The addition of an interpersonal element to the rhetorical devices offered students as they learn how to construct persuasive messages can enhance their writing by helping students discover why they produce the writing they do. To do so, teachers must help students to become more sensitive to the audience and involve them more in the…

The notion that rhetoric (and to a lesser extent, argument) is epistemic is an increasingly popular one today, although it can be traced to ancient Greece. The notion holds that rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, creates and shapes knowledge. Two ancient authors--Aristophanes and Plato--provide evidence that others had notions of rhetoric as…

A study was conducted to determine (1) what active forensic coaches currently perceive to be the purpose of forensic participation courses, (2) the difficulties they have had in reaching their course goals, and (3) what they think the purpose of the courses should be. Data were collected from coaches at 130 schools with active forensic programs.…

To formulate, justify, and establish priorities for high school debate goals, one must consider only those things that debate can uniquely offer to participating students. The most important goal that debate offers is the development of critical thinking. Educators must continue to develop critical thinkers who can anticipate, discover, and…

Acceptance of a paradigm in the scientific community depends upon persuasion, upon the supplying of "good reasons" for supporting one paradigm over another. When one paradigm gains long-term acceptance and becomes the standard for scientific thought, scientists defer to such an authority in their thinking, and such established paradigms…

An attempt was made to replicate findings of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) among nine-year-old Hispanic students in Grade 4. The subjects were from 12 classrooms in four elementary schools with high Hispanic student enrollments. All writing activities took place within the respective classrooms during the morning, and the…

Social advertisers--those responsible for public and nonprofit advertising and marketing--must employ many of the major psychological motivations used by commercial advertisers to stimulate desire and action on the part of target audiences. For example, commercial advertisers create psychological stimuli to facilitate motivation of the fulfillment…

A study analyzed how freshman composition students handled an assignment that forced them to perform an act of sophisticated literacy which was a variation between spontaneity (present) and repetition (past) with a focus on how novice writers borrow language, whether through quotation or misquotation. The assignment involved two masterpieces of…

A mythic interpretive framework can explain how the use of an uncontested term--a word which "seems to invite a contest, but which apparently is not so regarded in its own context"--is legitimated and perpetuated. By examining John C. Calhoun's nullification rhetoric as a case study of political myth (specifically his "Disquisition…

Until students have opportunities to discover the power of personal expression through writing in the narrative mode, it is dangerous to teach them writing solely in terms of institutional discourse. The goals of institutional prose, or professional writing, are not determined by the writer, and often demand an "objective" style that…

The growth in the popularity and importance of disadvantage arguments in debate has been, in some measure, due to the growing belief that debate should be viewed from a policy-making perspective. And, with the focus of contemporary debate shifting to the consequences of policy actions, there has been a concurrent increase in the sophistication of…

As a step toward the study of invention, an investigation dealt not with public arguments or the results of invention, but with arguments that may have occurred to the rhetor but were discarded. To avoid problems of self-presentation and retrospection, thinking aloud and reconstructive protocols were avoided in favor of providing 37 college…

A study examined procedures used to test the oral communication skills of students between the ages of 15 and 18 in the United Kingdom, with special attention given to strategies which might be of value to adopt in the United States. Subjects were 4 pairs of students tested from a randomly selected sample of 112 schools. Twenty-two assessors were…

The theories of cognitive development put forth by William Perry and by Jean Piaget are helpful in understanding the writing choices students made in responding to an assignment involving writing a persuasive essay. Some students were looking for the "Right Answer" and when they found it, they assumed that everyone would agree with them.…

Joseph Priestley, in his "A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism," developed a psychological theory of style. The "Course" covers three main topics: traditional rhetorical arts of invention, arrangement, and style. Borrowing from the ideas of David Hartley, the association psychologist; Joseph Addison, the aesthetician;…