Research is reviewed on systematic differences in expository styles due to cultural or linguistic diversity. The critique concentrates on the method of data gathering, the usage of the categorization "Oriental," and the description of English paragraph development. An investigation is reported that consisted of an analysis of the Japanese and English language versions of a newspaper column, which used a common 4-point organizational framework. The third point is the development of a theme which English compositions do not have. The concluding paragraph also violates English style constraints. In order to discover whether this style of writing is valued more highly in Japanese than in English, readers of both Japanese and English were asked to evaluate the organizational properties of several articles in their Japanese and English versions. Generally, English language raters found less unity than did Japanese language raters. It was found that a coherency device in Japanese was not translated into English. This finding suggested that a lack of unity appeared in the translation, where there was unity in Japanese. However, it is evident that a different set of rhetorical principles is operative in Japanese composition. (AMH)