The rhetorical organization of the genre science news article

Genres have been under scrutiny in several studies which have provided important discussions for current teaching approaches and new studies from different theoretical perspectives. Among them the Swalesian sociorhetorical perspective provides an effective theoretical and methodological framework for the understanding of the underlying rationale that establishes the rhetorical organization of a genre. This paper aims to identify the rhetorical organization of the genre science news article. We use Swales (1990)’s CARS (Create a Research Space) model to analyze twenty science news articles from two Brazilian science news magazines, Superinteressante (ten articles) and Galileu (ten articles). Provided that the science news article is a journalistic genre, in our analysis we also use the studies carried out by Barros and Maia (2017), Rojo (2008) and Bonini (2011). The results reveal a rhetorical organization with four rhetorical functions (persuading the reader into reading the article, contextualizing the topic, problematizing the topic, and concluding the article), subdivided into subfunctions, which constitutes useful input for language teaching/learning and genre studies.

Keywords:
science news article; rhetorical organization; genre; sociorhetoric