The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of a curriculum for college developmental writing classes, developed in prior design research and based on self-regulated strategy instruction. Students learned strategies for planning, drafting, and revising compositions with an emphasis on using knowledge of genre organization to guide planning and self-evaluation. In addition to specific writing strategies, students learned strategies for self-regulation. This quasi-experimental study involved 13 instructors and 276 students in 19 developmental writing classes at 2 universities. The curriculum was taught for a full semester in 9 classes and compared with a business-as-usual control condition in 10 classes. Significant positive effects were found for overall quality of writing on a persuasive essay (ES = 1.22), and for length (ES = .71), but not for grammar. Significant positive effects were also found for self-efficacy and mastery motivation.
Improvisation was long the apex of the arts of eloquence, yet modern scholars ignore its importance as a rhetorical and literary genre, thereby severing a long-enduring connection between rhetorical and literary history. This essay reads Plato's Menexenus to formulate a theory of improvisational rhetoric around the cultural position of Aspasia, a foreign woman renowned for eloquence in Periclean Athens. It then places this construction of improvisation alongside Germaine de Staël's early-nineteenth-century novel Corinne to demonstrate the endurance and evolution of improvisational rhetoric. Doing so not only illustrates the long-standing—and long-neglected—influence of improvisation on both rhetorical theory and literary production but also challenges present-day disciplinary prejudice by revealing the permeable boundary between imaginative works and those that provide rhetorical instruction.
In rhetorical studies recent attention to the central role of pedagogy in the formation of disciplinary identity has obscured the disciplinary-based differences in the presentation of the history of rhetoric in English and communication classrooms. This essay surveys introductory rhetoric textbooks to contrast our presentations of rhetorical history.
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