The rhetorical structure of technical brochures: A proposal for technical writing

Abstract

Nowadays, in many professional contexts native-speakers of Spanish are required to write technical texts in English. Texts belonging to the same genre follow certain rhetorical and phraseological conventions. The aim of this paper is to assist in the technical writing of this particular text type through a discourse analysis of their rhetorical structure. A corpus of technical brochures has been compiled and analyzed into moves and steps. Next, the most typical lexico-grammatical structures in each move and step have been extracted. The linguistic information obtained has been used to build specific software to generate technical brochures in English (GITEC).