Rhetorical features

Writing a composition under assessment conditions has high stakes for a college applicant. Although she may not be able to imagine how her composition will be read and rated, she knows that something she wants may be attached to how successful her writing is. This knowledge creates a rhetorical situation in which the applicant must use her manner of expression to persuade her readers to admit her into the college, place her in

“higher” composition courses, or grant her some other privilege she imagines can be gained by writing an effective composition. I chose three features for analysis that would show me what the participants were doing to help influence a favorable outcome: word count, rhetorical control, and rhetorical markers.

Word count

One manner of writing, or rhetorical strategy, many students have learned since elementary school is to write more words, rather than just a few. Indeed, when an Alverno College applicant hands her printed CPA composition to the proctor, if the composition is very short, the proctor will usually ask her if that is really all she would like to write. Most students who are asked this question will return to the computer and lengthen their essays (S. Witkowski, personal communication, August 17, 2011). Word

count, therefore, is an important analysis tool because it may indicate a writer’s rhetorical awareness. Moreover, Jarvis, et al. (2003) demonstrated that higher word counts are related to higher ratings from college instructors of L2 writers. This finding provides a second reason for including word count in the analysis of the compositions. Simple Concordance Program, mentioned earlier, was used to provide a word count for each composition in this study.

Rhetorical control

Besides length, another way placement essay writers may arrange their writing to demonstrate their readiness for college is to use paragraph breaks and the organizational devices they have learned to use in secondary school: an overall thesis, topic sentences for the paragraphs, and a sense of introduction, development, and conclusion. Di Gennaro developed a rubric for holistically assessing the rhetorical control of these aspects of student compositions (2009, pp. 558-559). This study uses di Gennaro’s rubric to score the writing samples holistically from 0 (no control) to 5 (excellent control) (see Appendix D).

Initially, I reread the compositions and assigned them a rhetorical control score.

However, by the time I was doing this task, I had already read the compositions a number of times and in a number of different ways. My familiarity with the compositions made me doubt my ability to view the compositions with objectivity. To counteract this

possible effect, I asked a group of Alverno College instructors who regularly assess CPA compositions for communication course placement to also read and score the

compositions. I gave them a short training session to introduce them to DiGennaro’s rubric and remind them that this session would differ from their regular work with CPAs

because they would be scoring the compositions for Rhetorical control only. Then I distributed the compositions; each composition was read and scored twice by different readers. The two scores assigned to a composition were then averaged. If the scorers disagreed by more than one point, a third instructor read and scored the composition; all three scores were then averaged. During this process, I took notes to ascertain which qualities of the compositions influenced the readers in their scoring choices. Later, I compared the scores to those I had assigned; in most cases, my scores were in line with my colleagues’. In the several cases where they were not, I took the composition back to our supervisor, who had created a process very similar to mine for scoring practice essays by education students preparing for PRAXIS exams. She and I looked at the scores and my notes from the scoring session; together, we chose the score we felt was most indicative of the rhetorical control exhibited by the writer.

Rhetorical markers

Writers use words and phrases to direct readers’ attention to logical relationships in their argument. While these words have a grammatical function, they also help the reader follow the writer’s line of reasoning. For example, in the previous sentence, the words While and also give semantic as well as syntactic information. While is

adversative, signaling my readers that the clause help the reader follow… is being offered in contrast to have a grammatical function. Also, on the other hand, signals that my contrast does not replace the phrase, have a grammatical function, it is meant, instead, to be added to the act of having a grammatical function of the words. Acting syntactically as adverbs, while and also have semantically alerted my readers that the second clause gives information that both differs from and adds to the information in the first.

Hinkel (2002) calls these words and phrases “rhetorical markers” and categorizes them according to function into lists that can be searched with a computer. Based on Hinkel’s work, I chose to search the CPA compositions for two subsets of one of her categories of rhetorical markers: coordinating and logical conjunctions/prepositions. I included another of Hinkel’s categories, exemplification markers, with logical

conjunctions/prepositions because words that signal exemplification also demonstrate a kind of logical relationship. Because coordinating, logical, and exemplification markers are “used significantly more frequently in NNS than NS texts” (p. 141) and are quite common, I searched for the two subsets separately: coordinating words and conjunctions (e.g., and, but, both, etc.), and logical (including exemplification) markers (e.g., because of, except, like, for instance/example, etc.). Ferris, in a small-scale but similar study

found, as Hinkel, that NNS “relied heavily on the use of discourse markers to introduce their ideas, while native speakers used a greater variety of topic-focus strategies” (1994, pp. 47-58). Presumably, the participants in my study who had more schooling in their L1 would be likely to resemble NNS writers by using more coordinating and logical markers than their peers with less L1 schooling.

The SCP program allowed me to search the CPA compositions for these words and phrases. The total number of instances for each word/phrase in each category

(coordination and logical) was divided by the total number of words in the composition to arrive at a percentage for each category.