Carey Dunne - Week 5

  

The videos made me think about how I can broaden my expectations as a teacher of writing in order to accommodate a wider range of organizational and rhetorical preferences. American organizational preferences as defined in the videos are so ingrained in me as a writer and teacher -- getting right to the point in the introduction, not using the first person in academic papers, limiting the sources you cite to course readings, aiming for clarity, etc. I considered how, as a teacher and tutor, I can help international students learn what American preferences are and how to meet their American professors’ expectations — in cases where the students’ professors are unfortunately not going to accommodate intercultural rhetorics — without devaluing the preference of the students’ native cultures. In terms of these contrasting cultural preferences, I was particularly interested in the discussion of how readers in Japan are typically expected to “participate more” in the reading process -- that it’s not always considered the responsibility of the writer to make everything perfectly clear, that it’s the reader’s job to do the work to decode things like which characters various pronouns refer to. In the NWP we sometimes talk about essays that “hold the reader’s hand” versus essays that require the reader to do more work to figure out what’s going on -- and the video emphasized the value of the latter type of writing, how prioritizing clarity can sometimes come at the price of lyricism or emotional impact.


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