Lecture Notes Week 01

Below you'll find the most important information from our week 1 seminar.

Communication patterns

Consider the scenarios below. Draw your communication pattern in these situations. Include words which describe what you do to elaborate on your doodle.

• When you get home from school and your mother is home. You're hungry and tired, and you want some food but are not in the mood to make any. What do you say or do?

• You are going to meet a good friend in a café, and you want to propose to work together this weekend on a major assignment (basically, you need help as you think you can not do it yourself) - what do you do to negotiate this situation?

• You are writing an Essay for this class about Rhetoric and Composition - how will you write this task?

• You visit Italy, and you arrive at your Airbnb, but nobody seems to be there to meet you, you're annoyed and tired, and you have to call the owners about the key. What do you do?

Contrastive Rhetoric and Famous Doodles and Diagrams that visualise communication patterns across cultures

Kaplan, 1966 Famous Doodles in Contrastive Rhetoric

Kaplan's (1966) doodles, as they are often referred to, provide a perspective how early experiences of different student backgrounds in an Anglo-Americal context communicate differently. The study is considered controversial and perhaps too simplistic in representing patterns. However, in the context of understanding Rhetoric, it can be useful to map out or draw attention to different ways communication happen in different contexts, genres, persons, etc. The same has been done in other studies (see below) to describe how different cultures communicate in more professional contexts.

When Cultures Collide Richard D. Lewis

In When Cultures Collide by Richard D. Lewis, various patterns of communications have been analysed in business contexts. Below is a small sample of some of these cultures and what they value. Again, these patterns can help us to visualise specific choices speakers (communicators) make to "influence" others. To what degree do you agree or disagree? To what degree do you recognise these patterns?

Storytelling

Finally, below is a selection of visuals used to describe some very popular storytelling techniques.

Here are some questions for you to think about

1. How would you describe and explain the different approaches to communication across cultures, genres, and contexts?

2. What vocabulary comes to your mind when describing communication?

3. How useful is it to know and understand these various patterns of communication?

4. What's the difference between communication and some of the other words you would use to describe the above patterns?