universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

113The question whether the texts in the corpus can be recognized as BRs in terms oftheir text features relates to the representativity of the data. I considered that ‘the actionbeing accomplished’ (Miller 1984:151) through the genre is two-fold –– description andevaluation: the reviewer is performing an action of providing the reader with a criticalappraisal of a written text. Therefore, after the skimming of each text, BRs that weresolely descriptive, that did not have explicitly a point of evaluation, were not consideredrepresentative of the genre.4.2 Qualitative data analysisAs mentioned in section 4.1, the data analysis of the 180 texts is developed in twodistinct moments with the so-called qualitative analysis carried out initially. The sectionthat follows is dedicated to explaining the methods adopted for this analysis.4.2.1 Analysis of text stagingThe qualitative analysis of the data consists of a detailed examination of the textstructure of 60 randomly selected BRs among the 180 texts, with the objective ofbringing forth the characteristic rhetorical organization of the genre in terms of movesand sub-functions, i.e., how reviewers describe and evaluate books across disciplineswithin the limits of the same genre.A previous survey of five texts in linguistics (Motta-Roth, 1993) had indicatedbook reviewers’ tendency to first introduce and describe the book, then evaluate it, andat last close the text with a final recommendation for the potential reader. This tendency