A study was conducted to obtain descriptive data on whether a student is aware of an audience when writing, what students perceive as the purpose of a persuasive writing assignment, and what steps comprise their writing process. Approximately 500 tenth grade student essays, prompted by an assignment based on the theme of the literature the class…

The photographs of William Henry Jackson taken during the 1871 survey of the Yellowstone region of Wyoming and Montana have often been cited as the first specific group of photographs used for successful persuasion. Many historians credit Jackson's photographs as being the most influential factor in persuading Congress to designate the Yellowstone…

The traditional views of audience analysis and rhetorical strategy are examined in terms of modifications necessary for application to persuasion in interpersonal communication contexts. To obtain guidance for ways in which the traditional concepts may be modified, a framework consisting of selected work by Erving Goffman and Ernest Becker is…

President Jimmy Carter's televised address on energy, July 15, 1979, illustrates the principle that rhetoric serves as a transformer, taking issues involving incompatible and insatiable demands and converting them to forms amenable to solutions. The address depicted three distinct yet related scenes: (1) the immediate scene of the energy crisis;…

A study focusing on argument as a receiver-contained phenomenon assessed the differential importance of (new) arguments stimulated by a message, as opposed to (old) arguments previously integrated. Data were collected from 207 college students in a pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest design. The subjects provided information on their attitudes…

The roles that essentially contested concepts play in persuasive discourse are examined in this paper. The first section of the paper reviews W. B. Gallie's original explication of the nature of essentially contested concepts and the body of theoretical literature that has developed in response to it. It then notes three major areas of…

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern embodied a rich Neo-Populist rhetorical vision that served as a framework for the candidate's campaign rhetoric. The thesis of the paper is that the Neo-Populist vision of McGovern included three particular fantasies, each of which dressed the…

This bibliography lists resources concerning divestiture by major oil companies. Materials provided in the first section are classified by topic and by position on the matter of divestiture and include government documents, sections of the "Congressional Record," the proceedings of congressional hearings, and information from the…

In an exercise designed to make students aware of their tendencies to examine a persuasive message from a single perspective, students were given a "Saturday Review" letter urging opposition to a bill. They were then told it was a hoax. Next, they were asked to specify "believable" and "unbelievable" features of the…

The Supreme Court's 1973 decision striking down restrictive abortion laws in Texas and Georgia has significantly shaped the rhetoric of the Right to Life movement in both tone and substance. This paper explores how the Court's decision has influenced the movement's definition and development of issues. In addition, it examines the verbal and…

This paper presents two research studies on the use of dogmatism as a predictor of verbal communication behavior. The studies examined the effects of dogmatism on the formulation of written and oral persuasive messages by comparing college students' scores on the Rokeach D and California F Scales with a content analysis of the written or oral…

A new debate strategy which may be used in judging academic debates is the application of policy systems analysis. In the policy systems analysis approach, the negative team must advocate a policy system just as the affirmative team does, providing a comparison for the debate judge. The major difference between systems analysis and traditional…

This paper focuses on the alternative-justification approach to debate, seeks to explore some of the objections to this approach, and considers several of the basic assumptions made by its supporters. The alternative-justification theory of debate is based on the assumption that any given question under debate has a number of affirmative plans and…

At the second annual Cal-State Hayward Conference in Rhetorical Criticism, upper division and graduate students from 17 colleges and universities presented papers on the theory, history, and criticism of rhetoric. Panels of faculty members from the same colleges and universities, serving as editor-critics, judged the six papers in this volume as…

The interview is a special form of dyadic (unequal two-party) communication. It can be defined as a two-way vocal interaction system which is time-bound and in which the interviewer serves as a delimiter of the topics considered. Further, the interviewer seeks information from the interviewee, who functions as an information source in order to…