Do women and men write differently? Past researchers have labeled certain writing characteristics as "feminine"; yet, Andrea Lunsford points out that "the tradition [rhetorical history] has never recognized the forms, strategies, and goals used by many women as 'rhetorical'" (6). Because the majority of feminine rhetoric research has centered on early rhetors, no research focuses on the feminine rhetoric used by students in the classroom. This thesis focuses on student essays written in first-year composition at a Midwestern state university to investigate if women and men write differently, to determine if characteristics labeled as feminine are evident in student essays, and to analyze the implication of these characteristics. The academic setting provides a venue that offers a perspective different from the one scholars have used to research feminine rhetoric in the past and hence provides an opportunity to recognize feminine rhetoric in academia. Past researchers indicate that feminine rhetoric has distinct characteristics: emotional language; inductive arrangement; a cooperative tone; narrative, personal experience, or anecdotal evidence; content related to women's issues; and syntactic construction including intensifiers, expressive forms, and possibilities. Following an analysis of student essays, reflections, and questionnaires interpreted from two feminist theory perspectives, found that minimal differences are evident in female and male writings.Additionally, female writers did not overwhelmingly display the feminine characteristics as past researchers have presented. In fact, the data from the participants of the two classrooms suggest that more men than women demonstrated feminine writing characteristics. The students taking part in this exploratory study did not display high percentages of usage of feminine rhetorical styles consistently. Nevertheless, the low numbers are not a reason to abandon the cause of acknowledging feminine rhetoric. On the contrary, this study hopes to foreground feminine rhetoric in college composition, encourage further study, and advocate for the inclusion of feminine rhetoric as part of the rhetorical tradition and pedagogical practices.