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Rhetorical Information as Predication
Author(s) -
Jacobs Suzanne E.
Publication year - 1981
Publication title -
tesol quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.737
H-Index - 91
eISSN - 1545-7249
pISSN - 0039-8322
DOI - 10.2307/3586750
Subject(s) - rhetorical question , linguistics , philosophy , sociology , psychology , epistemology
A significant problem for research in composition teaching has been objective evaluation of student prose. Measures such as T‐units provide information about surface or grammatical features, but there has been no satisfactory way to measure objectively the property of rhetorical connectedness. This is an important property to measure since it is directly related to teacher intuitions concerning the quality of expository writing. Holistic procedures, carried out by trained readers, can be used to show which passages have this characteristic and which do not, but show little about what rhetorical connectedness really is or where in the prose the quality resides. An analysis of writing samples produced for a pre‐med biology class by ESL and native‐speaking students suggests that when the writing assignment is a set, lead‐in sentence there is considerable demand placed on the writers to interrelate their biology information by means of rhetorical connections. It is argued here that a text grammar should show such connections not just as conjunctions but as predications of a special type. The skilled writer, in meeting the demands of the assignment, integrates these rhetorical predications with predications of other semantic types. Such integration constitutes complexity of a kind that is characteristic of academic reading and writing.