Towards an Analysis of the Book Review Genre: An Appraisal Analysis

Despite the paramount interest in unravelling patterns of evaluation in texts of various types, there have been hardly any extensive inventories of appraisal tools in the book reviews in hard and soft disciplines. The present study aimed to uncover the persuasive means of reviewing, describing, analysing, and judging books. Sixty book reviews representing hard and soft disciplines were collected for qualitative and quantitative analyses of the appraisal resources used by the authors. Results recorded significant disciplinary differences among the book reviews under the study in their preference for the utilization of the Appraisal resources. The significance was found, however, not in all resources but in engagement and graduation, being far more noticeable in the soft discipline book reviews. More frequent uses of the attitudinal resources were cited in the hard discipline reviews. This tendency apparently stems from the more controlled variables in the hard sciences and the easier verifiability and generalizability of the claims in different contexts compared to the interpretive nature of the soft science fields.