True Story 10.01
Students perplexed by advice on how to write American style
The setting for this story
Helen Fox taught abroad and worked as a Peace Corps trainer before returning to the U.S. and becoming a coach and teacher of graduate students from abroad who were struggling to adapt to the American way of writing academic, or expository, prose. In her own words, Helen shares some of what she learned during her career.
A story of misaligned minds1
Amazingly few graduate students from non-Western societies can write academic prose to the satisfaction of their U.S. professors.
A typical difference between American and non-Western students lies in how they respond to advice for improving their papers, like “You’re off the subject here,” “Needs examples,” and “Help the reader see why that’s true.” Most American students understand such advice; most non-Westerners don’t.
Differences also occur in the meanings students assign to concepts such as “clarity,” “organization,” “coherence,” and “depth,” which come up often when professors critique students’ expository prose.
Helen’s question
What’s the underlying cause of foreign students’ challenges to writing good academic prose?
Critique of story 10.01
Helen eventually realized that it’s not about how students write. It’s about how they think.
From our earliest years, most of us learn to perceive and conceptualize the world, and to explain it to others, analytically, that is, by breaking whole things into their constituent parts. Those of us who advance beyond high school get additional training in dealing with the world in this way.
Helen’s research revealed that American professors admired papers with these characteristics:
- began each paragraph with an overview of its topic;
- provided examples to support key assertions;
- compared, part by part, various aspects of the topic;
- presented step by step whatever was being discussed;
- offered an interpretation that didn’t parrot others’ ideas;
- concluded by referencing previously examined parts; and
- wrote it all with little or no digression or embellishment.
These qualities typify an analytic style that attends to parts, discusses them comparatively, often uses examples, proceeds methodically, and arrives at a conclusion based on cause–effect or other logical interactions among the parts. More fundamentally, these qualities characterize a way of perceiving the world that is central to our Western heritage and that, at least in the West, generated the rise of experimental science. In societies beyond Western influence, most people perceive the world in different ways – ways that work well for them.
When youth from such societies enter American universities, many bring with them little or no experience in thinking analytically or writing expository prose, i.e., in the analytic style. Thus, few can write in a way that passes muster with their professors. And they struggle to grasp their professors’ tips about how to improve.
For thought
Analytic perception and patterns of thought typically are contrasted with holistic (or relational) perception and patterns of thought. The basic distinction between them is that analysis narrowly focuses on the isolated, separate elements that interconnect to make up a whole thing or concept; holism responds broadly to an intact, homogeneous whole together with its surrounding context.
Holism is an elusive concept for people raised in pervasively analytic Western societies. Yet it’s a crucial distinction for U.S. teachers of students recently arrived from certain non-Western world regions. That’s why analysis–holism is the focus of the following stories and of Chapter 9.
Related stories
Stories 1.14 and 10.05 describe foreign students’ struggles to write expository American English.
Go to Chapter 1 Quick-Links | Go to Chapter 4 Quick-Links | Go to Chapter 7 Quick-Links | Return to Chapter 10 Quick-Links
Endnotes:
1 Fox, xiv–xviii. See also Campbell & Li, 382–83, 390.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.