Persuasion and Politeness in Academic Texts. An Introduction

This volume is an introduction to the study of academic discourse and the rhetorical strategies used by scholars to make this type of communication apporpriate and persuasive. The text is divided into three parts. Part One provides general criteria for the classification of scholarly communciation as an expression of specialized discourse in terms of targeted audience, context, language, genres and goals. Part Two discusses the ways scholars mitigate the threatening potential of academic writing through text-external and text-internal resources, with a specific focus on the use of reader-oriented strategies such as personalization and modalization, and writer-oriented evaluative resources. Part Three closes the volume with the analysis of a sample of academic texts.