There are many ways in which the definition of good writing can vary from culture to culture. Below is a list of some features of good writing from other cultures that are different from the features valued in western academic writing:

Some Features of Good Writing in Other Cultures

· Conscientious attention to surrounding context rather than to the subject
itself

· Extensive preliminaries

· Stories that seem unrelated to the main point but that are meant to give
the reader the feel of the situation

· Digressive or extraneous material that seems unrelated to a main idea

· Abstract language

· No stated position or thesis

· Reader-responsible prose

· Undocumented sources

· Use of sources to show knowledge rather than to critique them or use them
to add weight to an assertion

· Unifying rhetoric meant to show valuing of social solidarity, sometimes
in the form of rhetorical questions and a tendency to gloss over specifics
that might raise doubts

· Poetic features such as image, metaphor, and inference

· Ambiguity and lack of closure

· Politeness strategies to show respect for the reader's position and
intelligence, such as

· Omission

· Indirection

· Respectful silence

(adapted from Helen Fox, Listening to the World)

Note that these features are often ones that American university professors use as criteria for ineffective writing. Leki explains how different readings of the same text can result in a "misfit" of writer and reader: "English readers do not rely heavily on analogy, an appeal to intuition, the beauty of language, or a reference to opinions of the learned of antiquity. Yet conventions of argumentation in other cultures may require precisely that recourse to analogy, intuition, beauty, or shared communal wisdom. Thus, a misfit may occur between the writer's and the reader's sense of how to argue a point" (92).

While it is tempting to view these varying rhetorics as superficial structures which students can easily learn, Corbett reminds us that these rhetorics emerge from ideologies, and one ideology is not easily traded for another: "I suggest that these students are unable to negotiate conflicting rhetorics because they contain conflicting ideologies, and students do not have the means of writing about these ideologies without being rhetorically entangled in their contradictions" (Corbett 32).

Corbett suggest we adopt "a pedagogy which acknowledges this conflict [which] will enable L2 students, as well as students whose first language is English but whose rhetoric represents diverse economic and social cultures, to use their resistance as a heuristic by helping them understand it as a rhetorical problem that calls for a rhetorical solution. One such solution is for students to create a new discourse that allows them to negotiate the borders between conflicting rhetoric" (Corbett 32). Panneta urges western academic faculty to make our "Western writing conventions explicit" (8). Matalene recommends we see our rhetorical tradition as one of many, with its own limitations: "But Western rhetoric is only Western. As we commit ourselves to reinventing our own rhetorical tradition, we need to understand the limits as well as the virtues of tradition. And as our world becomes a global village in with ethno-centrism is a less and less appropriate response, we need to understand and appreciate rhetorical systems that are different than our own" (79).

Fox recommends that we see these rhetorical/cultural conflicts as opportunities for our own enrichment: " But while cultural collisions always have the potential to produce shock or distaste, they also have inherent in them the power to enrich the way both the world majority and the western minority understand and experience the world" (126).