Broadly considered, contrastive rhetoric examines differences and similarities in writing across cultures. The underlying premise of the field is that any given language is likely to have written texts that are constructed using identifiable discourse features, and these features may differ across languages or be coded using different linguistic configurations. Contrastive rhetoric dates back to the seminal work of Robert Kaplan, whose early work within an applied linguistics framework (Kaplan, 1966) suggested that to the degree that language and writing are cultural phenomena, different cultures have different rhetorical tendencies. Furthermore, Kaplan's early work, arising out of an extensive examination of writing produced by university students of English as a second language (ESL), focused on the claim that the linguistic patterns and rhetorical conventions of a first (or native) language (L1) often transfer to writing in ESL and thus cause interference. Although mainly concerned in its first 20 years with student essay writing, today contrastive rhetoric contributes to knowledge about preferred patterns of writing with the goal of helping teachers and students (and writers) around the world in many situations, especially as regards English for specific purposes.

Undeniably, in its first decades, contrastive rhetoric has had an appreciable impact on our understanding of cultural differences in writing, and it continues to spawn interest internationally with such venues as the biennial International Conference on Contrastive Rhetoric at the American University of Cairo and a roundtable seminar on contrastive rhetoric, titled “Contrastive Rhetoric in the 21st Century,” organized by Paul Kei Matsuda and me, following Purdue University's third international conference on second-language (L2) writing in October 2002.