| Opinion articles are part of a professional discourse genre that can be found in newspapers. These articles are separated from news pages and written for public, so they contain a variety of cultural background. By investigating the pattern of rhetorical organization in the opinion articles, this study aims to reveal the overall rhetorical patterns, the occurence of thesis statement, and to examine whether there is a difference in terms of the placement of thesis statement between native and non-native writers. This study investigated 151 opinion articles published in The Jakarta Post, March 2016 edition. Shi and Kubota’s (2007) four pattern of rhetorical organization was adapted as the theoretical framework for the present study. The results of this study showed that the overall rhetorical patterns of The Jakarta Post opinion articles is a three-part strcture of introduction, body and conclusion paragraphs. In term of the placing of thesis statement, there were 47% of non-native writers and 38% of native writers put the thesis statement in the introduction part with single sentence paragraph or two short single-sentence paragraphs (pattern 1), and 38% of non-native writers and 40% of native writers write the introduction part with two or more multi sentence paragraphs, and put the thesis statement in the end of it. Only 8% of non-native writers and 5% of native writers put the thesis statement in the body part, while there were 7% of non-native writers and 17% of native writers wrote the thesis statement in the conclusion part. Generally, there was a slight difference between native and non-native writers in terms of the placement of thesis statement, where the non-native writers tend to use a single sentence paragraph as the thesis statement as well as to begin the essays while native writers prefer to use two or more multi sentences paragraphs. This study proves that professional writings such as newspaper opinion articles follow the English rhetorical conventions; deductive, logical, and direct style as represented in the three part structure. |