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Teaching Arguments

Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response

Author: Jennifer Fletcher  

No matter where students’ lives lead after graduation, one of the most essential tools we can teach them is how to comprehend, analyze, and respond to arguments. Students need to know how writers’ and speakers’ choices are shaped by elements of the rhetorical situation, including audience, occasion, and purpose.

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Summary

No matter where students’ lives lead after graduation, one of the most essential tools we can teach them is how to comprehend, analyze, and respond to arguments. Students need to know how writers’ and speakers’ choices are shaped by elements of the rhetorical situation, including audience, occasion, and purpose.

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Description

No matter wherestudents' lives lead after graduation, one of the most essential tools we can teach them is how to comprehend, analyze, and respond to arguments. Students need to know how writers' and speakers' choices are shaped by elements of the rhetorical situation, including audience, occasion, and purpose. In Teaching Arguments: Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response , Jennifer Fletcher provides teachers with engaging classroom activities, writing prompts, graphic organizers, and student samples to help students at all levels read, write, listen, speak, and think rhetorically.Fletcher believes that, with appropriate scaffolding and encouragement, all students can learn a rhetorical approach to argument and gain access to rigorous academic content. Teaching Arguments opens the door and helps them pay closer attention to the acts of meaning around them, to notice persuasive strategies that might not be apparent at first glance. When we analyze and develop arguments, we have to consider more than just the printed words on the page. We have to evaluate multiple perspectives; the tension between belief and doubt; the interplay of reason, character, and emotion; the dynamics of occasion, audience, and purpose; and how our own identities shape what we read and write. Rhetoric teaches us how to do these things.Teaching Arguments will help students learn to move beyond a superficial response to texts so they can analyze and craft sophisticated, persuasive arguments-;a major cornerstone for being not just college-and career-ready but ready for the challenges of the world.

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Critic Reviews

“I first met Jennifer Fletcher when she joined our ERWC Task Force as a high school representative. At the time she was Chair of English at Buena Park High School, but she was working on a Ph.D. at UC Riverside (and raising two kids!). Soon she surprised us by taking an English Education position at CSU Monterey Bay. Jennifer has an amazing resume: high school teaching, chairing a department, scholarship, and publications. She is quite agile in moving from theory to practice. And she lives and breathes ERWC. So it was no surprise to me when she published this wonderful and timely book, Teaching Arguments: Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response . The book synthesizes concepts from classical rhetoric, modern rhetoric, Common Core State Standards, and Jennifer's teaching experience and wisdom. It manages to be both academic and personal, with practical teaching strategies on every page. As Jennifer herself says in the introduction: This book is about opening doors to deeper learning for all our students through a rhetorical approach to arguments--an approach based on situational awareness and responsiveness instead of rules and formulas. Throughout the chapters, you'll find detailed examples of activities, such as the rhetorical prcis, descriptive outlining, and the doubting and believing game, that show students how to move beyond a superficial response to texts (xiv). A bit later she offers a justification for teaching rhetorically: Rhetoric targets the conventions and processes of high academic literacy, including the sophisticated responsiveness to context that characterizes college and workplace writing. Writing rhetorically means writing with attention to argument, purpose, audience, authority, and style demanded by academic texts (xv). The first chapter is about "open-minded" inquiry. It begins with activities for closely attending to the features of a text, even a visual text such as a painting. Then Peter Elbow's "believing game" is introduced (the "doubting game" will appear in the next chapter) along with checklist questions for facilitating the activity. This is demonstrated through a detailed analysis of an op-ed by David Brooks, followed by a section on "Discovering the Question at Issue" which is built around the Ciceronian concept of stasis. Stasis theory is presented with lots of examples and sample questions, making it clear how it might be used with students. Though the theories deployed span centuries, everything is tied together by the focus on the classroom and the students and by the author's personal experience. Subsequent chapters discuss critical approaches to text, modern application of the ancient Greek concept of”

The book synthesizes concepts from classical rhetoric, modern rhetoric, Common Core State Standards, and Jennifer’s teaching experience and wisdom. It manages to be both academic and personal, with practical teaching strategies on every page…Reading this book is like accompanying the author on a personal intellectual journey through rhetoric and teaching, a journey on which you learn, grow, and pick up handouts that you can use on Monday morning. I recommend it highly.
Teaching Text Rhetorically Oct 2016

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About the Author

Jennifer Fletcher is a professor of English at California State University, Monterey Bay. Before joining the faculty at CSUMB, she taught high school English for more than ten years in Southern California. She is the author of Teaching Arguments: Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response (2015, Stenhouse).

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Product Details

Publisher
Stenhouse Publishers
Published
30th April 2015
Pages
312
ISBN
9781571109996

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