Limbu, McCool, & Zeng/JOGLTEP 1(2013) 56-70 Journal of Global Literacies, Technologies, and Emerging Pedagogies Volume 1, Issue 2, March 31, 2013, pp. 56-70 Writing Across Cultures: Understanding and Teaching Writer Responsibility and Reader Responsibility Writing Marohang Limbu ∗ Matthew McCool Xiangjuan Zeng Michigan State University Independent Scholar National Uni. of Defense Technology U.S.A. U.S.A. China Abstract This paper addresses ways of understanding writing strategies, communication approaches, and the teaching of English-language writer responsible syntactic structure. First, we provide a definition of culture that positions intercultural writing in practical terms and then break down the problem into the three important dimensions of culture. Second, we compress all of the many ways that people can write into two types—writer responsibility and reader responsibility. Third, we provide a brief set of tools for how to understand different cultural writing strategies to help teach writer responsibility in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. The goal of our paper is to provide an understanding of writer responsible and reader responsible syntactic structures and then demonstrate a basic technique for teaching it to non-native speakers of English. Keywords: Reader responsibility, writer responsibility, intercultural pragmatics, inductive writing, deductive writing Introduction Cultures use language to accomplish different goals, and this is certainly true for purposes of writing. The reason cultures use different writing strategies is because they have different ideas about what it means to inform and persuade (Connor, 1996). Some cultures find the concept of informing their audience about a topic to be rather odd, as anyone worth informing already knows it. By extension, these same ∗ Marohagn Limbu, e-mail: limbu@msu.edu Matthew McCool, e-mail: matthew.mccool@gmail.com Xiangjuan Zeng, e-mail: zengxiangjuan@126.com ISSN: 2128-1333 ©2013