Contrastive Rhetoric

[zmaalej]

Dear all,

I do not, of course, mean to short-circuit the ongoing discussion about RP,
but I thought it might help to conceive of it in contrastive terms. Since
there are a lot of listers involved in tutoring on composition, I think it
useful to ask them the following question: What kind of problems would you
face/are you facing and will your students face/are your students facing if
you are/were teaching a multi-cultural group?

I have a short excerpt I have been using in my own composition classes
(whose source I unfortunately don't know, and if any of you can recognise
it, please let me know), which might serve as a stimulant for a discussion:

Logic, which is the basis of rhetoric, comes from culture; it is not
universal. Rhetoric, therefore, is not universal either, but varies from
culture to culture. The rhetorical system of one language is neither better
nor worse than the rhetorical system of another language, but it is
different.

All the best
Zouhair