As it Turns Out, My World was Just an Island

          I have followed the little bunny down its rabbit hole and found a world I’m upside down in.  What world is this, you say?  It is the world of contrastive rhetoric—a reality, new to me, that jars my own.  See, I’ve been an adoring groupie of the English language for as long as I can remember.  From the time I was a little girl, I nabbed every chance I could get to draw nearer to words, whether it was a writing contest, an after school book club, or even a spelling bee.  Then, all grown up, I picked English literature as my major.  Who does that, except for those who have some sort of an allegiant love for the English language? 

            So, imagine my surprise and momentarily blurred vision when I discovered that the world of writing that I’ve come to dearly love and know is hardly a world at all, but rather a single island, wedged somewhere between other islands in a cluster of multitudes of islands.  This is how I felt when I came away from last Thursday’s class having learned about the many different ways rhetoric is structured in different cultures.  Granted, it’s not that I never expected writing styles to vary from culture to culture.  Clothes, foods, manners…all societies have certain trademarks to their ways, and I realize that this is what makes cultures diverse.  What I failed to realize, however, is just how vastly differentiated “good writing” is because of this diversity.  The whole structure of rhetoric is not an iron-clad, universal approach to appeal that magnificently works its magic on the hearts of humanity.  Everything I’ve ever learned about good writing, as a whole, is not infinite and limitless—it ends at our borders and takes on different forms for different countries, almost becoming something else entirely, and I don’t have a close relationship with it when it takes on other forms, which makes my confidence tremble.  And it makes me feel smaller.

            Nevertheless—and a big nevertheless, at that—it’s not the end of the world.  Actually, my world just got bigger.  There are many, many forms of rhetoric in writing that I know next to nothing about, so there are oodles of new things to learn that I get to look forward to.  In this regard, I see my future consultations with multilingual writers as much as a learning experience for me as it is a teaching one.  If he or she structured their papers to be a powerhouse in the rhetoric of their own native country, I want to understand just what it is that made it that way.  I want him or her to know that I want to know about it, and I appreciate it, and I hope this same willingness can be extended towards me and the love of my first language: English.  Essentially, I want to help multilingual writers gain the rhetorical strength to make their voices heard well.  One thing that truly is universal is the longing to be heard and understood, and if I can help them achieve this, then I have done something worthwhile.  Perhaps I can help them to feel not so small.