Managing the Emotive Impact of Argumentative Public Communication in Written English - A Linguistic-Didactic Approach

The article presents a range of strategies and techniques meant to acquaint advanced users of English with the linguistic means of enhancing the emotive impact of argumentative texts which state an opinion. The methods illustrated concern both intensive reading activities, consisting in examining good models of effective written communication, and writing activities proper, aimed at guiding students through the gradual stages of the writing process. The reading and writing tasks presented draw the learners' attention to the structural and lexical devices which good communicators employ so as to efficiently convey a variety of stances, attitudes, standpoints and moods. The proposed activities are aimed at raising the students' awareness of the importance of the context and purpose of writing for the linguistic choices a writer makes in order to get his/her message across. These tasks also emphasize the need for a clear sense of audience, in view of which the writer can gauge and control the emotive effect he/she seeks to create. The communicative approach employed in these strategies for developing written communication skills relies on interactive and collaborative activities such as pair- or group-work, on integrated skills sequences where the collaborative reading or writing tasks also involve discussion, debate and peer-cooperation.