Paskewicz (1984) believes that the language individuals use conveys information about the possibility of change, independent of content. To test this notion, consultant-consultee verbal interactions were analyzed. Advanced doctoral students in school psychology (N=4) served as consultants; consultees were 19 parochial school teachers each of whom…

The language of twins allows researchers in language development to examine acquisition in a unique environment. Researchers investigating the nature-nurture controversy, the order of acquisition, and other linguistic features find the twin situation particularly interesting because of the children's shared genetic makeup and environment. A…

A study examined differences in the language of direct mail advertising used by political campaigns at different levels--national state, and local. Seventeen direct mail fund-raising political campaign letters were content analyzed with Wiseman and Schenck-Hamlin's typology of compliance-gaining techniques, language style and readability. The…

Intended for college teachers and students of Anglo-Saxon literature, this paper provides an overview of the sophisticated poetic devices used by the "Beowulf" poet. The paper examines how old English words for color range in hues in a way that modern English words do not, and how these words for color are used in "Beowulf."…

Written syntactic complexity is considered in relation to the four modes of discourse (argumentation, exposition, narration, and description). In a study of 153 children at three ability ranges within each of three grade levels (three, four, and five), syntactic complexity was found to differ significantly across the modes. The range of syntactic…

Although some teachers doubt that sports literature should be taught in the college English class, the study of sports literature is enjoyable for studeents to read, think, and write. In a course entitled "The Rhetoric of Sport: Society, Media, Literature," students study the role of sport in society through reading articles and books that show…

Researchers in many disciplines dislike writing and view it as an additional and unnecessary irritant. Teaching researchers to write for administrators who must make decisions about highly specialized topics, but who lack the specialist's knowledge, means inducing a change in the researchers' perspective. They have to learn that they are writing…

Because of the syntactic differences between Spanish and Quechua, Quechua-speaking children must make major word order adjustments to learn the Peruvian Spanish taught in school. This study investigates whether the order or time sequence in which these changes are adopted reflects any general constraint, or is in any way predicted by a theory of…

Intended for students in regular and advanced composition classes, each of the four controlled composition exercises presented in this paper aims at teaching writing style through carefully constructed short passages that concentrate on an isolated problem in style such as parallel structure, relative clauses, pseudo-relative clauses, and…

Based upon research conducted during the past decade that identifies speech features of form, topic, content, and use of language as male- or female-associated, this paper examines the rhetoric of Sojourner Truth in reference to these features. It classifies her directness, originality, and action as male-associated and her modesty, emotionalism,…

The purposes of black feminist Pauli Murray in her feminist discourse are to help individuals gain self-awareness about their personal and social histories and about their potential for action, and to direct the energies of all oppressed people toward working together against oppression. Murray's discourse is addressed to successful professional…

One factor that contributes to the difficulty that a reader may encounter when reading a text is the syntactic complexity of the constructions used in the text. Examples of altered text constructions include the transformations of subjects of subordinate clauses, making them either the subjects or the objects of main clauses. When the conditions…

A survey of 112 editors from magazines, newspapers, and publishing houses was conducted to obtain their judgments about prose style, the best prose stylists, and representative works by those stylists. Of the 112 editors surveyed, only 22 responded with useful data. The results indicated very little consensus among editors, and almost no…

The study described in this paper illustrates how key features of rhetorical analysis can be operationalized to apply to the study of therapeutic transactions. After a discussion of psychotherapy as an influence process, the paper describes the methodology used in an analysis of tape-recorded discourse between three therapist/client dyads in an…