Argumentative Strategies of Newspaper Editorials in English across Cultures  

Oleh:

Masroor, Farzana

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: The Asian ESP Journal vol. 9 no. 3 (2013), page 35-72.
Topik: English Newspaper Editorials; Argumentative Strategies; Cross Cultural Persuasive Discourse; Genre Analysis.
Fulltext: 35-72.pdf (166.01KB)

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This paper investigates the structure of English editorials from two elite newspapers, Dawn of Pakistan and New Straits Times of Malaysia in an attempt to uncover the argumentative techniques of editorial persuasion employed across cultures. The data comprises 20 editorials systematically chosen within a duration of two month period from each newspaper to make up a corpus of 40 editorials. The paper employs Swales’s (1990, 2004) move analysis to determine the global structure of editorial genre. Even though the results show similarities at the macro level, the two newspapers reveal striking differences in the preferred argumentative strategies adopted when taking a stance which is the definitive move of an editorial. In arguing for its position, Dawn appeared to be more authoritative, judgmental and critical in nature while New Straits Times used less authoritative but more convincing strategy. The differences gave different ‘texture’ to written persuasive argumentation commonly reported in editorials. This study attributes the findings to situated, contextual factors, such as the time of genre production, the presumed role of the newspaper in its society as well as its relations with the target audience. Implications are drawn from the analysis for the teaching of students’ critical reading skills and skills of writing argumentative essays, besides teaching grammar and vocabulary in context.

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