Robert Taylor - Week 5 Post

Aside from my critique that Tony Silva--one of the speakers from the videos--needs to speak with a little more enthusiasm, one of my main focuses in watching the videos and reading the chapter on contrastive and intercultural rhetoric had to do with the parallels between written language rhetorical variations and training in philosophy.

I do not consider myself a philosophical thinker in a strict sense, but I do think of philosophy--and the learning of philosophy--as a way of training one’s brain to look at topics differently. The conversations within the videos and reading made me consider how approaching different writing assignments is a lot like learning to think in ways that go beyond one’s own academic and cultural background. In this way, I think it would be valuable for American educators to learn how individuals from other cultures construct sentences, arguments, and pieces of writing in general. Rather than focusing on colonizing the written structural, stylistic, and formatting conventions, I can see a lot of value in allowing students to learn different ways in which a writer might approach crafting a particular text.

As I was listening to some of the speakers in the video talk about some of their language backgrounds, I was struck by a desire to learn more about how their cultures constructed forms of writing differently than what I have become familiar with in my native (and only) language. I love the idea of building a relationship with my audience before getting to the point; similarly, I’ve always been fond of the idea that constructing longer, more elaborate sentences gives an audience something to appreciate about the craft of writing and ideas, thus giving better opportunities to establish a report with the reader, all the while incorporating punctuation as a way of increasing the aesthetics of those ideas…

The notion that institutions in the United States need to become more understanding of different cultural and rhetorical practices in writing does not go far enough in my opinion. In addition to becoming more understanding of different language practices, it seems institutions would also benefit from learning more about how diverse cultural practices might strengthen and enrich “standard” English writing practices. After all, if one goal of learning philosophy is to strengthen and enrich a person’s thought practices, couldn’t learning different rhetorical approaches have the same goal?


Comments

  1. Sean TylerSeptember 27, 2020 at 1:31 PM

    I wonder how much of what is judged as transfer problems in academic writing would be accepted and celebrated in a less restrictive form of writing like essay writing, or memoir. I think that the idea that American academic research papers are somehow a logical gold standard is completely unnecessary and eurocentric. I think the, often bland, style academic papers fall into is unnecessarily restrictive when it could be much more fluid, allow individual scholars and students to express themselves and their individual backgrounds more fully, and diversify the variety of written work available. I think you're completely right when you say it could be a benefit to students to study multiple rhetorical approaches.

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  2. C OSeptember 29, 2020 at 9:03 PM

    I also wanted to learn more about the different ways to construct texts after watching the video. The closest thing that came to mind was the French book Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau, wherein he describes a short anecdote of a man arguing on a bus and then talking about a new button for his coat 99 different ways. I wonder if there’s a similar book for how broader rhetorical constructs, such as “academic essay” and “funny story," are most commonly taught around the world.

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