In contemporary societies we can observe an increasing interest for the forms of persuasive public communication, for which the term "new rhetoric" has been proposed recently. It includes the analysis of scholarly publications. And, in this way, is related to developments in epistemology and in the sociology of science. Family research is a fruitful field for research on this kind of scientific rhetoric. A small number of key-terms, among them prominently the "pluralization of family forms", play a dominant role in the literature dealing with recent changes of the family. At the same time, a remarkable rise of family research led to a "pluralization of theoretical approaches". Also, speaking and writing on the family unavoidably contains moral, and therefore rhetorical connotations, due to the anthropological dimensions of the topic. The paper, which informs about "work in progress", begins with an overview of the theoretical foundations of scientific rhetoric, and of a model concerning the attention paid in public discourses to sociological propositions of the family. It is followed by a detailled comparative analysis of three recent articles on the situation of the family and related forms of private life in Germany. Finally, a frame of reference for the analysis of family rhetoric in scholarly texts is sketched out
