Beyond the topic sentence: paragraph-level inductive rhetoric in humanities and social science writing

Abstract

Students at the University of Hong Kong now take a first year general English for academic purposes course, followed by a disciplinary English course later in their degree. New disciplinary English courses for Faculty of Arts students include a number of written academic language features that did not appear in past courses. This paper focuses on one of these features: Inductive rhetoric at the paragraph level of writing, where the main idea is not summarized in a topic sentence placed early in the paragraph. Inductive and deductive rhetoric have drawn limited interest from contemporary applied linguists, but scholars of more traditional approaches of enquiry such as contrastive rhetoric and composition studies have offered some useful insights, including that Asian writers generally prefer inductive rhetoric, while westerners generally prefer deductive rhetoric. The response by some writing instructors has been to try to teach Asians to be more deductive in their academic writing. At the whole-text level, this may be appropriate, but past research has indicated that the emphasis on deductive paragraphing (i.e., beginning each paragraph with a topic sentence) in teaching and assessment may be misguided. This paper picks up from long-standing doubts about the actual use of topic sentences in professional academic writing. The paper theorizes why teachers of second language writing have emphasized deductive paragraph rhetoric, why inductive rhetoric in paragraphs is a feature worth teaching in humanities and social science writing courses, and then suggests what functions inductive rhetoric performs in sophisticated humanities and social science writing.