The rhetorical organization of the set of executive summaries of the thematic documents of the United Nations in Brazil to implement the 2030 Agenda

Abstract

The contributions of sociorhetoric to the study of discursive genres (oral and written) have been very significant, especially with regard to mapping and understanding the rhetorical organization of the various texts with which we have contact in our personal and professional lives. The English socio-rhetorical line conceives the textual genre as a social action moved by a communicative purpose that presents recurrence of discursive properties legitimized and agreed upon by a discursive community, serving as a framework for the production of individual texts. The communicative purpose is understood, then, as the purpose that motivates a writer/speaker to produce texts, being it an element considered key to the classification of a genre. Added to the concept of communicative purpose, the CARS (Create A Research Space) model, proposed by Swales (1990), supports the study of the rhetorical organization of a text, enabling the analyst to map the rhetorical movements (moves) and the sub movements (steps) that are used by the authors in the progression of the content when producing a discursive genre. The analysis of the rhetorical organization of the executive summaries of the thematic documents of the United Nations in Brazil revealed that, although the summaries share the same communicative purpose, the texts do not maintain a rigid standard with regard to the rhetorical structure, with some variation of the structural organization in the texts, which is in line with the socio-rhetorical theory of genres.

Keywords: Discursive genres; CARS model; Sociorhetoric.