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Showing posts from February, 2012

Contrastive Ethos: Chinese and English Rhetoric Continued

~Blog Two~ The Ethos of the Quoted             Confucius quite literally wrote the book on education in China. Since that time, a good education has always required an extensive quoting knowledge of the man's many writings and of the works of various other revered scholars. Early Chinese educators believed that the study of the works produced by these great minds would in turn create more scholars just like them. Hence, the more that one knew of the classics, the more intelligent and worthy one was considered to be. Credit was given by emulation. In other words, a person's knowledge of other writers allowed them, in a sense, to borrow the respect that those other writers had already earned and stand on it themselves.             This is where the extensive use of quotes in Chinese writing comes from. It is a part of their rhetoric, stemming from a long tradition. As mentioned above, the use of quotes allows the author to borrow ethos. To an extent, it can be said th

Contrastive Ethos: Chinese and English Rhetoric

Introduction             Every culture has their own paradigm, their own way of seeing the world. They each have central values specific to their own identity, and these values play an integral role in the shaping of how members of each culture form their arguments in literary formats. For example, in China, people place a strong emphasis on who a person is and on paying the respect due that person. Therefore, a person's ethos is considerably more important in China that it is in many Western cultures. ~Blog One~ The Ethos of the Author             The ethos of the writer, his supposed character or reliability as seen on the written page, is important in written Chinese. This comes from a tradition begun over a thousand years ago, when the masses were uneducated and only a few could claim the distinction of knowledge. Those who were educated, as part of Confucius theory, assumed the responsibility of educating those who were not in both ethics/morals and practica

International Writing Centers Week 2012

How is everyone celebrating? IWCWPoster2012

UCLAWC "Tutorpalooza"

Chris LeCluyse of Westminster College in Salt Lake City gives us a round-up of the Utah Community Literacy and Writing Consortium's "Staff Retreat" (a.k.a. Tutorpalooza) last weekend on the UCLAWC blog , replete with video and comics.