Argumentation and subjectivity in genre: the role of the topoi

Abstract

When a school teacher ask their students to write a “composition”, the students are expected to present a problem and their points of view, and to develop a line of argumentation that leads to a satisfactory answer to the problem. However, it is also expected that the student should be impersonal. In this article I argue, from a discursive perspective, that writing always implies a choice which directs the writer’s interpretation, and that this choice depends on the use of certain operators. I then focus on the conflict between being impersonal and defending a point of view (opinion) – contrasting the model of school composition and the dialogic characterization of Bakhtin’s concept of genre, and the resulting effects on both cases, in the hope of presenting a teaching alternative.