Evaluative Language in Engineering Writing: The Grammar of Persuasion

This book examines strategic language use in professional engineering written reports, illustrating how writers create a persuasive stance within an objective style. It describes engineering writing through a close analysis of interpersonal language, using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), complemented with quantitative corpus linguistics methods and interpreted through concepts drawn from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). This description demonstrates how engineering writers have a strong preference for a certain type of evaluative language, with a dominant stance focused on the worthiness of things and processes. It is also demonstrates that engineering writers make strategic choices in their use of interpersonal language towards a certain aim, particularly in documents written to gain approval of a project by a regulatory body.
This research is focused on engineering writing in the Australian context, but given the globalised nature of the engineering profession, also has relevance internationally. The creation of an objective stance in writing is also relevant to other disciplines.

J. R. Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia. The Martin Centre for Appliable Linguistics was opened by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2014.