Contrastive Analysis Of Persuasive Writing In Chinese And English Application Letters In Terms Of Rhetoric

Rhetoric can be defined as the art of using language effectively and persuasively. Contrastive rhetoric belongs to the basic tradition of text analysis; it is a conjunction of text linguistics and contrastive analysis. Robert Kaplan (1966) proposed a notion of contrastive rhetoric as a hypothesis to account for some persistent characteristic patterns in ESL students' writing. Unfortunately, over the years, the research in this field has been focused on expository writing; the research in application letters is very limited.The current thesis presents a comparative study of some issues in English and Chinese rhetoric, which may serve as examples to illustrate the differences as well as the similarities in the two rhetorical systems. An attempt is made in this thesis to probe into the causes and the origins of rhetorical differences that have been illustrated by looking at philosophical, social-cultural, and linguistic aspects of the two languages. This study maintains the view that rhetoric and writing of any ethnic group reflect the values and language traditions of that culture. Different societies develop their own preferences according to their cultural structure, philosophical implication and cultural values. The rhetoric of each culture is based on those preferences and values. Once people are socialized into those established preferences, it is hard for them to change their rhetorical systems, and hence to write different from those patterns their cultural prefers.This thesis aims to examine the content and organization of application letters in English and Chinese to see the differences in rhetorical techniques between the two languages. The author believes that the unconventional variation observed in ESL writing reflected inherent differences in conceptualizing the organization of persuasive writing, which arise from cultural and linguistic differences. The analyses of the genre in the two languages show us how the varied meaning is created in different cultures to achieve the same purpose. Kaplan (1972) points out that rhetoric is not universal, but varies from culture to culture. This inevitably affects the writing of second language learners when they organize a discourse. Thus the fact that...