This article details findings from a research study on learning transfer, in which most students reported transferring reading processes and explicitly linked their successes in writing to their successes in reading. Reading offered a pathway through their university learning experiences, improving self-efficacy and engagement.

This article excavates how style in writing was represented and taught in the under-investigated mid-twentieth century. I trace four editions of the textbook Modern Rhetoric (1949–1979), authored by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; I detail how the book was surprisingly innovative for the time, despite its eventual re-entrenchment to a more conservative approach. I argue that the teaching of style serves as a marker of the tensions between disciplines and pedagogical approaches, changing views of students, and competing cultural demands.