Planos discursivos e organização retórica: a redação modelo ENEM

Abstract

This dissertation investigates texts belonging to the argumentative essay typology written by second- and third-year high school students, taking as reference the format required in the writing section of the Brazilian National High School Examination (Enem). The study aims to analyze how students organize their essays in light of Swales (1990)’ sociorhetorical theory through the identification of rhetorical moves, as well as to examine the distribution of informational salience in the texts based on the functionalist perspective of the discourse planes of Figure and Ground proposed by Hopper and Thompson (1980). To this end, the essays are examined at two complementary analytical levels: a macrotextual level, focused on the realization of rhetorical moves characteristic of argumentative essays, and a microtextual level, grounded in the degree of clause transitivity in order to identify how textual segments are distributed along a continuum between informational centrality and peripherality. The study also considers guidelines presented in official documents that guide the production and assessment of the Enem essay. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the corpus indicates a predominance of the Ground discourse plane in the organization of the texts, especially in the development and conclusion sections, while the Figure plane tends to concentrate elements of greater discursive prominence, such as sociocultural repertoire. The results show that essays with better evaluation present a greater realization of rhetorical moves and a more effective management of informational salience. In this way, the study shows that the articulation between rhetorical organization and discourse planes constitutes a productive instrument for understanding the construction of argumentation in the Enem essay model and offers theoretical support for the teaching of argumentative writing in the school context.