Recently, scholars have argued that oral poetry helped lay the groundwork for the development of rhetorical theory and practice in archaic Greece. I propose that oral poetry played a similar role in archaic Israel. First, I describe the ritual and rhetorical contexts in which psalms were composed and performed in ancient Israel. Second, I analyze two psalms (Ps 22 and Ps 116) to show that treating the psalms as deliberative argument posed by Israelites to God can explain otherwise perplexing problems in interpretation and translation. Finally, I argue that positing an active locus for rhetoric in ancient Israelite culture raises interesting cross-cultural comparisons with ancient Athens regarding the striving for social status and public influence.

This study investigated the effects of writing models on students’ writing of research texts. The models used by participants varied in quality and in labeling cues. Ninety-five psychology majors were given basic facts, including relevant and irrelevant information, for writing a Method Section for one of two experiments. The control group (N = 22) saw no models. The models groups (N =73) saw three student-written Method sections—either 3 good models (AAA) or 1 good, 1 moderate, and 1 poor model (ABC). Half of each quality group saw the models labeled with grades; the other half saw them unlabeled. Following holistic ratings of the students’ texts, the texts were analyzed for content. The models groups’ texts were rated as better organized than those of the control group. The models also influenced text content. Seeing a proposition in the models increased the likelihood that students would include it in their texts, with the effect being smaller for propositions that appeared only in moderate or poor models. For the writing topic deemed more difficult, the models group included more topical information than the control group, including more essential propositions but also more unnecessary propositions. No systematic benefits emerged from labeling the models or from providing only good models. Students seemed able to judge the relative quality of the models, even without labels. Overall, providing models seems to increase the salience of the topical information considered by student writers for inclusion in their texts

To help students enter a professional discourse community, teachers must assess how accurately they both understand the community's discourse practices. Our research investigated how job recruiters seeking to fill positions in mechanical engineering or marketing were influenced by the quality of writing in student résumés. The résumés varied in elaboration, sentence style, mechanics, and amount of relevant work experience. The recruiters rated the résumés to indicate their willingness to interview the students. We found that recruiters in the two fields—engineering and marketing—valued quite different writing features. When we subsequently asked students in business writing and technical writing classes to rate the same résumés, we found that they underestimated the importance of various writing features. Generally, however, students' ratings resembled those of the recruiters in their respective disciplines. This study documents how students can improve their résumés and provides insight into the variations of discourse practices in professional disciplines.

While writing teachers view the résumé as a sophisticated rhetorical chal lenge, students tend to see it as a "technical specification"of their employment qualifications. This study investigated the reader's perspective by examining how writing features influence recruiters' assessments of résumés. Eighteen recruiters rated 72 résumés describing fictitious mechanical-engineering stu dents. Four résumé features were systematically varied: relevance of previous work experience, elaboration ofindependent coursework, stylistic quality, and mechanical correctness. The major result suggests that technical work experi ence is important but not sufficient: If the résumés of technically well- qualified applicants contained grammatical errors, recruiters rated these résumés lower than résumés listing less experience but containing more accu rate writing.1