This paper provides a contrastive text-linguistic study of rhetorical differences between academic papers written in English by Spanish-speaking and by Anglo-American academics. The intercultural variation in the rhetorical preferences is explored with respect to metatext used in papers from economics journals. The Anglo-American texts tend to reflect a more reader-oriented attitude, and a generally more explicit textual rhetoric, whilst the Spanish-speaking writers put a greater emphasis on propositional content and implicitness and adhere a more impersonal style of writing.