Research on persuasive writing has investigated writing quality but has not fully considered students’ perceptions of writing and of the language used in persuasive writing. Essentialist language – including words like “always,” “every,” and “prove” – insists on one explanation, ruling out other possibilities and making for poorer-quality, one-sided arguments. In Study 1, undergraduates provided characteristics they believed were important to writing and listed rhetorical indicators of those characteristics. Analysis revealed students identified essentialist-related characteristics (e.g., one-sidedness, inclusion of other viewpoints) as related to writing persuasiveness. Study 2 investigated students’ actual reactions to essentialist language. Participants read pairs of writing samples (one with essentialist language, one non-essentialist), indicated which was better and why, and rated each sample’s persuasiveness. Results revealed no difference in how often students chose essentialist samples or non-essentialist samples as better, although different reasons were associated with essentialist and non-essentialist choices. Students who preferred non-essentialist writing rated it as more persuasive, but students with essentialist or no preference rated the persuasiveness of essentialist and non-essentialist samples similarly. These results support the notion that many undergraduates fail to consistently adjust their judgments of essentialist writing to align with a reported awareness of the essentialism-persuasiveness relationship.

This study investigated situational and writer characteristics that influence the revision process. Thirty-four students who scored high on print exposure and 32 students who scored low on print exposure had 10 or 70 seconds to think about each of 2 prompts before beginning to write (prewriting time) the essays on a computer. A keystroke-logging program captured writing and editing behavior, including pauses, edits (deletions, substitutions, insertions), and prompt reviews. Quality was measured using an 8-factor, 3-point analytic scoring rubric. Results indicated that high print exposure students wrote longer and higher quality essays than low print exposure students. In addition, the short prewriting time increased prompt reviewing and average pause lengths. High and low print exposure writers showed differential responses to the prewriting time manipulation in terms of total pause-associated edits during writing. The complexity of the revision process and the importance of understanding multiple immediate variables in the writing situation are discussed.