Abstract

The essay genre plays an important role in the training of argumentative writing at the university level. However, its description in Spanish is still scarce, so the aim of this article is to describe the rhetorical organization of the argumentative essay genre. For this purpose, we selected a corpus of 54 essays produced by UNSA engineering students. First, genre analysis was used in a microcorpus of well evaluated essays. Second, a rhetorical-discursive model was proposed and validated by experts. Finally, the model was empirically tested on new essays with the HERMES_UNSA tool. The result is the configuration of a model composed of five macro-moves, six moves and fifteen steps, which account for the discursive organization of this genre, which can be used as a didactic support for the production of this genre in engineering.