Rhetoric of Promotion and Persuasion in Grant Proposal Abstracts

Introduction. Grant proposal abstracts represent a pivotal academic genre aimed at persuading experts in a specific field of research to fund the proposed projects. Being considered a “behind-the-scenes” genre, it has received little attention in academic discourse analysis and pedagogy. This study addresses this gap by analyzing rhetorical moves employed in grant proposal abstracts with a particular focus on their promotional and persuasive nature. Materials and Methods. A corpus of 90 successfully funded linguistics grant proposals from the Russian Science Foundation was analyzed. The texts were derived from the official website of the fund. The ana­lysis included a comprehensive procedure of extracting texts and conducting interpretative and quantitative analyses of the rhetorical moves using Matzler’s taxonomy. The corpus was chosen to provide insights into how persuasive and promotional language is used in a funding context. Results. The analysis revealed a consistent pattern of moves indicative of persuasive language and strategic promotion. The study identified that the most frequent moves found in the corpus were Territory, Goals, and Benefits, which underline the importance of establishing a clear context, articulating research aims, and highlighting the significance and novelty of the proposed research. The most frequent move structure in the corpus was “Territory – Goal – Means – Benefits”, which indicates the conventional approach taken in the abstracts. Discussion and Conclusion. Through a move analysis of grant proposal abstracts, the present study contributed to a deeper understanding of this persuasive and promotional academic genre. The analysis suggests a strong link between the successful use of specific rhetorical moves and securing funding, with variations in the types of moves identified in 90 abstracts. The findings highlight the persuasive and promotional nature of scientific communication and their implications for pedagogy. Explicit training in move analysis is recommended to improve researchers’ capacity to create convincing proposals.