Justifying a recommendation: tell a story or present an argument?

Abstract

In the deliberative genre there is a complex ‘playground’ of choices to present a recommendation; a rhetorician has to determine his or her position. Relevant dimensions are the coerciveness of the recommendation and the strength of its justifi cation, but also the presentation format, varying from prototypical narrative to prototypical argumentative. In different contexts this playground seems to be exploited in different ways and employed with different intensity. It is argued that this can best be understood in terms of different ideas about the management of the audience’s face and in terms of different concepts of rationality that prevail in specifi c socio-cultural contexts.