Corpus-based rhetorical analysis of the sub-genre of instruction manuals for household appliances

Abstract

My aim in this paper is to describe the rhetorical structure of the sub-genre of Instruction Manuals for household appliances in British English (BE) and Peninsular Spanish (PS). This study is based on the concept of genre, and it consists of a move analysis of an ad hoc specialised corpus. The analysis has two discrete parts: a qualitative analysis to establish the structure of this sub-genre; and a quantitative one, to identify the presence of each feature in order to determine the prototypical structure of this sub-genre. Finally, some possible implications of these findings are presented

Keywords

• rhetorical move analysis
• instruction manuals
• English for Science and Technology (EST)
• instructional genre.
• instructional genre