A Contrastive Rhetorical Analysis of the News Reports in Iranian and American Newspapers (A Case Study of News Reports in Tehran Times and New York Times)

Contrastive rhetorical analysis as a way of understanding different ways throughwhich writers from various cultural backgrounds shape their discourse wasofficially initiated by the works of Kaplan (1966). This study tries to use themethodology to investigate the news reports in two American and Iranian widelypublished newspapers. Using the analytical methodologies of contrastive rhetoricand genre analysis, 10 news reports written by Iranian and American journalistwere selected and analyzed. Results revealed that though the genre written by bothgroups of writers followed the same generic or rhetorical organizational structure,the strategies writers from the two different socio-cultural environments took torealize the moves in the genres were different.

Keywords:

Contrastive rhetorical analysis , Iranian and American journalists , Newspaper discourse , Genre analysis