Week 6 - Intercultural Rhetoric
This week's reading was very intriguing to me because of how, like others have mentioned in their posts, "intercultural" or "contrastive" rhetoric was something that I hadn't formally heard about. I've seen intercultural communication, and even have taken courses on it in terms of media. However, I've seen it in action, whether it is in talking with my international students, helping my friends in undergrad edit their papers, or working with students here at the writing center.
This reminds me quite eerily of how an entire section of my Japanese language course so far has been devoted to navigating the roundabout nature of Japanese speech. One can't just say "No" to a plan, because that is considered to be too direct (いいえ - literally "no") ; they have to instead say, "Uh... well, that's a little.... [inconvenient]" （えと・・・。 それはちょっと・・・。). So, with that in mind, the kind of academic writing that American students are taught to do is worlds different than Japanese academic writing in terms of directness. The reading even addresses this in detail as well, which I found to be true in my own experience working with Japanese language and media (32-33).
While I agree with (and have seen disastrous examples when this is violated) the assertion of "one mustn't try to fit the rhetorical structure of the original language into the target language," the main issue I had with the chapter is that it assumed that the American student was a native English Speaker... Which sometimes, they are not. So, with that in mind, how can we combat our own unintentional biases relating to the "American" reader, and also, to try to take in the views of other rhetorical traditions within English-language academic writing?
This reminds me quite eerily of how an entire section of my Japanese language course so far has been devoted to navigating the roundabout nature of Japanese speech. One can't just say "No" to a plan, because that is considered to be too direct (いいえ - literally "no") ; they have to instead say, "Uh... well, that's a little.... [inconvenient]" （えと・・・。 それはちょっと・・・。). So, with that in mind, the kind of academic writing that American students are taught to do is worlds different than Japanese academic writing in terms of directness. The reading even addresses this in detail as well, which I found to be true in my own experience working with Japanese language and media (32-33).
While I agree with (and have seen disastrous examples when this is violated) the assertion of "one mustn't try to fit the rhetorical structure of the original language into the target language," the main issue I had with the chapter is that it assumed that the American student was a native English Speaker... Which sometimes, they are not. So, with that in mind, how can we combat our own unintentional biases relating to the "American" reader, and also, to try to take in the views of other rhetorical traditions within English-language academic writing?
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