Courses: Visual Rhetoric, Visual Communication, Multiplatform Journalism, Advertising, Journalism, Public Relations. Objective: This unit activity requires that students analyze and produce imagery with the help of semiotic theory. Students will: (1) learn to connect theory with practice holistically by simultaneously practicing visual analysis…

The Problem Statement (PS) section communicates the issue that targets a study. Having a clear understanding of its rhetorical moves facilitates its communication. However, undergraduate students are not generally worried about this important writing aspect. The purpose of this descriptive study intended to explore the rhetorical moves in…

This study investigated the extent to which results of rhetorical comparisons of persuasive essays by Moroccan students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) would provide empirical evidence for Kaplan's (1966) contrastive rhetoric hypothesis. This is especially regarding the fact that EFL students-writing problems are a byproduct of…

Effects of peer response using instruction in genre knowledge on the writing of 140 sixth-grade students are investigated. In one condition students were taught specific genre knowledge involving functions of linguistic indicators of time and place. In another condition students were taught more general aspects of communicative writing. Both…

The present study mainly focuses on the topic development in student written production through the consistency between student self-assessment and teacher assessment. In the present study, topic development means "cohesion", "overall organization", and "coherence". It proposes the next hypotheses: (i) Students could…

This pilot study aims at integrating a socio-pragmatic concept, Cooperative Principles, into an experimental writing project on the genres of comparison and contrast. It reports on a six-week study of five undergraduates voluntarily recruited in a university located in central Taiwan. In surveying their writing momentum before and after the…

This article recounts the experiences of a team of faculty, graduate students, and instructional technologists facilitating Rhetorical Composing, a writing-focused Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). When first offering the MOOC, we recognized quickly that we needed to emphasize the global makeup of our learning cohort to foster a stronger sense of…

This article, the second of a two-part series, features 13 "My Favorite Assignments" that were introduced at the Association for Business Communication's 82nd annual conference held in Dublin, Ireland, in 2017. The pedagogical innovations include assignments that teach students how to conduct primary research, present their findings,…

Research that has examined university assignment writing has varied from large-scale, inventorial surveys across disciplines to more specific, finer-grained analyses of the assignment requirements of specific disciplines. However, while such research has involved surveys of the views and expectations of faculty or the analysis of assignment tasks,…

This study investigated the influence of culture and discussion participation on rhetorical patterns in the reflective essays of 238 Korean and 196 American 4th-graders. Results showed significant differences between Korean children's essays and American children's essays in types of reasons, uses of argument elements, and uses of rhetorical…

This article is a pragmatic, classroom-focused conversation about the teaching of writing among three teachers living in the United States and China, separated by many thousands of miles and many centuries of tradition and culture. Our focus here is on classroom concerns: actual student writing, assignment design, and assessment. We seek to…

Research suggests that culturally distinctive first-language rhetorical patterns influence second language composing skills. Frequently, however, these patterns have never been taught formally and are not refined, leaving first-language composing largely underdeveloped. Teaching second language learners to compose often requires attending to the…