Rhetoric's Outliers in Second Language Writing | Jay Jordan

Rhetorical Principle(s)

"Technical Rhetorical Principles and Grammatical Choice" by John Lackstrom, Larry Selinker, & Louis Trimble (1973)

10 of 14 occurrences in corpus

Adding to a series of articles on what they describe as an "English of Science and Technology" (EST), John Lackstrom and co-authors (1973) here explicitly responded to criticisms that they had paid too much attention in the technical writing examples they had previously analyzed to the relationships between writer–reader shared knowledge and a given writer's grammatical choices. In this article, then, the authors refocused on the "rhetorical or organizational choices which appear to have important syntactic consequences" (p. 128). For them, the paragraph was straightforwardly defined as the "basic rhetorical unit . . . which presents a selected amount of information on a given subject for a given purpose" (p. 128). At the conceptual center of the paragraph is a "core generalization" (p. 129), which is supported by further, more specific, statements. The paragraph's rhetorical purpose unfolds in a hierarchical arrangement that ideally signals such dependent conceptual relationships to readers, whether such relationships are represented in one or several physical paragraphs. Specifically, Lackstrom et al. defined two major methods by which authors develop paragraph-level arrangement. "Natural" principles, such as time order, spatial order, and causality, are those an author may be forced to use as a result of her whole-discourse level choice of topic or focus: for instance, a description of a technical process would likely require a chronological arrangement. "Logical" principles, such as comparison, analogy, and exemplification, reflect an author's more active interpretation: for example, the same technical process that called for attention to time order could be compared analogically to a process more familiar to the presumed readers.

While Lackstrom et al. provided this paragraph-level rhetorical analysis as a response to readers' concern about their previously sharp focus on grammar, they did revisit EST grammatical characteristics. However, where before they isolated articles and verb tense, owing to second-language EST learners' challenges with those elements, they contextualized both elements here as part of an extensive network of discursive connections largely predetermined by the hierarchical arrangement of

• rhetorical purpose (roughly equivalent to genre, such as experimental description, proposal, process analysis);
• rhetorical function (roughly equivalent to the roles of sections [introduction, methods, etc.] in IMRAD–based research articles);
• "rhetorical device" (roughly equivalent to modes, such as definition and argument); and
• rhetorical principles.

At each level, grammatical choices reinforce the writer's perspective: for instance, reporting the findings of past research in the simple past tense suggests that the research is no longer relevant, where reporting in present perfect tense suggests ongoing relevance. Thus "grammar" and "rhetoric" are inseparable to the extent that grammatical choices reflect and reinforce prior, hierarchically arranged rhetorical choices, including genre. Further, the EST paragraph's precisely describable organizational principles make it the fulcrum for EST rhetorical work (and for analysis of EST) because it ideally presents concepts for readers' sake in ways that are visualizable.