Toward a Rhetoric of Inquiry: A Study of the Theory, Application, and Evaluation of the Interdisciplinary Writing Course.

This dissertation describes the basic features of four interdisciplinary writing courses at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), explaining briefly how and why they arose. For example, the "adjunct" course featured the conjunction of a writing class and another class on campus (e.g., in political science or history), thus allowing the writing instructor to help the students in that course develop their required term or research papers. The second section, devoted to the implementation of the theory that writing can be a mode of learning or of inquiry, delineates the strengths and weaknesses of the courses developed at UCLA and offers elements of a pedagogy oriented to the concept of inquiry. The third section, on evaluation, describes the purposes, methodology, conclusions, and recommendations of an evaluative project studying the effectiveness of a multidisciplinary writing course in 1974-1975. The results of the evaluation indicated that the improvement in the writing of students in that course compared favorably with that of students in the traditional freshman composition classes at UCLA. (Author/AA)