Existing research on students’ citation practices has tended to focus on the formal and linguistic characteristics of citation (Howard et al., 2010; Swales, 2014), without fully examining their underlying rhetorical functions or the influence of classroom genres on citation practices. Smaller-scale studies have yielded meaningful insights into the rhetorical dimensions of citation (Haller, 2010), but these have been challenging to scale up, and proposed coding schemes have had limited applicability to L1 first-year writing contexts (Petric, 2007; Lee, Hitchcock, and Casal, 2018; Zhang, 2023). This study responds to calls for a better understanding of the rhetorical strategies first-year writing students employ when citing sources, as well as improved program-level assessment methods to capture their citation practices across classrooms and courses. My dissertation study examines the rhetorical practices of citation employed by students within a foundational academic writing course, ENG 101: Introduction to Academic Discourse, at a large urban research university. Combining qualitative coding and computational text analysis, the study investigates three key research questions: 1) What rhetorical practices of citation do students learn to employ within a foundational academic writing course? 2) To what extent do different genres condition different practices of citation? and 3) To what extent do students' citation practices differ—within and across genres—in relation to the scores they receive? This study reveals that students primarily engage sources for three rhetorical purposes: to Report information from and about sources (without imposing an interpretive lens); to Transform source material through analysis, application, and synthesis; and to Evaluate a source’s content, argument, and/or rhetorical effectiveness. The study found that higher-scoring student papers demonstrated more frequent use of Evaluating sources while lower-scoring papers tended to rely more heavily on Reporting from sources. Additionally, the analysis uncovered distinct citation profiles across the key genres assigned in the course, with the Rhetorical Analysis paper requiring the highest levels of Evaluating and Transforming, the Brand Analysis emphasizing Transforming, and the Review Paper displaying lower overall source engagement. The dissertation contributes to the field's understanding of citation practices in first-year writing, offering a framework for assessing the rhetorical dimensions of student citation that can be adapted for use within the context of local writing programs to support outcomes assessment, curriculum design, and classroom pedagogy attuned to the rhetorical dimensions of source engagement. / English / Accompanied by one .zip file : 1) Kane_temple_0225E_171/Kane_Supplementary_Materials.zip

The domain of rhetoric has changed dramatically since its inception as the art of persuasion. It has adapted to encompass many forms of digital media, including, for example, data visualization and coding as a form of literature, but the approach has frequently been that of an outsider looking in. The use of comprehensive computational tools as a part of rhetorical analysis has largely been lacking. In this report, we attempt to address this lack by means of three case studies in natural language processing tasks, all of which can be used as part of a computational approach to rhetoric. At this same moment in time, it is becoming all the more important to transition to renewable energy in order to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius and ensure that countries meet the conditions of the Paris Agreement. Thus, we make use of speech data on climate policy from the Swedish parliament to ground these three analyses in semantic textual similarity, topic modeling, and political party attribution. We find that speeches are, to a certain extent, consistent within parties, given that a slight majority of most semantically similar speeches come from the same party. We also find that some of the most common topics discussed in these speeches are nuclear energy and the Swedish Green party, purported environmental risks due to renewable energy sources, and the job market. Finally, we find that though pairs of speeches are semantically similar, party rhetoric on the whole is generally not unique enough for speeches to be distinguishable by party. These results then open the door for a broader exploration of computational rhetoric for Swedish political science in the future.