This paper, presented in English and in Spanish, presents a method designed to help foreign students in English-speaking universities increase their speed and comprehension while reading scientific and technical matter. The training of these students has often been limited to reading "general" English, which means that they are unable to cope with the complex structures of scientific and technical English. Their training may not have stressed the special nature of the linguistic act of reading complex and dense material. The "rhetorical approach" is a way of analyzing the process employed by a writer of scientific or technical English to produce a desired text. The basic unit used in this process is the scientific and technical paragraph, which differs from the "traditional" paragraph in that one conceptual paragraph is often made up of more than one physical paragraph. Two samples of conceptual paragraphs are given and analyzed. The first is illustrative of the most common types of rhetorical information found in scientific and technical English. The second illustrates implicit classification. (Author/CFM)