A organização retórica de ensaios na esfera acadêmica

Abstract

This thesis is motivated by the difficulties encountered by the author of this research during the production of academic essays in graduate classes. From these difficulties arose questions about how the rhetorical organization of this textual genre, which is rarely explored within academia but prevalent in academic journals, is structured. Thus, our general objective is to investigate the rhetorical organization of essays produced by specialists in the major fields of Health Sciences, Humanities, Applied Social Sciences, and Linguistics, Letters, and Arts, corresponding to the following disciplinary cultures: Occupational Therapy, Sociology, Information Science, and Linguistics. We have defined three specific objectives: to describe the rhetorical organization of the sections, to investigate the grammatical person used, and to outline the rhetorical organization of essays in each disciplinary culture. The theoretical framework used includes Swales (1990, 1992, 2004, 2016), regarding the categories of discourse community, communicative purpose, and genre. We also employed Hyland (2000) concerning the concept of disciplinary culture. The methodology was qualitative and quantitative, analyzing 103 essays based on a bibliographic survey conducted in the Scielo Br Online Virtual Library. Based on the analyses, we highlight that disciplinary cultures show similar configurations in section organization, with a greater prevalence of Introduction and Conclusion sections; the number of pages in the essays is an important characteristic for some areas, as we identified that essays in Linguistics and Sociology have a higher number of pages, while Occupational Therapy has fewer pages; regarding the grammatical person, we found that although the essay is characterized by a more personal writing style, typically in the first person singular, most essays were written by multiple authors, with the third person singular being predominant; concerning the rhetorical organization of the essays, we found that, in general, the reflection of the text was found in the conclusion, with no moments where the reader is in dialogue with the author. The analyzed essays exhibited objectivity and organization, contrary to the characteristics of subjectivity and fragmentation that we identified as analysis categories.