Cahill, D: Contrastive Rhetoric

Contrastive rhetoric investigates rhetorical structures across languages to predict difficulties experienced by students composing in a foreign language. Major problems result from the field‘s binary logic, which reduces differing rhetorical traditions to the contrasting paradigm of Western "directness" and Eastern "indirectness". This book examines writing students in two contexts - East Asian students at a U.S. university and English majors at a Chinese university - and the scholarship on Chinese and Japanese writing instruction to challenge the contrastive rhetoric claim that students are enslaved to native rhetorical traditions ultimately deriving from the old Chinese civil service examination. Nonnative English-speaking students may resemble native students more than commonly believed, as both confront the same cognitive and developmental processes involved in academic writing. Arguing for a non-contrastive comparative rhetoric highlighting analogous text structures across languages as potential rhetorical universals for aiding second language writers, this book will be of interest both to researchers in comparative rhetoric and to teachers of second-language writing students.