Contrastive rhetoric—an analytical framework for the study of second language writing—has had incredible staying power. Since Kaplan's (1966) original paper, this framework has been used in dozens of studies that compare the rhetorical organizations of written texts produced by writers from different cultures and native languages (L1s). Additionally, the framework has been elaborated and refined considerably to account for the extensive range of linguistic variability found among written texts from different text types; more recent treatments include Grabe and Kaplan (1996, chap. 7) and Connor (1996).