The rhetorical density of authorial emotiveness and voice passiveness in abstract compositions

Abstract

The study sought to examine authorial emotiveness and passive tone of academic writing in academic research abstracts (RAs) to appeal to the Aristotelian pathos. Based on the integrated framework of Contrastive Rhetoric and Domain of Emotional Tone, this study investigated the overall demonstration of emotional appeal through quantitative content analysis of two rhetorical items - emotive phrases and passive voice in subtly ‘colouring’ the academic tone of research abstracts. Four hundred eighty (480) research abstracts (RAs) of the international non-native English writers (INE) and Malaysian non-native English writers (MNNE) were sampled from 88 national and international indexed journals. Two quantitative analysis tools were used to auto-generate the frequency percentages, which were then analysed with SPSS. It was found that MNNE RAs showed a significantly denser level of overall emotional appeal than INE RAs. The authorial tones of emotiveness and passiveness were also distinctly heavier in academic MNNE RAs than INE RAs. These were concluded as the marked rhetorical features of non-native English writers, deflecting them from the ones used by native English writers. In terms of research implication, the common trend of these features was not to be misconstrued by MNNE writers as the main rhetorical appeal of research composition.

Emotive Discursivity of Move Structures in the Organisational Rhetoric of Composing Academic Research Abstracts (ARAs)

“…Non-native English writers were identified by Kaplan (1966) in their study of academic style of writing development for their circumlocutory discursivity compared to the Anglo-European narrative style of writing which was substantiated by Williamson (2021) to be well known for its linear and straightforward discursivity. This culturally mediated pattern in terms of the emotive characteristic of discursivity is distinctively shown by non-native English writers in their composition of academic research abstracts through their use of strongly evocative adjectives and expressive nouns (Mohamad et al, 2023). Lack of directness in putting forth their main message through the rhetorical employment of passive sentences is another circumlocutory form of writing discursivity in trying to evoke the emotions of the audience emanated from their cultural way of message implicitness.…”

“…In addition, the act of recall would be much easier if the text was constructed with a logically and emotionally appealing choice of words as the rhetorical strategies of compositions due to the impact that it can leave on the readers' logical and emotional minds. This is substantiated by Mohamad et al (2023) who recommended the use of rhetorical choices related to logical, ethical, and emotional appeals in persuasively presenting academic or non-academic research texts. This persuasiveness could be attained by applying the universally accepted order of structure in composing any types of academic texts such as academic essays, research reviews or summaries, research proposals, research theses, research articles, research application letters, and research abstracts.…”

“…Then, the identified occurrences of codified constituents were converted into frequencies or percentages (Franzosi et al, 2010). This quantification of qualitative data was adopted by previous researchers in their studies of content analysis to explore the frequencies of specific linguistic elements in a specific type of discourse (Berhan & Hamid, 2012;Mohamad, 2022;Mohamad et al, 2022;Zolkalpi et al, 2022;Mohamad, et al, 2023). Next, the nativenes types of ARAs, either native English or Malaysian non-native English, were determined as the independent variable whereas the frequencies in the use of Territory-Problem-Solution (TPS) move structures were the independent variables.…”