Types of knowledge - Ways of knowing - Types of rhetorical research - Knowledge society - Rhetoric of science - Evolution of scientific discourse - Genres of academic discourse - Argumentation - Science and ethics - Sociology of academic excellence - (C)overt knowledge

Educational policy is often dismissed as simply rhetoric and a collection of half truths. However, this is to underestimate the power of rhetoric and the ways in which rhetorical strategies are integral to persuasive acts. Through a series of illustrative chapters, this book argues that rather than something to be dismissed, rhetorical analysis offers a rich and deep arena in which to explore and examine educational issues and practices. It adopts an original stance in relation to contemporary debates and will make a significant contribution to educational debates in elucidating and illustrating the pervasiveness of persuasive strategies in educational practices. Rhetoric and Educational Discourse is a useful resource for postgraduate and research students in education and applied linguistics. The book will also be of interest to academics and researchers in these fields of study and those interested in discursive approaches to research and scholarship.

Although genre studies abound in literary criticism, researchers and scholars interested in the social contexts of literacy have recently become interested in the dynamic, rhetorical dimensions of speech genres. Within this burgeoning scholarly community, the authors are among the first researchers working within social science traditions to study genre from the perspective of the implicit knowledge of language users. Thus, this is the first sociocognitive study of genre using case-study, naturalistic research methods combined with the techniques of rhetorical and discourse analysis. The term "genre knowledge" refers to an individual's repertoire of situationally appropriate responses to recurrent situations -- from immediate encounters to distanced communication through the medium of print, and more recently, the electronic media. One way to study the textual character of disciplinary knowledge is to examine both the situated actions of writers, and the communicative systems in which disciplinary actors participate. These two perspectives are presented in this book. The authors' studies of disciplinary communication examine operations of systems as diverse as peer review in scientific publications and language in a first grade science classroom. The methods used include case study and ethnographic techniques, rhetorical and discourse analysis of changing features within large corpora and in the texts of individual writers. Through the use of these techniques, the authors engaged in both micro-level and macro-level analyses and developed a perspective which reflects both foci. From this perspective they propose that what micro-level studies of actors' situated actions frequently depict as individual processes, can also be interpreted -- from the macro-level -- as communicative acts within a discursive network or system. The research methods and the theoretical framework presented are designed to raise provocative questions for scholars, researchers, and teachers in a number of fields: linguists who teach and conduct research in ESP and LSP and are interested in methods for studying professional communication; scholars in the fields of communication, rhetoric, and sociology of science with an interest in the textual dynamics of scientific and scholarly communities; educational researchers interested in cognition in context; and composition scholars interested in writing in the disciplines.

Since antiquity, the notion of rhetoric has been associated with Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian. Their theories are central to the understanding that, on the one hand, rhetoric can be used for persuading and convincing an audience, and on the other, for becoming an eloquent speaker. Based on this understanding, the study of rhetoric was for many years regarded by scholars as a meaningless enterprise as it was perceived as a study of linguistic ornamentation. However, in the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars regained an interest in the study of rhetoric in recognition of rhetorical skills being important for communication in modern society. Like speakers in public life, e.g. politicians, who had always acknowledged the role of rhetoric, all sorts of communicators, mediators and scholars became interested in rhetoric as a practical tool for building up texts meant for the public sphere as well as an analytical tool for the critique of public argumentation. This led to the development of new theories from New Rhetoric over Rhetorical Criticism to theories of genre and discourse, reflecting the view that rhetoric must be understood and used against the social and cultural framework in which it is embedded. The contributions of this book reflect this multi-faceted approach to rhetoric, discourse and genre through their focus upon and analysis of different institutionalised discourses. Thus, within the three sections of political, journalistic and organisational discourse, the articles discuss various discourse types and their rhetorical features, contributing to the understanding of rhetoric and discourse having significant influence on human action and interaction in society.

Recontextualized Knowledge aims to analyze the communicative situations involved in the popularization of scientific knowledge: their settings, audiences, and the adaptive process of recontextualization in science communication. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this publication brings together essays from rhetoric, linguistics, and psychology as well as political and education sciences to serve as an in-depth exploration of today's communicative situations in science communication.