Recovering from a steady decline since the late 1980s, style is finding relevance in current approaches to composition pedagogy that make writing its focus. Yet despite this renewed interest in style and more general turn toward language study in rhetoric and composition, scholarship on style continues to be guided by a narrow view of what constitutes style pedagogy. This dissertation argues that in many composition classrooms, where style instruction is not prioritized, teachers' assessments of student writing can stand in for style instruction and become the primary means through which style is taught. What this suggests is that style is often taught implicitly, with little consciousness on the part of the teacher. As a result, style may be caught between conflicting values, those that are communicated to students through written feedback and grades and those that teachers actually endorse. This dissertation approaches the issue of style assessment from the perspectives of assessment scholarship, composition teachers, and advanced composition students to better understand how style is being "taught" through assessment and what values guide those evaluations. Ultimately, it seeks to extend the notion of pedagogy to include the assessment of students' writing styles and to contribute a more fully-realized treatment of style to its recent revival in rhetoric and composition.

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The existence of specific lexical features marking the speech of female characters in Roman Comedy is signalled in scholiastic literature, and has been confirmed by modern quantitative research. This thesis, focusing on the comedies of Plautus, investigates the question of why the playwrights made specific linguistic choices for female personae. / Greek and Roman literary theory stipulated that the speech of women in drama had to be constructed so as to reveal the speakers' feminine nature. Philosophical doctrines that construed gender as a polar opposition evince a fundamental distinction, defining male as 'bond' and female as 'boundless'. The association of female with boundlessness, it is argued, also determines woman's position with respect to speech. A study of Greek New Comedy reveals that the reflections on female nature and expression found there depict woman as adverse to limits, a concept which Plautus seems to have subsequently adapted from his sources. / Donatus's scholia to Terence characterize female speech as disorderly and disrespectful of the norms of verbal interaction. Concrete linguistic patterns are rationalized as symptoms of 'softness' and querulousness, both representing the female propensity to violate interpersonal limits. The text of Plautus, examined for meta-textual asides on female speech, confirms the scholiast's observations. An inquiry into the Plautine perception of blanditia reveals that female mannerisms are interpreted as tokens of a contagious moral disorder, and that they earmark the feebleness of female (and effeminate) personae. The otherness of female complaints, emphasized during the performance of palliata by both verbal and para-verbal means, is intimately associated in the text of the comedies with the chaos within women's minds. Female speech patterns in Plautus thus illustrate the concept of infirmitas sexus.

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This study aimed at examining the association between perfectionism and helpless explanatory style as a function of gender in a Turkish university sample. The sample consisted of 331 undergraduate students from 35 departments of Middle East Technical University. Turkish version of Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (MPS, Oral, 1999) and Depressive Attribution Style Questionnaire (DASQ, Aydin, 1988a) were used to collect data. Factor analysis was employed to the MPS scores to investigate the dimensions of perfectionism as perceived by the participants. MANOVA was conducted to examine a possible relationship between perfectionism and helpless explanatory style as a function of gender. Results of the factor analysis revealed four factors, termed self-oriented, socially prescribed, other-oriented perfectionism, and perfectionist expectations. With regard to the results of the MANOVA no significant associations emerged between perfectionism and helpless explanatory style as a function of gender.

During the last few decades the academic re-gendering has reached the field of rhetorical discourse and differences of speech and rhetoric has been determined. Another gender shift has occurred during the last few decades in the appointments of foreign policy representatives, from being one of the last patriarchal strongholds the change towards equality has been remarkably swift. However, the norms of masculinity and formality within the sphere of foreign policy are still persistent. The first aim of this thesis was to determine if the rhetorical style of men and women differed even in a context heavily laden with norms, such as the UNGA. The secondary aim is based upon the concept of masculinity and femininity in culture, to determine if the gender of culture influenced the speaker’s rhetorical style, even in the UNGA. This thesis generates its own theoretical framework from the works of rhetoric and linguistics to separate masculine and feminine rhetorical style. The method used is a qualitative textual analyze applied to transcribed speeches held by Swedish and U.S. representatives in UNGA. The analysis proved that there is a difference in rhetorical style between genders and culture, even in a context such as the UNGA, but only a small one.

This thesis presents two studies that are concerned with evaluating the psychometric properties of the revised version of the Test of Attentional and Interpersonal Style (TAIS; Nideffer, 1976) - the TAIS2 (Nideffer, n.d.). The original TAIS has many psychometric weaknesses but the revised version was developed in an attempt to rectify the problems of the original. The aim of Study One was to explore the internal consistency and construct validity of the TAIS2 attention subscales. These psychometric properties were evaluated on a sample of 119 undergraduate students who completed the TAIS2 along with measures of anxiety and the