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Contrastive studies of Chinese rhetoric have been haunted by several myths. First, there has been an overemphasis upon the eight-legged essay, tested in the imperial civil service exam for centuries, as virtually the sole representative of expository and persuasive writing in ancient China. Robert Kaplan, Carolyn Matalene, and Guanjun Cai, for example, have concurred on the centrality of the essay in traditional expository and persuasive writings. As Cai claims, "It thus constituted the basic framework of expository and persuasive writing in classical Chinese and has since influenced academic writing in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and modern China" (282). However, Bernard Mohan and Winnie Lo disagree. They suggest that the eight-legged examination essay is one among several rhetorical and literary forms in classical Chinese writing. The second myth concerns the rhetorical patterns of Chinese expository and persuasive writings. Kaplan claims that "Oriental" writing tends to be circular and indirect rather than linear or direct. A subject is not discussed directly but is approached from a variety of indirectly related angles ("Cultural"). Third, and closely related to the question of rhetorical patterns, is the issue of self and personal voice. Ron Scollon agrees with Kaplan that Chinese writers are indirect in presenting their thoughts. He attributes indirectness to different views of the self in Chinese and Western cultures. In modern English writing, an individual's experience and voice are emphasized, and the individual is encouraged to seek and express his or her true self in explicit and unequivocal terms. Scollon argues that the Chinese perception of self as a member entangled in various human relations makes it difficult for the Chinese writer to be direct, to express a point of view in a thesis statement at the beginning of a piece of writing, and as a result to employ deductive reasoning.
These myths, we believe, have two points of origin. First, most scholars have relied heavily on secondary sources to make inferences about classical Chinese writing. Second, these mythic issues have come from the extensive scholarly attention paid to the eight-legged essay. Sustained by an orientalist mentality, as Mary Garrett, Yameng Liu, and Ryuko Kubota and Al Lehner have remarked on various occasions, early contrastive rhetoricians found the eightlegged essay ideal in representing their perception of exotic Asian...