Despite incredible sales success, popularity, and a fifty year history, easy readers are one of the most neglected forms of children’s literature. Called everything from “the poor stepchild of the more glamorous picture book or children’s novel” to “literary flotsam,” easy readers are too-often regarded as insubstantial, superficial, sub-par literature. This thesis provides the first comprehensive, theoretically grounded examination of easy readers and endeavors to prove that a surprising complexity lurks beneath the easy reader’s decodable surface. In order to illuminate both extra-textual and textual complexity, easy readers are treated generically and examined using the contemporary genre theories of Amy Devitt and Adena Rosmarin. This thesis ultimately unearths a heretofore unexplored complexity in the easy reader’s publication history and generic emergence, and finds that the easy reader genre has literary potential and can accommodate works of artistic merit.

Despite incredible sales success, popularity, and a fifty year history, easy readers are one of the most neglected forms of children’s literature. Called everything from “the poor stepchild of the more glamorous picture book or children’s novel” to “literary flotsam,” easy readers are too-often regarded as insubstantial, superficial, sub-par literature. This thesis provides the first comprehensive, theoretically grounded examination of easy readers and endeavors to prove that a surprising complexity lurks beneath the easy reader’s decodable surface. In order to illuminate both extra-textual and textual complexity, easy readers are treated generically and examined using the contemporary genre theories of Amy Devitt and Adena Rosmarin. This thesis ultimately unearths a heretofore unexplored complexity in the easy reader’s publication history and generic emergence, and finds that the easy reader genre has literary potential and can accommodate works of artistic merit.

Despite incredible sales success, popularity, and a fifty year history, easy readers are one of the most neglected forms of children’s literature. Called everything from “the poor stepchild of the more glamorous picture book or children’s novel” to “literary flotsam,” easy readers are too-often regarded as insubstantial, superficial, sub-par literature. This thesis provides the first comprehensive, theoretically grounded examination of easy readers and endeavors to prove that a surprising complexity lurks beneath the easy reader’s decodable surface. In order to illuminate both extra-textual and textual complexity, easy readers are treated generically and examined using the contemporary genre theories of Amy Devitt and Adena Rosmarin. This thesis ultimately unearths a heretofore unexplored complexity in the easy reader’s publication history and generic emergence, and finds that the easy reader genre has literary potential and can accommodate works of artistic merit. / Arts, Faculty of / Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), School of / Graduate

The place of the research paper in first-year composition (FYC) courses is often debated in composition forums. Many argue that the a-disciplinary nature of FYC doesn't allow instructors to teach the research paper in a way that will be transferable to disciplinary writing tasks, while others say that it is possible, as long as we have a thorough understanding of the kinds of writing tasks students will face in the disciplines and specifically teach writing skills that will be transferable. To identify these more generalizable writing skills to be emphasized, I interviewed 14 professors at Brigham Young University from different disciplines about the research papers they teach within their upper-division disciplinary courses and the kinds of researching and writing skills they expect students to have mastered before enrolling in these courses. I collated the results of the interviews and categorized 22 skills into four categories: writing process knowledge, genre knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, and researching knowledge, finding correlation between the 22 skills I identified with skills identified by both John Bean and Carra Leah Hood, lending credence to the value of my identified skills as worthwhile to be focused on in FYC. I draw on Amy Devitt's idea that the school genres we teach in FYC are antecedent genres to assert that teaching a research paper in FYC outside of the constraints of any one discipline can provide a viable and valuable learning experience, provided that it is taught with an emphasis on these writing skills that are most valued across the disciplines, and provided it is taught as a step along the way to later mastery of disciplinary genres.

There have always been rogues who dared to go against the traditional "intellectual" writing style of science and academia, a style that seems bent on transcending the "merely personal." Those who take this risk are embracing the rhetorical tradition of pathos, one that goes as far back as Aristotle. Current academic trends support a genre devoid of pathos and lacking true ethos—a deviation from classic rhetoric, and one that supports the Cartesian split of mind-body dualism. Neurological studies done by Antonio Damasio and others suggest that a holistic view is a more accurate picture of how a human soul functions. Philosophy and psychology support this same perspective, proving that the opposite of logic is not emotion: the opposite of logic is illogic. By the same token, there are two types of emotion: reasonable emotion and unreasonable emotion, one good, the other bad. There are dangers when emotion is left on its own, but there are equal dangers when logic is left on its own; so it is crucial that the two be united. Changing the academic super-genre and inviting pathos back will require writers to pursue, to an extent, divergent thinking.