Cultural Rhetorics

1. American Academic Rhetoric
2. African American Vernacular English
3. Other Cultural Rhetorics (Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern, Spanish, Native American, ASL)
4. Some Sources for Further Reading

I. American Academic Rhetoric

Writing in many academic disciplines focus on two major areas (or canons) of rhetoric--arrangement and style. Sharon Crowley points out that in American academic rhetoric, arrangement usually emphasizes some version of the following elements:

• Introduction
• Statement of the issue
• Division of the issue into its parts
• Confirmation of the writer’s argument or point
• Refutation of other views
• Conclusion

Style usually emphasizes an “objective” stance, which draws support from so-called facts and the testimony of authorities.  Most disciplines pressure students to avoid referring too openly to themselves or their opinions.  Third person is preferable, because it conveys a sense of disinterestedness--although some disciplines even favor passive voice for the same reason (e.g. psychology).  Words and sentences must be plain, “nonliterary,” and concise.  Grammar, punctuation, and format must meet expectations of Edited American English.

Such writing sounds odd, cold, or even insulting to writers who come from different rhetorical backgrounds.  Those writers (including most of us and the people we tutor) must recognize that American academic rhetoric may be increasingly shaped by the practical demands of business, government, medicine, educational administration, and other communication sites that favor writers who can get messages across simply and directly.

American academic rhetoric is only one type of cultural rhetoric that has its own history, motives, conventions, users/abusers, and so forth.  But many other kinds of cultural rhetorics abound in North America alone, each with its own unique and complex elements.  Teachers and professors can get acquainted with the elements that distinguish the differences between American academic rhetoric and other cultural rhetorics, so they can help writers find ways to combine rhetorics to a greater advantage.  This is a more controversial, but more effective approach to helping writers improve, based on studies by Geneva Smitherman.

A list describing characteristics of a few of these other cultural rhetoric follows.

II. African American Vernacular English (AAVE)

Keith Gilyard and Elaine Richardson point out several distinctive elements of arrangement and style that exist in AAVE.

Arrangement in AAVE may employ:

• Direct address, conversational tone.  These two are not necessarily the same, but often co-occur.  Speaking directly to audience.  Also, can be a kind of call/response.  Example: “Would you rather be respected as Aunt Jemima and Sambo or Queen Nzinga…?  As yourself or someone else?”
• Narrative sequencing.  Dramatic retelling of a story implicitly linked to topic, to make a point.  Reporting events dramatically acted out or narrated.  For example: “I have learned … some things that never crossed my path in thirteen years of miseducation…. This was very important for me because I… felt [my writing was wrong and far beyond improving….”
• Call/response (structural).  Writer returns repetitiously to the prompt as a structural device, checking for constant connection with the question or text at hand.  A repeated invocation of the language from the prompt, manifested as a refrain.  Example: “…to be a member of the AAVE Culture and literate….”  “Black and literate....”  “Blacks being literate” (repeated four times).
• Topic association.  A series of associated segments that may seem anecdotal in character, linked implicitly to a particular topical event or theme, but with no explicit statement of the overall theme.
• Testifying.  Telling the truth through story.  Bearing witness to the righteousness of a condition or situation.  Example: “I use [the works of Angelou and Douglass] to liberate myself from my hardships to come.”

Style in AAVE may employ:

• Rhythmic, dramatic, evocative language.  Use of metaphors, significations, vivid imagery.  Example: “Our history through the eyes of white America after it has been cut, massacured and censored is pushed down Blacks throath.”
• Proverbs, aphorisms, Biblical verses.  Employment of familiar maxims or Biblical verses.  Example: “….there is a time and place for everything.”
• Sermonic tone reminiscent of traditional Black church rhetoric, especially in vocabulary, imagery, metaphor.  Example: “The man should once again be the leader of the household as God intended and the female… the helpmate.”
• Cultural references.  Reference to cultural items/icons that usually carry symbolic meaning in AAVE communities.  Example: “There are still those Uncle Toms…out to get you.”
• Ethnolinguistic idioms.  Use of language that bears particular meaning in Black communities.  Example: “…Black english is a ‘Black Thang’ you wouldn’t understand…  That’s on the real!”
• Verbal inventiveness, unique nomenclature.  Example: “…[W]e will begin dealing with this deep seeded self-destruction and self-hate….”
• Cultural values, community consciousness.  Expressions of concern for the development of African Americans; concern for welfare of entire community, not just individuals.  Example: “Before Blacks can come together in racial harmony they need to strengthen their own people.  Trying to unite… will only cause more problems if we have not taken care of our own business.”
• Field dependency.  Involvement with and immersion in events and situations; personalizing phenomena; lack of distance from topics and subjects.  Example: “…[w]e should first try to accomplish better race matters within ourselves.  We can do this by patronizing and supporting our Black community.”
• Tonal semantics (repetition of sounds or structures to emphasize meaning).  Example: “European views are the rules….”  “We are victimized…” [structure repeated four times in subsequent sentences].
• Signifying: Use of indirection to make points.  May employ oppositional logic, overstatement, understatement, and/or reliance on reader’s knowledge of implicit assumption that is taken to be common knowledge (shared worldview).  Example: “In light of having limited means of getting first hand information we then have had to rely on books and the media to provide us with an unbiased account of information… we know how honest the media is” (all points cited verbatim, 41-42)

Denise Troutman adds:

• Reporting action, employing “went and did” pattern.  The appropriate use of this form dictates that the utterer conveys displeasure and dissatisfaction with the interlocuter’s action.  Example: “He went and mumbled something at the officer.”
• Intentional use of fragments for emphasis.  (a strategy of African American clergy).  Example: “Racism.  The first thought that comes to my mind is the Deep South with its old signs of ‘Whites Only’ and ‘Colored Only.’”
• Sounding off.  Getting your own back by telling others and by pontificating on a mistreatment.  Example: “Who did the white people think they were?  They are no better than anybody else.  OK, in some cases they have better hair but that is about it” (32-34)

III. Elements of other cultural rhetorics

Ilona Leki asserts that unfamiliarity with other cultural rhetorical traditions encourages the assumption that non-native American writers or writers whose home language is not English are illogical.  Leki points out that rhetorical strategies, not logic, are the issue.  To illustrate, here are a few distinguishing rhetorical elements from different cultures:

Chinese rhetoric.

Arrangement:

• Writer provides a series of concrete examples to make a point but may neither state the point nor relate the examples to each other
• Writer does not blurt out the main idea but rather builds up to it by discussing ideas which are related to the main idea but which will not be pursued
• Writer does not provide a conclusion but leaves the reader to sense the conclusion

Style:

• Writer provides justification for statements based on communal wisdom and past authority
• Writer seeks to be obscure with an audience to establish scholarly authority
• Writer shares many bits of memorized teachings from the past
• Writer avoids verbosity or repetition

Japanese rhetoric.

Arrangement:

• Writer follows four-part organization
1. begin an argument, but don’t state it explicitly
2. develop the argument
3. return overtly to the baseline theme, then turn to a subtheme that has a connection, but not a directly connected association
4. bring all the parts together with a conclusion or summary or both
• Writer works from specifics to general

Style:

• Writer relates textual information to personal experience
• Writer tries to make prose aesthetically acceptable (engaging the emotions through beauty or surprise)

Middle Eastern rhetoric.

Arrangement:

• Writer prizes coordination, parallelism, and balancing of ideas over hierarchy and subordination
• Writer seeks multiple ways to say the same thing

Style:

• Writer uses words for effect rather than precision or meaning
• Writer incorporates flamboyant imagery
• Writer uses exaggeration and overstatement

Spanish rhetoric.

Arrangement:

• Writer engages in digressions, asides, and attempts to link the point under discussion to other issues
• Writer explores subtopics at substantial length

Style:

• Writer provides scattered examples and data, concentrating more on generalizing underlying patterns that link them
• Writer works toward leisurely elegance, especially in introductions (see 90-102)

Native American Rhetoric.

Arrangement:

• Writer uses tales to convey tribal beliefs, values, standards, or prohibitions
• Writer uses myths to transport reader to strange, fantastic realms
• Writer recites tribal history or tribal relationships
• Writer interpolates parts of poetry and song

Style:

• Writer dramatizes language, to resemble oral performance
• Writer addresses readers directly, to create sense of ceremonial context
• Writer uses frequent humor to parody or satirize human behavior
• Writer refers frequently to natural world

American Sign Language.

Arrangement:

• Writer uses reduplicative sentence structure, phrases, and words to clarify meaning
• Writer makes frequent use of shorter sentences, prizing conciseness and directness
• Writer places emphasis on key nouns or verbs, sometimes omitting (or adding) articles, prepositions, or inflections

Style:

• Writer prefers simple, unambiguous words and avoids idiomatic language
• Writers may identify herself as part of a community that shares the same language, cultural values, history, and social life
• Writer "fronts" her identity to affirm that self-identity is more salient than an essay prompt or assignment
• Writer may use language that challenges those biased toward the auditory mode of communication

IV. Sources

1. Anderson, Jacqueline. "Essays that Never Were: Deaf Identity and Resistance in the Mainstream Classroom." Outbursts in Academe: Multiculturalism and Other Sources of Conflict. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1998. 66-86.
2. Balester, Valerie. Cultural Divide: A Study of African-American College-Level Writers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1993.
3. Crowley, Sharon. Ancient Rhetoric for Contemporary Students. New York: Macmillan College Publishing Company, 1994.
4. Davis, Leonnard. "Deafness and Insight: The Deafened Moment as a Critical Modality." College English 57 (1995): 881-900.
5. Gilyard, Keith, and Elaine Richardson. “Students’ Right to Possibility: Basic Writing and African American Rhetoric,” Insurrections: Approaches to Resistance in Composition Studies. Ed. Andrea Greenbaum. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001. 37-51.
6. Gilyard, Keith. Voices of the Self: A Study of Linguistic Competence. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991.
7. Leki, Ilona. Understanding ESL Writers: A Guide for Teachers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Boynton/Cook, 1992.
8. Lesko, John. "American Indian Rhetoric." Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition. Ed. Theresa Enos. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996. 7-9.
9. Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone." Profession 91: 33-39.
10. Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin' and Testifyin': The Language of Black America. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977.
11.        .“’The Blacker the Berry, the Sweeter the Juice’: African American Student Writers.” The Need for Story: Cultural Diversity in Classroom and Community. Ed. Anne Hass Dyson and Celia Genishi.  Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994.  80-101.
12. Troutman, Denise.  “Whose Voice Is It Anyway?  Marked Features in the Writing of Black English Speakers.” Writing in Multicultural Settings.  Ed. Carol Severino, Juan Guerra, and Johnnella Butler. New York: Modern Language Association, 1997. 32-34.