Rhetorical Organizations Of Argumentative Essays By English And Chinese Natives: A Contrastive Study

This thesis aims to examine the similarities and differences of the rhetorical organizations in argumentative essays composed by English and Chinese natives. Many researchers in the field of contrastive rhetoric held that English writers prefer direct organization in their argumentative writing, as against Chinese writers'preference of indirect organization. There are still some scholars who insist that Chinese writing is also"direct". Nevertheless, the studies they undertake are flawed with the problems of the excessive reliance on students'compositions and small samples, which impair the credibility of their results. In order to verify the views held by Kaplan and other scholars, this thesis quantitatively analyzes a considerable dataset that comprises the essays composed by natives, and explores the causes of the formation of the rhetorical organizations in English and Chinese to make a further exposition.This research is an integration of quantitative study and qualitative study, which corresponds to two steps. The first step of this research, a quantitative study, in accordance with the criteria of the same genre, similar time of publication, but different writers, selects as the data 100 argumentative essays, composed by native writers, published on the main-stream newspapers in the United States and in China, and statistically analyzes the distributions of thesis statements and topic sentences, since they well reflect the essays'rhetorical organizations. The quantitative study indicates that there are not fundamental differences between American and Chinese natives'writing with regard to rhetorical organizations, although American essays tend to be slightly more direct than their Chinese counterparts.On the basis of the quantitative study, a qualitative study is conducted. The study first explores the philosophical backgrounds contributing to the rhetorical organizations in the two languages. The investigation of Aristotle's views on rhetoric reveals that Aristotle thinks highly of deductive reasoning, which can explain the phenomenon that the majority of English essays are direct. On the other hand, the Chinese, who are molded by Confucianism, advocate an implicit way of expressing. However, a further analysis shows that it is inevitable that Chinese rhetorical organizations have, to some extent, been influenced by Western ones since the New Culture Movement (1915-1923). More importantly, given the fact that writing is a learned ability which needs training and practice, it is argued that writing conventions play a determining role in the formation of rhetorical organizations.In the succeeding section this thesis expounds the writing conventions in English and Chinese respectively. It is found that two currents run through the history of English writing teaching: the"thesis/support"form of articles and the literary essay, which means there are also"indirect"rhetorical structures in English writing, and the simplified writing formula is advocated just for the convenience of teaching. An exploration of Chinese writing books indicates that Chinese writing also tends to prefer the direct approach in terms of rhetorical organizations. In other words, there are many similarities between what Chinese rhetoricians have discussed about the patterns of argumentative writing and those prescribed by English writing textbooks. Nonetheless, due to the view that there is no fixed pattern or format for writing, there is no simplified writing formula in Chinese writing books. It is held that this point eventually results in Chinese writers'neglect of structures in their writing. These findings can provide the rational explanation and further testament for the results in the third chapter.This study firstly has practical significance. Looking for the placements of the thesis statement and the topic sentence to examine the preferential rhetorical patterns is a method that can be easily handled, through which more convincing conclusions can be drawn. Secondly, the findings of this study that there are more similarities than differences between English and Chinese rhetorical organizations, to a certain extent, resolve the controversy mentioned in the first chapter by negating the binary division between English and Chinese rhetorical organizations. Moreover, the findings of this study also provide valuable implications for the reading and writing of texts in L2 learning and teaching. For instance, ESL/EFL writing teachers should lay more stress on rhetorical organizations in their English writing instruction, whereas CSL/CFL writing teacher should lay less stress on rhetorical organizations in their Chinese writing instruction.