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Beyond Contrastive Rhetoric: Helping International Lawyers Use Cohesive Devices In U.S. Legal Writing, Elizabeth R. Baldwin
Beyond Contrastive Rhetoric: Helping International Lawyers Use Cohesive Devices In U.S. Legal Writing, Elizabeth R. Baldwin
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This Article attempts to use linguistics, specifically text analysis and pragmatics, to help explain how and why lawyers who are non-native speakers of English (NNS) struggle with cohesion in their U.S. legal writing. Then in light of that discussion, it offers a four-step, receptive and productive exercise to engage students in contrastive analysis of cohesive features across languages and cultures.
It begins by distinguishing coherence (top-down flow related to rhetorical preferences and organization of content and argument) from cohesion (bottom-up flow related to the surface features that exhibit connections between clauses). As background, it explores the role of cohesion in …