Andrew blog post 5

In my experience, I find that most students, even among those with various cultural backgrounds, tend to write in standard written English; those that don't, or perhaps struggle with the conventions of written English, are usually still able to effectively communicate their thoughts in language. That being said, I still think it's important to consider the value of contrastive/intercultural analysis of rhetoric, and, in the classroom, to validate and celebrate the richness and variety of alternative rhetorical/communicative forms.

Contrastive and intercultural theories of rhetoric, as I see it and as Casanave mentions in her article, risks reinforcing essentialist notions of ethnicity and culture, that writers and speakers of different languages/dialects simply cannot think or write effectively in modes other than those they grew up with. In my undergraduate psychology classes we often spoke of differences in personality between individual-centered cultures (e.g. the United States and Europe) and community-centered cultures (e.g. China and Eastern Asia more broadly). It's a useful distinction to make when studying individual differences in personality, and how those differences vary in accordance with culture, but in recent years there has been resistance among psychologists to rely on the distinction too much in their research, as it presents a danger in posing non-Western subjects as a different "race" than American and European subjects.

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