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Internationals Writing inEnglish

An Introduction to Contrastive Rhetoric

Spring 2007Laurie MillerGeorge Mason UniversityEnglish Language Institute

Author’s Note

This is a copy of a paper I wrote for the World Bank in the spring of 2007. They use it in training for employeeswhose first language is not English to help them focus on underlying patterns of explanation in their English writingthat may make it difficult for native speakers of English to read.

Internationals Writing in English

Writing in any language involves more than a working knowledge of grammar, vocabulary and spelling.There are thought connections and organization patterns that extend beyond sentences and go deeper than thesurface meaning of sentences alone. These elements of writing can be referred to as elements of discourse. And, asany person who has command of more than one language knows, these larger communication patterns are not thesame in every language. No matter how strong an American high school student’s written French is in terms of grammar and vocabulary, if she becomes a foreign exchange student in France, she will not earn good grades on her essays if she writes American style essays in French. Her teachers will not find the important “introduction-thesis-antithesis-synthesis-conclusion” pattern they expect to find. Our student’s problem can be easily fixed, of course, byintroducing her to the appropriate elements she must include in her French essays, but sometimes non-native writershave different kinds of problems related to discourse.Take, for instance, a twenty-three year old Korean writer who has completed his undergraduate degree inKorea. Throughout his studies there, whether he wrote in Korean or English, his teachers advised him to write in the“introduction-body-conclusion” format that demands a writer use the main idea–support pattern so familiar toAmerican students. Yet, when he took classes at a university in the United States, his professor always complainedthat she could not easily differentiate between main ideas and supporting details in his papers. She said she couldfind an introduction, body and conclusion in his essays, but that within the body section his main ideas were vagueand that he did not include enough details. This student’s problem was not leaving out an element as the Americanforeign exchange student had, rather his problem was related to how he presented his ideas within an accepted pattern: he placed the ideas before his reader without overtly emphasizing connections and conclusions that could bedrawn from them; his sentence and over-arching argumentation style were more “indirect” than what his American professor expected to find.Such problems are inevitable for people writing in a language that is not their first, “native” language. Butit is not easy to say how to overcome them. Being immersed in the target language and its culture for an extended period of time is always helpful, but sometimes not enough. One possible approach is to look at the commondiscourse patterns and strategies of a writer’s first, native, language and then look to see if those patterns appear inhis or her writing in English. If they do, the writer can work to more consciously use the discourse patterns of