Blog Post #5

What interests me most about this article and general ideas around non-native English speakers is this idea that "nonnative English speakers who write in English violate the norms of English rhetoric, that "each language and each culture has a paragraph order unique to itself, and that part of the learning of a particular language is the mastering of its logical system."

Of course, different cultures structure papers differently, but as long as long as the argument of the essay is successfully relayed indentation and paragraph order don't matter much. Especially considering that most of my students (almost all of them white Americans) write as if no one ever taught them the five paragraph essay. Their arguments are muddled, there are no topic sentences, etc. So I don't really understand why this is an important disquisition between native and nonnative speakers. I have to each ALL of my students how to structure an academic paper proper within the context of the class.

I think the larger issues with writing from nonnative speakers are issues related to learning any new language. Things like missing articles, word order, clarity on what the assignments are asking, etc. 

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