Writing Persuasive Documents

Two experiments examined the role that college students’ verbal aptitude, a cognitive variable, and evaluation anxiety, an affective variable, play in the production of persuasive letters. In both experiments, the students with higher verbal aptitude tended to obtain higher holistic ratings of letter quality, with fewer punctuation and spelling errors, than the students with lower aptitude. In addition, the students’ verbal aptitude and anxiety were inversely related. In Experiment 1, where time limits were imposed to pressure students, there was a weak relationship between anxiety and letter quality. There was also some support for the notion that poor verbal aptitude leads to anxiety. In Experiment 2, where time was unlimited, the relationship between anxiety and letter quality was no longer significant. Taken together, these findings suggest that students’ evaluation anxiety has little, if any, influence on the overall quality of their writing. In general, the findings were interpreted as providing support for instructors who believe that verbal aptitude should be considered when predicting the overall quality of students’ actual writing for purposes of placement. Taking writing anxiety into account, however, does not appear to increase the predictive power of verbal aptitude scores.