Understanding Persuasive Essay Writing: Linguistic/Rhetorical Approach

Abstract

This paper reports on research, funded by the Educational Foundation of the Exxon Corporation, to study several measures for describing and evaluating student persuasive writing. The variables examined were coherence, cohesion, syntactic features, and persuasive appeals. The data were 100 American and British high-school student persuasive essays randomly selected from the compositions of the International Education Association project. The results demonstrate the need for a multidimensional methodology to assess a broad range of linguistic and rhetorical features in order to adequately account for variation in writing quality among students.