The idea that genre-specific reading benefits apprenticing writers is a concept that the field of teaching writing values as an underlying constant. Following this, writing center directors select rhetorics (anthologies of writing exemplars) for their self-access library shelves from the over 200 rhetorics presently in print. To choose these texts, quantitative readability formulae (e.g., the Lexile Readability Formula) are often employed. However, such formulae only measure two (i.e., semantic, syntactic) of the many features that impact readability. Other important features that require qualitative exploration are not considered (e.g., interest). To address this, this article reports the findings of a sequential, mixed-methods study conducted in a Taiwanese university writing center setting. The study found that interest influences the readability of rhetorics both as (a) a primary (i.e., an isolated feature) and (b) a conjoined feature (i.e., consisting of two or more associated entities where the second impacts the first). The article also makes a recommendation for teachers, writing center staff, and the publishing industry that interest be considered when considering the difficulty of exemplars in rhetorics.