Persuasiveness is an important component of much academic writing (Hyland, 1998; Parkison, 2011). Authors need to project a tone of confidence in their argument and promote the relevance of their contribution to the evolving field. However, the manner in which writers convey persuasiveness has been relatively understudied.
This paper examines linguistic devices in L1 and L2 students’ argumentative texts which convey persuasiveness. The analysis employs texts from the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCLE) and the British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE). Using the semantic tagging tool, Wmatrix, formulations with persuasive functions were identified, and these were classified as forms of appeal to either ethos, pathos or logos.
Statistically significant differences were found in the frequency of use of these strategies. The Chinese learner corpus displayed greater usage of the pathos strategy (i.e., appeals to emotion), while greater use of the logos strategy occurred in the BAWE corpus. Differences in academic writing cultural conventions in the two educational contexts may partially contribute to explaining these findings; however, the Chinese students’ insufficient genre awareness, and their lack of exposure to alternative persuasive linguistic resources in English are also likely to be contributing factors.
Previous investigations of western and Asian approaches to the construction of an argument and the inclusion of self-promotional discourse in academic writing have often been from a descriptive perspective (e.g, Mu et al., 2015). The findings presented here possess particular pedagogical value due to their very specific nature; additionally, the approach taken to identify elements of persuasion could usefully be replicated in subsequent explorations into argument construction.
Hyland, K. (1998). Persuasion and context: The pragmatics of academic metadiscourse. Journal of pragmatics, 30(4), 437-455.
Mu, C., Zhang, L. J., Ehrich, J., & Hong, H. (2015). The use of metadiscourse for knowledge construction in Chinese and English research articles. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 20, 135–148.
Parkinson, J. (2011). The Discussion section as argument: The language used to prove knowledge claims. English for Specific Purposes, 30(3), 164-175.
