Cultural Influences On Styles of Writing and Presenting Ideas

So there do seem to be ways of approaching knowledge and study which are given more emphasis in some cultures than in others, and in some subjects, or disciplines, than in others. There seem also to be distinctive styles of writing and organizing ideas which reflect these differences.

Robert Kaplan, an American, drew attention to the cultural differences in the nature of rhetoric' based on his analysis of the written work of overseas students studying in his Los Angeles university.1 He argues that different cultures produce distinctive

Approaches to thinking and writing, just as they each have a distincti v e language. He suggests that it is a fallacy to assume that ‘because student can write an adequate essay in .his native language he can necessarily write an adequate essay in a second language'. Briefly, he supports his view by analysis of the students' writing. He claims that there are at least five distinct patterns for structuring an ‘expository' paragraph - a paragraph that is developing ideas rather than telling a story.

Within Western cultures, for example, he distin­guishes the English pattern which he calls linear, i.e. moving directly from the central idea to explanations and examples, from Romance and Russian patterns which permit some movement away from the central idea. In the English pattern such divergence would break the ru les of relevance. Kaplan also identifies a Semitic pattern, covering the Arabic and related cultural traditions, which emphasizes the de velopment of an idea through parallelism: a statement is made and then repeated with a slight variation which adds to or reflects or contradicts the original meaning. For example, both the Bible and the Koran contain passages of highly poetic parallelism: