Rhetorical Appeals Of English Scientific Writing

As one of the most important bridges to international communication, the English scientific paper has been paid great attention since reform and opening up.According to the different levels of formality and difficulty, English for science and technology can be classified into two categories:popular scientific articles and English for specialized science. The popular scientific article is frequently composed of common words, simple sentences and fewer complicated expressions. Examples are popular articles, scientific newspapers, product introduction and memos. English for specialized science is relatively more difficult to understand, aimed at professionals, and its audience is smaller. Examples are scientific papers, technology contracts, and patent instructions.According to Perelman’s Audience theory, audience can be divided into two categories: universal audience and particular audience. This thesis takes scientific paper as a research object, thus the audiences are the readers of scientific writing who are mostly technical professionals who study in a certain field. These readers belong to the particular audience. Under the guidance of rhetorical audience, writers need to attempt to reach the standard of audiences when they write academic papers.Based on rhetoric, appeals contain logos, ethos and pathos. Ethos and pathos fit to analyze public speeches, while logos is suitable for the analysis of scientific paper, because scientific research paper is always logical, accurate, serious and persuasive. Great efforts will be made to probe into the rhetorical appeals of scientific writing:logic and reasoning appeal, expressive appeal and stylistic appeal. Logic in rhetoric needs to satisfy the enthymeme of audience and differs from traditional logic. The suggested approaches to achieve logic and reasoning appeal are using transitional words, topic sentences and proper arrangement of each section and the whole paper. To achieve expressive appeal, writers can use active voice, nonsexist language and objective data. Stylistic appeal covers accuracy and conciseness. Using abbreviations and omitting wordy phrases and extra words can make scientific paper concise. The author of the thesis analyzes scientific writing from a rhetoric perspective and provides some approaches, hoping beneficial to enhance the understanding of scientific writing and useful in theory and practice.