Evaluative patterns in the concluding components of expounding essays

Abstract

Essays that have an expounding or explaining nature are a common type of text in many academic disciplines such as business. While their primary function is to explain the causes or consequences of a phenomenon, they also serve to illustrate the writer’s perspective. In other words, these essays persuade readers to recognise the writer’s arguments, often when they are summarised in the concluding sentence of a paragraph with a final commentary. To illustrate how reasoning and persuasion are undertaken in the concluding components of a paragraph, this paper investigates the expounding essays written by English-as-a-Second-Language associate degree business students in a Hong Kong self-financed tertiary institution. To understand how logical coherence facilitates the writer’s evaluative stance, the present study examines the text structure and its influence on evaluative language choice by combining two analytical frameworks, Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and APPRAISAL. The textual focus is the body paragraphs announcing and explaining the factors or effects of a business topic to reveal how a conclusion is reached with an evaluative insight. The findings will demonstrate the common rhetorical relations for reasoning, elaborating and conjoining arguments. The findings will also illustrate the two key RST relations, Evaluation and Interpretation, located at the end of the paragraph. These two relations exhibit differences in the choice of explicit and implicit ATTITUDE resources. This paper concludes with a brief discussion on the pedagogical implications for instructing student writers in the rhetorical strategies for writing concluding components of a paragraph with an evaluative punch, based on the writer’s intention to resonate with his or her assessment throughout the paragraph or to make an alternative personal judgement over the subject matter.