos’ and ‘pathos’ introduced by Aristotle. Ethos relates to the qualities of character in the speaker’s act of communication, logos refers to the proofs given to support an argument, and pathos is the speaker’s ability to successfully arouse the feelings of the audience. Aristotle’s argument in respect of persuasive rhetoric was that these three ideas complemented each other and became the guiding principles used for evoking and directing the emotions of one’s audience.

As most modern discussions and exegeses of classical rhetoric show (e.g., Corbett, 1965; Dixon, 1985; Plett, 1985; Nash, 1989; Richards, 2008), classical rhetoric was divided into five parts which represented the sequential stages in the production of a text. These were inventio (the capacity to find argumentative matter), dispositio (the structural arrangement of arguments), elocutio, (verbal adornment of the matter/topic being argued), actio (the use of gesture, facial expression and other visual

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elements) and pronuntiatio (auditory realisation). It should be mentioned that each of these stages was accompanied by a set of rules even though the five stages together constituted the rhetorical competence of the orator/speaker.

As Nash (1989: 15) observes, the Greek and Roman theories of discourse structure even today “guide the presentation of arguments at law, the writing of scholarly papers and theses, [and] the construction of newspaper editorials”. We see, then, that the theories of classical rhetoric, and perhaps those after them, have greatly influenced modern and contemporary thinking of rhetorical studies. Gradually, through the contributions of the Classical, Medieval, Renaissance and Enlightenment periods (Conley, 1990), contemporary rhetoric has expanded in shape and has come to be considered as a powerful tool for the analysis of discourse in general, embracing nearly every facet of human communication.

2.3.2 Modern approaches to rhetoric

Particularly in the 20th _{century, new theories of rhetoric were developed and these} strongly revived the study of rhetoric in the modern world. These theories have often been collectively referred to as the ‘new’ rhetorics, following what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca designated as the ‘New Rhetoric’ (Roberts and Good, 1993). While several rhetoricians have made contributions to the new rhetorics, the works of Chaim Perelman and Stephen Toulmin seem to have been most profound in shaping modern thinking of rhetoric. Drawing on classical rhetorical theory, these authors have especially stressed the structure of argumentation in discourse.

Stephen Toulmin’s model emphasises the sequential development of arguments for different purposes at different levels of writing, which is especially useful

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for L2 writers in learning the structure and sequence of argument development (Toulmin, 1958; Toulmin, Rieke and Janik, 1979). On the other hand, Perelman’s greatest contribution has been on the effect a well-constructed argument has on the audience, distinguishing three audiences: those the speaker directly addresses, the speaker herself, “reflecting privately about how to respond to delicate situation”, and the “universal audience”, which refers to “at least all those who are competent and reasonable (Perelman, 1982: 14).

2.3.3 Rhetoric is now everywhere

Quite clearly, rhetoric is no longer merely an art of persuasion mainly confined to the public domains, as was the case with classical rhetoric. While the persuasive element remains central to contemporary rhetoric, the subject has become more of a theory of language which, apart from the tools it offers for the analysis of discourse, also addresses all contexts involving the use of language and symbols (Cahn, 1993; Foss, 2009). As Foss notes, these contexts include

… everything from intrapersonal to interpersonal to public discourse to social movements and mediated discourse. Rhetorical theories address what makes a public, personal diaries as rhetoric, and television, the Internet, and the Web sites as rhetorical artifacts. This means that rhetorical theory also includes the study of visual and nonverbal elements, such as the study of art and architecture, buildings and all design elements of cities, and dress and appearance, to sports, to mention a few. There is virtually nothing that is part of the human experience that cannot be looked at from a rhetorical perspective.

(Foss, 2009: 855)

Quite clearly, rhetoric is now virtually everywhere, and in the field of academic discourse its role started becoming manifest in the 1930s and 40s in the USA through studies of university students’ composition by applied linguists and other scholars in

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various English departments (Moberg, 1990; Connor, 1996). A crucial motivation for the interest in composition studies lied in the notion of ‘epistemic rhetoric’. This notion, as James Berlin posits, “holds that language is the key to understanding the dialectal process involved in the rhetorical act. Knowledge does not exist apart from language” (cited in Moberg, 1990: 67).

As I have noted in chapter 1, as EAP developed in the 1960s, the study of the language of academic communicative practices extended to include other domains of speaking and writing in academic contexts. Notable among these are scholarly research genres such as research articles, research books, conference papers and grant proposals, among others (Hyland, 2006). The present study is situated within the context of the rhetoric of scholarly writing, focusing on the RA genre. In the next section, I provide a brief overview of the historical development of the scientific RA, and then move on to consider the role of rhetoric in scholarly professional writing, mainly situating the discussion around the RA genre and its operation in academic discourse communities.