A Descriptive Study of the Rhetoric in Persian Expository Writings: Cohesion and Audience Awareness

The contrastive study of the rhetorical organization of the paragraphs is a rather new trend in the field of writing research. The turning point of such a trend goes back to Kaplan (1966). Within the framework of the contrastive rhetoric, the present research focused on the study of the existence of cross-cultural differences in rhetorical terms between the expository essays written by Persian EFL writers and the English preferred style. Two rhetorical features were examined including: cohesion and audience awareness. Through a descriptive study of the expository essays written by one hundred and ten students from six universities in Iran, it was found that the transitions are not explicitly expressed in the essays written by the Persian writers. It was also found that in these essays, the preferred style is the reader-responsible style. Both these findings imply a cross-cultural impact of the Persian language on the essays written in English as a foreign language.