Graduation Semester and Year
Summer 2025
Language
English
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science in Psychology
Department
Psychology
First Advisor
Logan L. Watts
Second Advisor
Jared Kenworthy
Third Advisor
Michelle Martin-Raugh
Abstract
In professional and academic settings, support for creative ideas often hinges on how effectively those ideas are communicated in writing. This study examined how two sentence-level rhetorical features—parsimony and parallelism—influence the evaluation, support, and recall of written proposals featuring creative restaurant concepts. Using a 2×2 within-subjects design, 211 undergraduates reviewed proposals manipulated to vary in parsimony (high vs. low) and parallelism (high vs. low). Participants rated each proposal on quality, originality, elegance, support, and completed a recall task. Contrary to expectations, proposals with low parsimony and low parallelism received the highest evaluations across all three creative indicators (i.e., quality, originality, and elegance). However, parsimony and parallelism did not significantly influence recall or support, which appeared more closely tied to content relevance. These findings challenge common assumptions about brevity and parallelism in professional writing and offer theoretical and practical implications for how creative ideas are communicated and assessed in real-world contexts.
Keywords
Creative idea evaluation, proposal structure, effictive communication
Disciplines
Industrial and Organizational Psychology
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
McLemore, Peter, "Parsimony, Parallelism, and Presentation: The Impact of Presentation on Evaluation" (2025). Psychology Theses. 168.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/psychology_theses/168
Comments
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Logan Watts, for their unwavering support, insightful guidance, and encouragement throughout every stage of this thesis. Their expertise, thoughtful feedback, and commitment to my academic development have been instrumental in shaping both this project and my growth as a researcher.