“See Figure 1”: Visual moves in discrete mathematics research articles

Abstract

Abstract This research is motivated by John Swales genre analysis of academic texts and rhetorical studies of visuals in scientific texts. Swales approach still generates insights into the rhetorical structure of research genres across disciplines, yet few studies explore their nonverbal aspects. Rhetorical studies of visuals examine images and ignore links with surrounding texts and may overlook ways that the nonverbal contributes to the discipline s intellectual project. ESP genre research has begun multimodal analysis of academic genres but its focus on conference presentations has left a gap in the study of verbal-visual links in other academic genres. This paper addresses this gap in multimodal genre scholarship. After analyzing a corpus of 30 RAs from discrete mathematics to identify the functions of visuals and possible visual–move associations, we found that visuals in two-thirds of the corpus perform three functions: ontological, argumentative, and epistemological. Our data also indicates three multimodal rhetorical moves initiated primarily by visuals. Implications of our findings are that visual moves go beyond textual considerations, they can disrupt the RA s chronological structure, and novice writers in the field would benefit from understanding the crucial associations between the visual representations, disciplinary knowledge, and the rhetorical structure of RAs in this field.