Written Discourse

In class this week, we focused on 'written discourse'. It was quite fun because we got to analyze writings and how they relate to individual cultures.

Kaplan’s ‘framework’ (I guess that’s what it’s called?) certainly has its merits, and it was so super interesting to realize that there *are* actually trends between the way a person writes and the culture one is from. One really cool thing to learn was that English is written in a linear fashion, which, if I’m not wrong, is what we were all taught to do since primary school – we must always have a topic statement, subdivisions, examples and illustrations and have to close off the paragraph neatly. I think if I wrote in the manner that the semitic framework proposed (with the parallel constructions), I’d probably fail my English and wouldn’t be in NUS right now. The most useful thing to have gained from Kaplan’s study is that it probably allows me to better understand what another culture requires (i.e. their expectations) in terms of writing. For example, I probably wouldn’t be able to write the say that I can write in the exact manner that a German speaker would, but from the framework, I could probably guess what is the style of the written discourse they would be looking out for. So I guess knowing what kind of culture the other party resides in can help me in my writing and also probably minimize any sort of cultural misunderstandings.

This is just a question that I had in my mind: Does the increasing hybridization of culture (especially due to globalization, transnationalism, diaspora etc) mean that Kaplan’s ‘framework’ will slowly hold less sway in academia? His study is situated in 1972, and it’s been roughly 30 years already, and I do think the world has changed much and, as Dr. Deng mentioned, to view written discourse in such an ethnocentric manner is quite dangerous. I mean, what would the paragraph development of a Mandarin speaker, writing in French, look like?