Academic writing is rhetorical and culturally conditioned. What in one culture appears as effective and proper, can in a new cultural context look like chaotic writing and sloppy thinking. To discover the ways in which such impressions are made, we need careful textual analysis of academic writing in different cultural contexts. This book takes a textlinguistic approach and contrasts academic journal articles in a large and dominant culture (Anglo-American), a small and peripheral one (Finnish), and the intercultural products of the small culture members writing in the dominant language (Finns in English). The results indicate that academics do have culture-specific writing styles, and that textlinguistic tools are crucial if we want to expand our understanding of written communication.

This book, Rhetoric in European and World Culture, defines the position of rhetoric in the cultural and educational systems from ancient times through the present. It examines the decline of its importance in a period of rationalism and enlightenment, presents the causes of why rhetoric (reduced to a system of rhetorical tricks) came to have negative connotations, and explains why rhetoric in the 20th century was able to regain its position. It demonstrates that the prestige of rhetoric sharply falls when it is reduced to a refined method for deceiving the public, and increases when it is seen as a scientific discipline that is used throughout all of the fields of the humanities - philosophy, logic, semiotics, literary science, linguistics, the science of media and others. In this sense, rhetoric strives for universal recognition and the cultivation of rhetorical expression, spoken and written, including not only its production but also reception and interpretation. In such a renaissance of interest, rhetoric appears not merely as a guide to language skills, but as a complex theoretical field examining human behaviour in social communication. Chapters 1-9 describe the development of rhetoric from its Greek, Hellenic and Roman beginnings to rhetoric in the context of medieval Christian culture, later during the periods of humanism, Enlightenment, baroque. The final chapter is concerned with rhetoric in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It takes into account geography, including the history of rhetoric in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, Russia, the Czech Lands, Moravia, Slovakia and from the 19th century in the United States. The final chapter presents an answer to the question of whether corresponding systems of rhetorical knowledge have been formed beyond the borders of Mediterranean antiquity. The selected examples of theoretical works on "the art of speech" from India, the Middle East, China, Korea and Japan show that each language community forms its own concept, theory and practice of persuasive and suggestive speaking behaviours. Often such findings, instead of being used as manuals for the stylization and presentation of speeches, rather concentrate on analyzing written documents, in which we can find not only specific categorical devices of the given culture (as is the case with comments on the Vedic texts of ancient India) but also tropes and figures characteristic of Greek and Roman rhetoric, e.g., the Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Old Testament.

While some scholars have said that there is no such thing as culture and have urged to abandon the concept altogether, the contributors to this volume overcome this impasse by understanding cultures and their representations for what they ultimately are – rhetorical constructs. These senior, international scholars explore the complex relationships between culture and rhetoric arguing that just as rhetoric is founded in culture, culture is founded in rhetoric. This intersection constitutes the central theme of the first part of the book, while the second is dedicated to the study of figuration as a common ground of rhetoric and anthropology. The book offers a compelling range of theoretical reflections, historical vistas, and empirical investigations, which aim to show how people talk themselves and others into particular modalities of thought and action, and how rhetoric and culture, in this way, are co-emergent. It thus turns a new page in the history of academic discourse by bringing two disciplines – anthropology and rhetoric – together in a way that has never been done before.

Contrastive rhetoric is the term used to describe the observable differences in the linguistic and structural aspects of writing from culturally different settings. Writing Across Languages and Cultures - the second volume in the Written Communication Annual series - introduces theoretical and methodological approaches to issues in contrastive rhetoric and its relationship to teaching and curricula. It also considers national differences in writing styles, how these cultural patterns are transferred to second language writing and the criteria applied to the writing of non-native speakers.

This volume demonstrates the role of contrastive rhetoric in ESL courses, and offers suggestions for using CR toward cultural understanding of rhetorical decisions. For scholars and educators in composition, rhetoric, education, ESL, and related areas.

This book confronts the patterns of school failure often faced by subordinated minority groups in the United States. It does so by presenting a socioacademic framework that is based on the notion that all groups can have comparable access to quality schooling, comparable participation in the schooling, and derive comparable educational benefits from their participation. Organized around three key, interrelated components—communication, integration, and cooperation—the book combines theoretical concepts with actual classroom practices that support change. It moves us from a position of rhetoric about educational equality to one that actively addresses the socioacademic needs of students in a culturally diverse society.

It is easy to argue that the need for attention to how we navigate rhetorically within and across cultures has never been greater, given ever-increasing global migrations and seemingly instantaneous global communication. Yet, the conceptual basis of intercultural rhetoric (also known in the past as contrastive rhetoric) has been under fire ever since it first emerged as an area of research and pedagogical interest. In recent years, Ulla Connor has built a steadily more extensive and sophisticated case for how a culturally contextualized study of rhetoric in any media can be carried out without static and reductive over-generalizations about culture/s or rhetoric. This volume provides both an eloquent summation and further theoretical expansion of Connor’s arguments. Readers who have wondered about the possibility of exploring connections between their students’ (or anyone’s) culture and discourse style will find many of their questions addressed in this volume; other readers who have not previously raised such questions will very likely begin to see the value of doing so.