Metageneric competence in official letter

from formal prescriptions to functional traces in the meta-genre writing manual

Abstract

Based on the notion of meta-generic competence, we aim to analyze how writing manuals address the formal and functional attributes of the official letter genre, to suggest guidelines that may assist in writing this genre. Methodologically, we use Document Analysis (Cellard, 2008; Alves et al., 2021) and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2001; Bessa; Sato, 2018) to examine writing manuals and academic productions that address this genre. Theoretically, we draw on the notion of discursive genres from socio-rhetorical and sociodiscursive perspectives (Meurer et al., 2005), linking it to the idea of meta-generic competence, which results from other language competencies represented in linguistic-discursive, pragmatic, socio-cognitive, and socio-interactional dimensions (Albuquerque, 2022). Analytically, we found that the manuals focus on the formal properties of the genre and that academic productions make little progress in the debate regarding official letter. We conclude that access to the functional attributes of this genre, socially motivated, would contribute to the autonomy of the interlocutors in reading and writing the official letter.