Contrastive rhetoric: issues in technical and professional correspondence

In the modern workplace, American employees can be confronted with correspondence created within a foreign rhetoric, whether from a writer located in another culture or a from co-worker whose first language is other than English. It may be tempting for the naive employee, ignorant of contrastive rhetoric issues, to judge the motives and the intellect of the writer solely in light of American professional schemata. Contrastive rhetoric is the study of the culture-specific meanings embedded within document structure and the sequencing of ideas. The paper outlines a training module designed to alert participants to the rhetorical issues surrounding professional correspondence in the technical workplace.