Genre, Text Type and Rhetorical Strategy

Abstract

Although most of this book is concerned with quite detailed analysis of localized stretches of language in texts, it turned out at an early stage of the project that it was going to be important to think a little about global questions of what kinds of text I was dealing with, and also what kinds of strategy were being used to present information, or sometimes simply opinion, to the readers. The result of these more general investigations is reported in this chapter, and I have, for convenience sake, divided these observations under the headings of ‘Genre and text types’ and ‘Rhetorical strategies’ respectively.