Rhetorical Pedagogy: Teaching Students how to write a Stylistics Paper

How can we help our students to think clearly and plan wisely so that they can write better stylistics papers? This article evaluates a set of rhetorical pedagogical guidelines that I made for my own undergraduate stylistics students in an attempt to address this question. The article primarily reproduces the guidelines I designed, but also a questionnaire that I drew up, and, crucially, reports the responses of the subjects in that questionnaire. It is hoped that such data might lead to better testing methods and ultimately an improved set of stylistics guidelines so that students can be empowered to perform better, with increased confidence and motivation, in the undergraduate stylistics classroom.