The interactions among cognitive, affective, and linguistic factors have received scant attention in task-based writing research. To address this gap, this study aims to examine the relationships among task complexity, task motivation, task engagement, and syntactic complexity in second language (L2) writing. One hundred L2 learners enrolled in an…

In this article, we aim to explore the differences in the received peer feedback among successful, less successful, and unsuccessful students in higher education. This exploratory study was conducted in online settings and in the context of argumentative essay writing. In total, 135 undergraduate students participated in an online module and they…

Writing argumentative syntheses based on multiple sources implies integrating ideas from different, often conflicting, positions. This can promote more constructive learning, especially when students undertake the task together with their peers. However, despite the importance of this activity in the university context, students generally lack the…

Coherent writing skill is an important prerequisite for academic success, especially at the tertiary level. This work studied the effect of four-month teaching intervention of genre pedagogy with Reading to Learn (R2L) approach for developing coherence in argumentative writing. It was implemented on 40 undergraduate Pakistani English Language…

An essay's motive or research problem consists of the rhetorical moves illuminating why that essay matters--what puzzling elements of a primary source it resolves, which contradictions in the data it explains, or what gaps in the literature it fills. This article invites college instructors to dedicate some of their classroom time to teaching…

Human social evolution depends in part on using language persuasively to secure cooperation. Rhetoric emerged in the West over two thousand years ago as a deliberate cultural construction. Though often misunderstood today, rhetoric is fundamental in general education programs that teach students how knowledge is forged in agreement and applied.…

Individual agency is necessary for the possibility of rhetoric, and especially for deliberative rhetoric, which enables the composition of what Latour calls a good common world. Drawing on neurophenomenology, this essay defines individual agency as the process through which organisms create meanings through acting into the world and changing their…

This article examines the various uses to which Stephen Toulmin has been put in composition studies. It presents data on citations of Toulmin in nine journals, considers appeals to Toulmin in several strains of composition scholarship, and argues that composition scholars ought to attend more carefully to Toulmin's later works. (Contains 4 tables…

Crossing the threshold from high school to college-level writing expectations constitutes a challenge for many students since secondary and post-secondary composition instructors often work under different constraints and are guided by different curricular philosophies. Dual enrollment classrooms provide a space where these differences can be…

Acquiring argumentative reading and writing practices reflects a key component of recent curricular reforms in schools and universities throughout the United States and the world as well as a major challenge to teachers of reading and writing in K-12 and college writing classrooms. In this review, we consider the contributions of two research…

Advocates teaching both classical argumentation and Rogerian rhetoric back-to-back. Advocates assignments using both to highlight the role of audience, the importance of arrangement, the value of tone, the nature of the writer's "ethics," and the use of evidence. (MS)

Represents a departure from the current trend against abstraction. Proposes a new formalism for the composition classroom. Argues that, when it comes to representing written arguments composed in response to multiple sources, existing schemes of argument are missing important abstractions about how authors use the arguments of others in the…

A number of arguments appeared in the late-nineteenth-century United States about "correctness" in language, arguments for and against enforcing a standard of correctness and arguments about what should count as correct in language. Insofar as knowledge about and facility with "correct" linguistic usage could affect one's standing in the social…

"Frame alignment"--the conscious process of creating correspondence between one's own "frame" (ways of making meaning out circumstances) and someone else's--is a necessary condition for participation in organized social movements. Frame alignment processes may offer a generative and useful alternative to the reductive…

Claims Rogerian principles of communication and problem solving offer important supplements to teaching traditional argumentation, especially in advanced composition courses. (MS)