Rhetoric's Outliers in Second Language Writing | Jay Jordan

Rhetorical Information and Predication

"Rhetorical Information as Predication" by Suzanne E. Jacobs (1981)

Information: 26 of 28 occurrences in corpus

Predicate(s)/Predication: all 24 occurrences in corpus

Starting with the claim that "[a] significant problem for research in composition teaching has been objective evaluation of student prose," Suzanne Jacobs (1981) argued for the specific need for and utility of measuring "rhetorical connectedness" or "density" (p. 237). She defined "rhetorical" explicitly in terms of "general-to-specific, comparison/contrast, cause/effect, purpose, condition" and other conceptual relationships that also promote cohesion and coherence, and she described "density" in terms of the number of such relationships present in prose (p. 237). As Jacobs related, while the field had developed specific, credible, quantifiable approaches to studying and teaching textual cohesion (in, for instance, Halliday & Hasan, 1976), coherence remained elusive. Jacobs' goal, then, was to extend the "precision" of cohesion analysis into the "fuzzy" domain of rhetoric (p. 238), where reader and writer relate not only within but beyond the text.

Citing cognitive psychologists and reading comprehension specialists, Jacobs focused specifically on such scholars' definition of "predicates"—sub-syntactic units (such as verbs or coordinating/subordinating conjunctions) that describe relationships that in turn create meaning. Rhetorical predicates in particular are critical to encouraging shared writer–reader understanding because they connect information across sentences and—crucially—they represent assertions about relationships. In the sentence, "When the money supply dries up, the demand for goods falls," the subordinating conjunction "when" connects the sentence's two clauses, and it also represents a causal/chronological relationship (p. 240). But such predicates may be particularly difficult to identify, analyze, and teach because, while essential to meaning making, they may not appear explicitly at all. For instance, "The supply of money dried up. The demand for goods fell off sharply" illustrates the writer's option to express the causal relationship implicitly (p. 240).

Jacobs applied the concept of rhetorical predication as well as quantitative descriptions of the density of predicates to essays written by native and nonnative English-speaking students in a pre-med program in Hawai'i. On a first/intuitive reading of essays about the human digestive system's immunological components, Jacobs roughly classified the student writing samples into "better" and "incoherent/irrelevant" stacks (p. 241) and then identified and counted rhetorical predications for each sample. Focusing on three essays—two by nonnative speakers and one by a native English speaker—Jacobs asserted that "[t]here may be a cultural explanation" for the relative incoherence of the NNS samples, which resulted from the writers' basic description of digestive system elements but their failure to generalize, attribute causation, or connect information across sentence boundaries. "As an academic person," Jacobs wrote, "I am accustomed to a certain flow of information, a certain ordering" (p. 245). In other words, where the second-language writers may have been able to provide content, "content information is only part of what the reader wants to hear" (p. 245): more than "packages of information," Jacobs argued, readers need writers to "[break] down and [recombine]" it to "fit the task at hand" (p. 246). Rhetorical predication and enough rhetorical density to carry readers from seeing lists to understanding a passage seemed for Jacobs to be a function of shifting from informational prose to connecting prose as fluidly and subtly as possible.