A COMPARATIVE GENRE-BASED ANALYSIS OF LETTERS TO THE EDITOR IN PAKISTANI ENGLISH NEWSPAPERS: AN ADAPTED SWALES' CARS MODEL

Abstract

Despite the success of genre analysis as a tool to study the rhetorical organization of language in certain social and professional contexts, the genre of writing letters to the editor in Pakistani English newspapers is still not studied systematically on a rhetorical basis. Previous research has examined the Pakistani newspaper letters mainly within the Critical Discourse Analysis frameworks that emphasize ideological representation, yet no study suggested a formally adapted form of the CARS model for the newspaper letters genre, and none of the studies attempted a systematic comparison of the rhetorical move structures of newspapers that have different editorial identities. The present study aims to fill these gaps by studying ten letters to the editor that were published in two prominent English newspapers of Pakistan (Dawn and The Nation) using a six-move adapted CARS model as a framework for the genre. The sample of social and political letters from each newspaper was chosen by purposive sampling, and a more detailed move and step analysis was applied to the letters. The results show that all six moves of the adapted model are consistently realized in both newspapers and in both thematic categories, but with differences at the step level: Step 1A (Heading) occurs as obligatory in Move 1, while Step 1B (Salutation) is completely missing from the corpus, meaning that the epistolary character of the genre has been lost in both newspapers at the level of steps. Step 4B (Oppositional Argument) becomes the one universal requirement for all 10 letters. The study brings an original adapted CARS model to the genre theory and ESP pedagogy, and provides a culturally embedded and rhetorical model for guiding the teaching of genre in educational settings of Pakistan.