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AGNES FIDELIS GLORIA-PINZON 87-15240ENG 262_2_2008-2009 TMA 4: Unit FourPage 1 of 7
 A.Make an overall assessment of the features of Western rhetoric and contrast westernrhetoric with Eastern rhetoric and its manifestations and features. What place does thePhilippines occupy between these oppositions? Justify how or why.
 To compare Western rhetoric to that of its Eastern counterpart, one must first definewhat it is to qualify as “West” and “East”. It would be easy enough to define “West”in terms of geographical definitions – West here being nations in the Westernhemisphere (North and South America) and the East covering countries in theopposite side of the world (Europe, Asia, Africa, Middle East). West and East,however, has come to mean more than just what lies opposite each other across themeridian line. The classifications of West and East, after centuries of modern humanhistory has come to ultimately describe how the globe is divided politically and socio-economically – where nations and their peoples stand in the global economic andpolitical schema. Thus, the West has come to mean the more industrialized andmore developed, ergo more prosperous, countries like the countries of Europe(Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, etc.), the North American continent (the UnitedStates and Canada) and even Australia. The East, on the other hand, encompass lessindustrialized (or newly industrializing) to underdeveloped countries in Asia, Russia,Africa and the beleaguered Middle Eastern countries. Here the distinctions seemeasy to identify; the West being the rich First World capitalist (imperialist?) economiesand the East being the struggling nations of the Third World. But taking a longer lookat this construct will reveal that the schism is not based simply on GNP bottom linesand even a shallow review of recent history will reveal that West and East actuallydetermine how much power a nation wields in global realpolitik. Thus, even if SaudiArabia, let’s say, controls all the world’s oil resources, it’s not enough to land a seatwith the big boys since the country exerts no real power on international affairs. Thisrather meticulous exploration on distinguishing the West from the East attempts todiscover what may have implications on the kind of rhetoric used and valued in both.First let us define Western rhetoric as the rhetoric used by the Anglo-Americanspeakers and writers of English (the British and Americans) as well as the Romancediscourse of the French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish and the East as the rhetoricemployed by Asian, Arabic or Semitic and Slavic (Czech, Russian, Polish andUkrainian) peoples. The table below lists salient features and attributes of each kind.
TYPE OF RHETORICCHARACTERISTICS/ FEATURES
WESTERNRHETORIC
English
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Paragraph development follow a linear pattern
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Coordination is considered an inferior way of connecting structures, with subordination as thepreferred cohesive device.
 
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Digression is heavily discouraged as a straight-line,straightforward pattern of development is preferred.
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English speaking readers expect to see theintroduction of purpose at the beginning of thepiece and rely on cohesive devices and transitionalmarkers provided by the writer to guide the reader.
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Writers take on primary responsibility for creatingmeaning; they have to spell everything out for thereader: main ideas, details and how the detailsconnect to one another as well as to the main idea.
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Preference for direct, concise vocabulary.
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Standard paragraph structure: first sentence statesthe main idea, the main idea is followed by two tofour sentences that support, prove or elaborate onthe first sentence, the concluding sentence re-states your point, brings it to a conclusion and willideally create a bridge to the next paragraph.
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Puts premium on individual effort and extols thevalue of individualism, thus the “I” perspective ishighly valued.
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When writing descriptive prose, American studentstend to create subjective impressions in theirdescriptions, describing people or things or eventsin relation to themselves.
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Narratives follow a particular template and isaction-oriented, presupposes a logical sequence of events and centers on a particular character/s towhich the action, or sequence of events, happens.
ROMANCE: French,Italian,Portuguese,Spanish
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Distinguishing feature, in contrast to English, isdiversion. Readers of these languages expect tofind embellishment of ideas that are tangential tothe main line of explanation.
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Use of broad, philosophical introductions, especiallyin formal writing.
French
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Students are taught a specific essay format inFrench schools; a five part pattern that includesintroduction, thesis, antithesis, synthesis andconclusion.
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Students are taught to use the introduction to raisequestions or define terms and suggest the form andargument of the body.
Spanish
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Formality and elaboration are typical anddemonstrate a preference for long sentencescomposed with complex clause structures.
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Spanish writers also use more pronouns than nativeEnglish writers.
EASTERNRHETORIC
SEMITIC: Arabic, Farsi,
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Paragraph development is based on a series of parallel coordinated clauses
 
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Hebrew
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Characterized as very elaborate to recreate thesame elaborate intricacy that the Arabic languageprovides
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When Arabic writers write in English, they use asignificantly higher number of coordinatedsentences (
The boy was here, and he had a goat,and the goat ate the grass, and the boy took thegoat home
.)
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Another characteristic is repetition which can be inthe form of paraphrasing content on the idea levelor on a smaller scale through the use of specificsynonyms and hyponyms.
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Written discourse is rooted in strong oral traditionswhich mean keeping their message simple andclear and the use of repetition ensures that theaudience still understands the ideas.
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Attention is paid to the writer’s relation to thereader. Arabic writers often start essays with broadsweeping information about their place within theirfamilies and societies, including references toreligion.
ASIAN: Chinese, Japanese, Korean
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Essays use an indirect approach and come to thepoint only at the end
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 The development of the paragraph is said to be“turning and turning in a widening gyre” with thecircles of the gyres turning around the subject,showing it from a variety of tangential views butwithout presenting it directly.
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 These writers tend to use an inductive or “quasi-inductive” pattern of idea development in whichthere is a delayed introduction of purpose”. Mainideas are not strongly stated at the onset and whiledetails are presented, direct connections betweenthem and a main idea are not. This is to get“readers to think for themselves, to consider theobservations made, and to draw their ownconclusions.”
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 The task of the writer is to stimulate the reader intocontemplating the issue or issues that might nothave been previously considered.
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Asian discourse strategies often employ abstractvocabulary that gives it an official or artist “sound”Chinese
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Founded on Chinese culture and tradition; Chinesestudents are taught specific formats for essays(eight-legged essay, qi-cheng-jun-he)
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Chinese writing is also characterized by apreference to draw upon the wisdom andknowledge of previous texts rather than to relyupon personal viewpoints. Writers will often includestories from Chinese history or mythology. Thisshows sophistication and respect for authority.
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Use of elaborate and abstract vocabulary.
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