Contrastive Rhetoric

Contrastive Rhetoric: Reader vs. Writer Responsibility

While reading Casanave, one of the topics mentioned particularly stuck in my mind. As Casanave related John Hinds study of the differences between Japanese and English expository writing, I had a flashback to working in the Writing Center of my alma mater, Clarion University. We would often work with Asian students and Arabic students and find ourselves working to convince them to be more direct and explanatory in their writing. As American students, accustomed to a writing system that demands and expects the writer to lead the reader to new knowledge AND explain that new knowledge in such a way that a reader ignorant of the issue can fully understand the discussion, we were puzzled by the roundabout way those students were writing their essays. However, as Hinds explains, the burden of creating understanding is not on the writers in Japanese as it is in English. According to Hinds, contrastive rhetoric has a lot to do with the expectations of the reader. Now, Peter McCagg argues with Hind over whether or not Japanese puts more responsibility on the reader but I’m really not sure how I feel about his counterargument.

As we had been trained to do, we asked our Asian and Arabic students questions to help them develop their essays. At first, we did this because we thought they just had no idea what else to write. We were fascinated to learn, however, that the writing system in their L1 background made very different demands of them and that was why they were having a more difficult time producing essays agreeable to American essay expectations. So, I can see that it is important to have some awareness of pre-existing differences in writing expectations because that awareness allows educators to look further than the assumption that writing in an L2 is just difficult because of some cognitive inability to perform in the L2.

An interesting thing to note though is that American students often exhibit similar problems being direct with their writing and creating an understanding for the reader that does not rely primarily on the readers own ability to piece knowledge together. College freshman in the US are often reminded time and again about the importance of providing pertinent information, using transitional sentences, and not assuming that the reader has any prior knowledge of the subject being discussed.