| In the field of contrastive rhetoric, it seems there has never been an agreement as to what Chinese rhetoric is and how it affects English written by Chinese. While some scholars (Kaplan, 1966; Young, 1982; Matalene, 1985; Scollon, 1991) insist that the Chinese prefer indirect organization in their English writing, others (Mohan and Lo, 1985; Chen, 1986; Lin, 1987) argue that there are no fundamental differences between ESL writing by Chinese writers and NES writing. This thesis aims to contribute to the debate over the indirectness of Chinese ESL writing by examining Chinese college students' English compositions to see whether there are thesis statements and topic sentences.The corpus of the study consists of 110 English compositions in the CET tests from a book entitled A Collection of CET Sample Compositions with Comments. What is important about the corpus is that the book was compiled by the CET committee and the student writings were edited by CET experts.The quantitative analysis shows that a majority of Chinese college students organize their compositions in the pattern that is supposed to be adopted by NESs, which is composed of an introduction, a body and a conclusion. However, they rarely place a thesis statement in the first paragraph of their writing, which is asserted as the introduction; instead, they prefer to place the thesis statement in the conclusion or leave it unstated. In terms of the topic sentence, compositions with topic sentences only surpass those without them by a proportion of 18．2%. Hence, this study, supported by the quantitative analysis, has confirmed, by and large, the indirectness of English writing by Chinese college students.The findings in the study are expected to shed light on the debate over Oriental writing in the field of contrastive rhetoric and provide some practical implications for English teaching and learning as well as the testing of ESL writing, especially for the College English Test in China.
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