Investigating English Academic Book Blurbs:A Rhetorical Perspective

Nowadays, with the speeding up of information transfer and knowledge update,the publishing companies have been confronted with increasingly fierce competition,thus more and more publishers started to pay attention to how to promote their books.As the most direct and conspicuous reflection of the book, the book blurb plays a vital role in promoting books. The blurb primarily appears on the back cover of books. With the prevalence of internet and e-commerce, it is also put on the publisher's website and other online shopping platforms. Through the blurb, the customers will decide whether the book is worth buying. Therefore, the book blurb is hoped to attract customers and fulfill its persuasive function within the limited length and shortest time. In spite of the highly promotional function of the blurb, its research is very limited, especially in China. Taking the persuasive function of the blurb into account, this thesis investigates academic book blurbs from a rhetorical perspective. The corpus in this research is collected from four great publishing companies: Wiley, Springer, Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge, and covers six disciplines in both hard science and soft science.As Aristotle stated, rhetoric is “an art of persuasion”. And the persuasion is achieved through three appeals: logos, pathos and ethos. In addition, the rhetorical process can be divided into invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery,which are also called canons of rhetoric. On the basis of rhetoric theories, this thesis delves into academic book blurbs from both macro and micro perspectives. The macro rhetorical analysis is conducted at the textual level, which includes the organization of the text and the presentation of the whole text. Whereas, the micro rhetorical analysis investigates rhetoric in blurbs at the intra-textual level, including the word choice and sentence types.From the perspective of the macro rhetorical analysis, this thesis mainly investigates the rhetorical move and visual rhetoric, and the findings demonstrate:(1) Before composing the blurb, the writer will establish the preliminaryconception of blurb, and this is the first step of rhetoric: invention. To better fulfill the persuasive function of book blurbs, according to the persuasion knowledge model, the agent and target knowledge, the topic knowledge and the persuasion knowledge all can be employed to take function. Following the selection of materials,the materials should be arranged in an appropriate and logic order, and that process is arrangement. With a thorough and deep analysis of the corpus, the findings suggest that the corpus presents six moves: move 1 catchphrase, move 2 background information, move 3 description of the book, move 4 evaluation of the book, move 5readership and move 6 authorship. Among these moves, move 3 and move 4 are obligatory moves and move 1 is least frequently used. The move order basically follows the sequential move 1 to move 6, but is not always fixed. Apart from move 1and move 6, which individually occupy the top and bottom positions, the other moves and steps may be mixed.(2) Visual rhetoric mainly concerns the presentation of the text, which is about how to make it visually clear and understandable. That is also the connotation of delivery, which refers to the process of enhancing visual effect by adopting layout,font size, color and other designs in the written text. Through the investigation of the corpus, the findings suggest that paragraph layout, paragraph spacing and bold fonts all contribute to the presentation of the book as well as the attraction of customers. In this way, the key points will be highlighted and the writing logic is clearer to the readers. Readers will catch the most important information at the first sight.From the perspective of micro rhetorical analysis, this thesis mainly investigates the persuasion in academic book blurbs from two aspects: word choice and sentence type. As one of the rhetoric canons, style means that the choices at the level of words,phrases and sentences should reflect the feature of the text. As a promotional genre,academic book blurbs mainly cover two stylistic features: on the one hand, it should be consistent with the professional, formal and authoritative features of the academic books, on the other hand, it should reflect the persuasive function of book blurb,including the persuasive words, tone intensifier and objective expression. The findings indicate:(1) At the level of word choice, the persuasive keyword use is a very prominentphenomenon in the corpus. These persuasive keywords, including nouns(innovation,discovery, specialist), verbs(help, enable, improve), adjectives(essential, useful,pioneering) and adverbs(successfully, effectively, significantly), are employed to provide abundant reasons and adequate evidence and thus very important to achieve the persuasive function of the blurb. Among these words, words like expert, leader,professionals demonstrate the authoritative, professional and superior research status of the author, thus can be regarded as logos, which refers to the appeal the character of the author. To intensify the affirmative tone and increase persuasion, on the basis of Hyland's listing of boosters, this thesis presents the boosters in the corpus, such as modal auxiliaries(will, must), epistemic verbs(demonstrate, show) and epistemic adjectives and adverbs(clearly, definite). To make objective evaluation and increase its credibility, impersonality is used in the corpus. It is achieved by writer's invisibility in the blurb writing. It is the fact that the expressions like “i think” “i recommend” “i believe” etc., carry strong subjectivity, thus will leave a biased impression to others. In this circumstance, impersonality contributes to shaping the objectivity of the academic book blurb, so as to increase reliability.(2) At the level of sentence type, complex sentence and interrogative sentence are two prominent features in the corpus. The complex sentence is characterized by large amounts of relative clauses. The research suggests that there are all together132 that-relative clauses, 62 which-relative clauses, 17 who-relative clauses, 10where-relative clauses and 5 when-relative clauses. These complex sentences strengthen the formal and professional feature of academic books and also make it possible to present more content in an economical way. The other prominent sentence type is interrogative sentence, which is used not only to catch readers' attention and induce them to think, but also to establish the professional and authoritative character of the book. Both sentence types present the formal,professional and authoritative style, which is also the style of academic books. This style contributes to the professional, authoritative and formal impression of the book to readers and enhance the book's credibility.Through the macro and micro rhetorical analyses, the persuasive function of academic book blurbs is manifested from different angles. This thesis investigatesthe persuasive function of academic book blurbs from the rhetorical perspective and applies the rhetoric theory into this new research territory, and that is the theoretical meaning of this research. As an important promotional genre, the book blurb will better fulfill its persuasive function through a thorough research of it, and will inspire the recognition of the domestic publishers, who will then carry forward the perfection of book blurbs in China, and that is the significance of the thesis.