Persuasive Verbs Used In English Udergraduate Argumentative Essay Writing

Abstract

The researcher was interested in knowing what kinds of persuasive verbs were used by English undergraduates in their argumentative essay writing. The writers of argumentative essay should consider what kinds of persuasive verbs that they use in writing argumentative essay. This study was corpus based study which studied the persuasive verbs that English undergraduates at Muhammadiyah Mataram used in their argumentative essay writing. The objects of the study were English undergraduate argumentative essays. In collecting the data, the researchers distributed a paper containing a problem and asked them to respond in an argumentative essay. To analyze the data, the researchers equipped themselves using AntConc that provides wordlist and concordance. The results showed that the persuasive verbs used by English undergraduates in their argumentative essays were more on neutral verbs rather than evaluative verbs so that the argumentations given by the English undergraduates in their essays seemed not strong enough to endorse their points of view. With the finding, the English undergraduates are suggested to use evaluative verbs rather than neutral verbs to help them attach to the issue that they are concerning about.