Paragraph organization in English and Chinese academic prose: A comparative study

This dissertation reports the findings of a comparative analysis of Chinese and English academic writing with respect to paragraph organization. The data base consisted of 578 English and 536 Chinese paragraphs in 20 English and an equal number of Chinese articles taken from academic journals published in the U.S.A. and the P.R.C. Interactional Analysis, an analytical system developed by Tirkkonen-Condit in 1985, was employed with some modification for the analytical task in the study.; It was found that Chinese and English academic writing are not unlike in terms of methods used for paragraph development. However, there are noticeable differences between the two in the frequency with which each particular method is employed. Specifically, English writing exhibits an unmistakable tendency to favor deductive organization, whereas Chinese writing in general is more or less evenly divided between deductive, inductive, and mixed (i.e., a combination of the two) organizations. Moreover, while English writing shows considerable stylistic consistency across writers, Chinese writing appears inconsistent in that some writers follow a predominantly deductive style similar to that of English, whereas others use proportionally much fewer deductive and much more inductive and mixed paragraphs.; The results support the view that rhetorical organization is culture-specific. But the lack of stylistic consistency in the case of Chinese needs to be accounted for. The present writer believes that the cross-writer stylistic variation has been caused by the interaction between Chinese rhetorical tradition on the one hand and English influence on the other. This belief is backed up by a survey of the historical context in which modern Chinese academic writing has evolved and a supplementary analysis of the paragraphs in 10 classical Chinese argumentative essays.; The findings of this study suggest that Chinese academic writing is more writer-oriented than English academic writing regarding paragraph organization. They also suggest that stylistic inconsistency may very well exist not only in Chinese academic writing, but in the academic writing of many other non-English-speaking cultures due to English influence. The implications of the findings for contrastive research and ESL/EFL instruction are discussed.