Narrative navigation in legal persuasion: a rhetorical analysis of lawyers’ affidavits and skeleton arguments for appellate relief in criminal cases in Malawi

Abstract Narrative navigation and lawyers’ use of linguistic persuasion in affidavits and skeleton arguments for appellant relief in criminal cases remains one of the under-researched areas in the field of language and law. This is a phase at which lawyers have the opportunity to influence the judicial decision-making process through their ability to persuade the appellate judge to believe their version of the case to be the true version. The argument chosen by the lawyer and the manner of telling it are inseparable. By utilising data from ten appellate level criminal cases from the High Court of Malawi, this study investigates the narrative structure of lawyers’ affidavits and skeleton arguments using Aristotle’s rhetorical analysis framework. Our findings reveal that the appeal to logos is simply a templatic genre structure that lawyers are meant to follow. However, lawyers’ appeals to ethos and pathos reveal excessive redundancy and low deployment of important linguistic resources that can help them be appropriately persuasive, which can be acceptable to the wider discourse community.