Humanistic Texts: Characteristics, Features, and Structures
Humanistic Texts: Characteristics, Linguistic Features, and Text Structures
Humanistic texts encompass writings within the humanities and social sciences, focusing on cultural productions, relationships, and interpretations of reality. These texts often fall within the didactic essay genre, characterized by:
- Non-fiction content
- Language used for communicating thought
- A prevailing didactic intention
Communicative Characteristics
- Informative communicative intention
- Targeting a trained or expert audience, depending on the text type
- Covering a wide range of subjects
- Using natural language with specific terminology
Construction of Humanistic Texts
Due to the diversity of these texts, establishing common characteristics is challenging. However, some general features include:
General Language Characteristics
- Language reflects and theorizes about a specific topic.
- Predominance of referential and sometimes poetic functions of language.
- Grammatical features: declarative and complex sentences.
- Extensive use of the third person.
Organization and Text Structures
Exposition and argumentation are common forms of speech. The structure varies, but often includes an introduction and conclusion. The author aims to convince the reader of a particular idea, blending argumentation and exposition.
Types of Humanistic Texts
The most important humanistic texts are essays and studies.
The Essay
An essay is a prose piece of variable length, reflective in character, and covering a wide variety of themes. It can address any topic, be inbound, or be informative.
Principal Characteristics of Essays
- Textual Modalities: Employ exposition and argumentation, with a subjective approach.
- Type of Reflection: Often subjective and historical, from the issuer’s perspective, influenced by social, cultural, and ideological contexts.
- Finality: The sender’s communicative intention is to persuade the reader by arguing opinions.
- Grammatical Features: References to the receiver may appear in the second person verb forms, including vocative and imperative sentences. When the recipient is not using the nosotros form.
- Structure: Presents an open structure with freely organized content, allowing for digressions and various fragments.
- Style: Uses standard language with few technical terms, employing connotative language and expressive resources.
Main Features: Author’s personal vision, free subjectivity, variety of themes, free and open internal structure, addresses a broad audience.
The Study
Includes writings such as general treaties, monographs, articles, and reviews. A treaty is typically an extensive monograph. A case study mirrors a specific case. A scholarly article is a brief study by a specialist providing novel informative aspects. An article offers a general synthesis of ideas, while a review is a critical text analyzing and evaluating a work for an audience. They all share thematic unity, completeness, an objective attitude, use of jargon, and a scholarly treatment of the subject.
Cohesion: The Syntactic Structure of the Text
From a syntactic standpoint, textual cohesion is fundamental. Cohesion refers to the web of relationships between different elements and formal mechanisms that linguistically express overall consistency and linear ideas within a text.