In this study, integration, or students' connection formation across texts, was examined across two tasks: when undergraduates were asked to complete a writing assignment and a novel, diagram construction task. While the writing assignment asked students to compose an argument based on multiple texts, the diagram construction task asked students…

Investigates whether changes in the written structure of a proposal will affect the reader's attitudes. Maintains that writers can help readers of proposals by providing the information, detail, and structure the reader expects. (SR)

Examines persuasive text, first describing it and discussing it with reference to relevant philosophy and rhetoric, and then asking whether it is successful: do written texts change the minds of their readers? Notes that research on designing text to disabuse students of scientific misconceptions points to text features that authors could use to…

By applying Kenneth Burke's concepts of Order, the Secret, and the Kill to the newspaper-audience-advertiser relationship, the narrow imagery that depicts that relationship only in economic terms can be counteracted. Burke's maps of hierarchy, mystery, and transcendence in human action allow the depiction of a complex meshing of patterns,…

Reports on an investigation of whether or not persuasive writers actually can engineer a match between their stylistic and organizational intentions and their readers' perceptions of those elements of a text. Finds that a consistent writer/reader perceptual match can be achieved. (MS)

Literati differ markedly on whether satire is persuasive. Accordingly, a study tested whether partisans of a political candidate would fail to perceive the thesis of satire ridiculing their candidate; further, it tested whether they would perceive the thesis of satire ridiculing an opposing candidate. Subjects, students at the University of…

This unit of study involves high ability intermediate-grade students interacting with literature while enhancing reading comprehension and textual analysis skills. Students read literature and engage in shared inquiry to develop an awareness about the nature and importance of change, particularly as it affects people in various circumstances,…

The humanist position for the teaching of values can be turned against English teachers and literature education when it is based primarily on the assumption that literature directly portrays life, a strategy which was used by a religious fundamentalist group, Renaissance Peterborough, in its dispute with officials of Peterborough County, Ontario,…