Deductive, Inductive, and Quasi-Inductive Writing Styles in Persian and English: Evidence from Media Discourse

Abstract

This study intends to locate the place topic sentence(s) in popular Persian and English newspaper editorials, and, then, check them in terms of their paragraph organization of deduction, induction, and quasi-induction. For the purpose of the study, 98 editorials (49 for each language) were given to four specialist raters to determine the exact place of the topic sentence in the corpora. A two-way chi-square was run for the whole data and a set of one-way chi-squares for the comparison of the individual subcategories in the study. The results revealed that Persian writing is different from that of English regarding the inductive and quasi-inductive writing styles and the number of the topic sentence(s) in each editorial. However, the two languages are similar in the use of the deductive writing style. Furthermore, Persian writers prefer to develop their editorials quasi-inductively while English writers prefer to use the inductive style and rarely develop their paragraphs quasi-inductively. These writing preferences imply the existence of cross-cultural differences between the two languages.Key words: Contrastive rhetoric; Topic sentence; Writing styles; Deduction; induction; Quasi-induction