Persuasive Genres: Old and New Media, by Sujata S. Kathpalia

This book attempts to shift the analytical focus of genre analysis from the conventional academic and disciplinary settings to the increasingly prevalent new media contexts of professional communication, examining particularly the creativity of discursive practices embedded in the composition, dissemination and reception of digital persuasive genres.The multidisciplinary and multiperspective analytical techniques adopted by the author make her work a worthy contribution in the field of professional discourse studies which is characteristic of the mixing of micro linguistic analysis and macro social interpretation.Instances of professional communication, as typical specialist-lay social engagements, may be seen as macro social events of a celebrative nature (Goffman, 1981, p. 167), which enable participants to claim, reinforce, and circulate their power, status, prestige, and ideologies.At the same time, each occurrence of professional communication is a language game in which participants act competitively to build their images and identities, to position their interlocutors, and to remain the continuous moving-on of their business at hand.A joint understanding of the macro structural constraints and the micro contingencies of language games is a prerequisite for the successful explanation of professionals' strategic practice of composing texts and achieving communicative purposes.The author of this book demonstrates her skills of balancing the two levels of genre analysis.There are six chapters in this book.In chapter one, three major traditions of genre analysis (i.e.English for Specific Purposes, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and New Rhetorical Studies) are compared from a historical perspective.In spite of their different theoretical foundations, the three traditions are actually on the same ground as they formulate the definition of genre on the same set of notions, e.g.communicative/social purposes, structural forms, social action, situation, cultural and social contexts, discourse community, and others.Researchers of the three traditions show the same tendency of prioritizing the ethnographic account of genre-