Compares Spanish and English essays written by bilingual writers. Describes each writer's discourse-organizational and clausal-combining strategies. Suggests that organization on the discourse level is reflected in the type of clausal combinations chosen by the writers at the sentence level. (TB)

Contrastive rhetoric scholarship researches rhetorical structures across languages to predict the difficulties experienced by students learning to write essays in a second language. The paradigmatic contrast is between Western languages (e.g., English) that are said to exemplify "linearity" and "directness" and Eastern languages (e.g., Chinese,…