Abstract
The education of composition teachers, tutors, and researchers about culturally influenced rhetorical differences in writing, or contrastive rhetoric, is usually limited, often consisting of brief explanations of Robert Kaplan's 1966 diagrams purporting to represent the rhetorics of five cultural traditions: Oriental, English, Semitic, Russian, and Romance. Frequently reprinted in teacher-training sources, the diagrams are only briefly and unproblematically explained in his own controversial terms (e.g., "the Oriental writer" and "Oriental rhetoric") as if they depicted the Truth about five complex rhetorical traditions. For example, the five drawings discussed in Kaplan's vocabulary appear in a seven-page section entitled "Cultural Differences" in Muriel Harris' Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference, the guidebook for many writing center tutor-training programs. These models have been assumed factual and further disseminated at numerous presentation at writing center conferences (Xia Wang and Liu Yue; James Robinson, et al.). The increasing number of writing center publications and conference sessions on English-as-a-Second-Language issues such as contrastive rhetoric reflects the increasing number of international students using and working in writing centers. It is important that international students be approached by tutors with a stance that acknowledges the complexities of the rhetorics of different languages and cultures.
- Journal
- Writing Center Journal
- Published
- 1993
- DOI
- 10.7771/2832-9414.1282
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- Search in CompPile ↗
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Citation Context
Cited by in this index (4)
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Lee et al. (2023)Assessing Writing
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Cahill (2003)Written Communication
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Spyridakis et al. (1998)Technical Communication Quarterly
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Grimm (1995)Computers and Composition
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