A Contrastive Rhetorical Analysis of the News Reports in Iranian and American Newspapers

Contrastive rhetorical analysis as a way of understanding different ways through which writers from various cultural backgrounds shape their discourse was officially initiated by the works of Kaplan (1966). This study tries to use the methodology to investigate the news reports in two American and Iranian widely published newspapers. Using the analytical methodologies of contrastive rhetoric and genre analysis, 10 news reports written by Iranian and American journalist were selected and analyzed. Results revealed that though the genre written by both groups of writers followed the same generic or rhetorical organizational structure, the strategies writers from the two different socio-cultural environments took to realize the moves in the genres were different.