This note explores the role of contrastive rhetoric in writing pedagogy in the context of a monolingual class, in this case a group of students from the Russian Federation studying at an English medium university in Central Europe. The study compares students' argumentative essays written before and after a short writing course, which aimed to address cultural differences in writing in a non-prescriptive, exploratory, manner. The comparison focuses on, in this case, a culturally based textual element: the thesis statement. The analysis reveals that the essays written after the course display higher occurrence of thesis statements, more uniformity in the position of the thesis statements and less variation in the thesis statement sentence structure and lexical choices. The implications for the role of contrastive rhetoric in writing pedagogy are discussed.