Notes undergraduate students read both a one-sided text on educational reform and a two-sided nonrefutational text on the V-chip; and that they completed topic-specific beliefs, knowledge, and interest measures and reacted to specific text characteristics. Finds that although both forms of texts affected readers, the effects varied by the type of…

Studied how and why persuasion occurs, examining the processing of two articles using topic-specific measures of belief. Results from 37 undergraduates, 25 graduate students, and 20 faculty members show that readers' perceptions of their knowledge play a more significant role in persuasion outcomes than the knowledge actually demonstrated. (SLD)

Examines prewriting and writing assignments designed to tighten the continuity between the personal essays typically written in English 101 and the more literature-based essays of English 102. Aims to help students blend personal and public voices. (MG)

Uses Emmeline Pankhurst's speech "The Importance of the Vote" to analyze how a speaker may utilize the discourse of the dominant culture to force revolutionary change within that culture. (MG)

Examines verbal influence behavior during couples' disagreements. Finds the most frequently used strategies are content validation, self-assertions, and other accusations. Finds less use of content invalidation, self-defense, and other-support. Analyzes male/female differences in persuasive tactics. Finds interaction patterns are predominantly…

Uses a pragma-dialectical analysis to argue that the legal process is rational. Suggests that the legal system's own rules guarantee that the conditions of rational and efficient discussion are present. Describes the Netherlands' civil procedure rules and shows how such rules help ensure that legal discussions are rational. (SG)

Examines Susan Sontag's February 1982 Town Hall Address as a case study of strategies and constraints associated with contextual reconstruction (whereby rhetors address perceived conflicts between text and context). Traces the development of these concepts in Sontag's writings. Discusses the counter-intentional understanding of Sontag's speech by…

Discusses a course in which female students were instructed to compose argumentative compositions in the empathic style of Carl Rogers. Reports that students disliked the style, believing it pretended to accept minority opinions while making women feel as if they had to change their views to belong to the majority culture. (SG)

Argues that an individual's activities prior to and during an interpersonal influence attempt may be explained by his or her goals. Examines primary and secondary goals, their relationships to one another, and how they shape the interpersonal influence process in terms of planning, effort, directness, positivity, and logic. (SR)

Examines how the 1988 Presidential Debates provide a resource for effective instruction in public argument. Provides several examples of effective (and ineffective) argumentative speaking taken from the debates. (MM)

Examines the strategies people employ to deal with the face- and interaction-threatening implications of argumentative behavior. Explores the joint influence of individual differences in perceivers' interpersonal construct systems and message producers' communication strategies on the content and structure of impressions of message producers. (MS)

Presents three experiments examining the relationships among plan complexity, access to planned actions, and verbal fluency while pursuing a persuasion goal. Finds that complex planners are less fluent than less complex planners under high access to action alternatives, and that reduced fluency is not induced by decreasing self-confidence. (SR)

Examines the relationships among an audience analysis task, the number of arguments and appeals used in college students' persuasive papers, the level of strategic adaptation of those arguments, and overall persuasiveness. Finds that giving students information about the audience relative to their paper topics significantly affects each of the…

Outlines a series of progressive exercises designed to train students in written persuasive discourse in French. The technique involves observation of advertising, study of premises, arguments, and conclusions, pragmatic text analysis, training in logical construction, and development of argumentative strategies. (MSE)

Investigates how institutions argue about the idea of public good. Studies how institutions rely on the Contingent Valuation Method (to determine the worth of despoiled environmental resources) to argue that critical-public argumentation theory benefits from critique that reveals how institutional arguments structurally foreclose the ability of…