Subtitled: Writing to Learn in College

In a Preface to Instructors, the author explains that he designed this textbook motivated by a common critique of composition courses--that they don't teach students anything that transfers to their particular disciplines and professions. His answer to this critique is to teach what he calls "a writing-to-learn system" in the form of an "Inquiry Contract."

Students are first to choose an issue and research question and then write a "contract proposal"--the first genre in the student's process of inquiry. Next students write a "reflective reading response" which helps them clarify the issue they are exploring. Several examples of student papers in this genre are provided. Next they write an "informative report," in which they report on an interview or on research, then an "exploration project," in which they "resist closure" and look at the ambiguities and unresolvable tensions in their issue. Finally, students choose from many "real-life" genres (i.e., a letter to the editor, an open letter, a brochure) and produce a final argumentative piece.

As students progress through each of these genres (there are two chapters devoted to each), they are given lots of tips on how to handle the task and theory about the genre they are employing. They are asked to reflect back on their previous projects too, for example, looking back at their initial proposal as they learn more about the issue and revising and modifying it, if necessary.

Has anyone used this one? It looks interesting. I wonder if it would be a challenge to keep students interested in a single issue/topic for a whole semester. This doesn't seem to be a text that you could copy pieces from (which would be nice, since there are some great discussions of genre) because each chapter refers to and builds upon previous ones.

Subtitled: The Moves That Matter in Academic Discourse

This text came highly recommended from an instructor that I happen to know is passionate and dedicated to teaching rhetoric, so of-course I had to have a look. The authors offer up simple "templates" for academic discourse, with the essential principle guiding all academic discourse being the "they say, I say" construct. One might balk at the idea of templates... and there are actual fill-in-the-blank templates intended to introduce students to different ways to refer to sources. As the authors themselves admit, this can backfire. But the authors stress that they intend these templates to be generative and heuristic. They write, "the aim of the templates, then, is not to stifle critical thinking but to be direct with students about the key rhetorical moves that comprise it" (xv).

Even though this approach relies on certain structures and forms to teach college-level writing, it explicitly eschews discussion of what they call "logical principles of argument." This is because, as the editors write, "most of us learn the ins and outs of argumentative writing not be studying logical principles in the abstract, but by plunging into actual discussions and debates, trying out different modes of response, and in this way, getting a sense of what works to persuade different audiences and what doesn't. In our view, people learn more about argument from hearing someone say, "You miss my point. What I'm saying is not..." than they do from studying the differences between indictive and deductive reasoning" (xvii).

Brothers and sisters. May I hear an Amen? Just kidding. But this book looks interesting. Structure, not in terms of rhetorical and critical thinking, but in terms of academic discourse. Would this address the "argument checklist" problem I've encountered? (see reviews of Everything's an Argument and Asking the Right Questions.) Hmmm. Here are some sample templates they provide students to "enter the conversation" and "engage the voice of the other.":

Many Americans assume that...

Author X contradicts herself. At the same time she argues..., she implies...

While they rarely admit as much, .... often take it for granted that...

When it comes to the topic of ...., many of us agree that.... However,...

There are ones much longer and more complicated than these, but I don't feel inclined to type more of this out. These are ways to represent what "they say," which comprise the first half of the book. Chapter titles are "starting with what others say," "the art of quoting," and "the art of summarizing." The second half helps students move to what "I say," and chapters deal with distinguishing what you think based on what they say, answering possible skeptics, and answering the big question of "so what."

It's a small book, chapters are brief. Anyone have any experience using this text? Would be good to hear about it.

This is a reader with a specific focus on helping students read actively. Unlike Reading Rhetorically, this text is light on instruction, heavy on guided practice. The introduction, "Reading Ratification and Risk" is similar to the introduction to Asking the Right Questions, in that both focus on not just hows but the whys of reading critically. The editors start, "You take a chance when you read"...then go on to explain how reading actively changes a person (active reading means risk versus ratification).

There are about 25 short essays in the reader. A sampling of contributors: Angelou, Baldwin, SB Heath, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, Richard Rodriguez, Scott Russel Sanders, Robert Scholes. Some essays are academic, others personal narrative, some fiction. There are preparatory questions before readings, then "invititations" to write about them after. These include informal questions for in-class writing, and draft 1 and 2 paper prompts. The readings are also organized into sequences with essays put into conversation with each other. A sample theme: "power and knowledge in everyday life."

I used this text to teach a freshman comp class that was not necessarily argument or "rhetoric" based. This class was more geared toward teaching active reading, interpretation, and academic conventions for paper-writing. My favorite essay in the collection is Scholes' "on reading a video text" which basically demonstrates how a budweiser commercial persuades enthymematically (sp?), with audiences supplying the missing piece of cultural knowledge to "get" the commercial and demonstrate their membership in a discourse community. This is a great article because you can start by discussing it, then ask students to bring in magazine articles to analyze in class. This is a great way to teach rhetoric and active reading without bogging students down with terminology. It's also a introduction to visual rhetoric and a means of expaning what students consider a text.

I think I'll copy the introduction and scholes article for my reader. I am realizing that I'm basically using this blog as a space to organize my thoughts as I put together my rhetoric reader for next semester. I don't know if this is useful for anyone other than me, but I'll keep doing it. ;)

Subtitled: A guide to critical thinking.

This text teaches students to use formal rules of logic to analyze texts. The "right" questions are: what are the issues and conclusions? what are the reasons? what words and phrases are ambigious? what are the value conflicts and assumptions? what are the descriptive assumptions? logical fallacies? how good is the evidence? are there rival causes? what significant information is omittted? and what reasonable conclusions are possible? The introduction provides a nice framework for why to ask the right questions, and the difference between reading to just reaffirm what one already knows versus reading to question ideas (yours and other peoples'). This intro would be a nice complement to some selected chapters from Reading Rhetorically (reviewed in another post), which focuses more on how to read actively but not really why.

I think that some of these chapters would be fantastic in getting students to engage in active reading. But, in my experience, students don't always enjoy breaking arguments down this way. They'd rather talk about arguments more indepedently, free-form, debate style. So, if one wanted to get students out of that pattern and into more formal analysis, this could be a good text. But, this kind of formal analysis, even when successful, can really make for dull class discussions. Students get trained to "shoot down" arguments based on some internalized checklist. I think this was the difficulty I had with Everything's an Argument (reviewed in another posting).

So, I guess that's the split: engaged students talking about texts in unretrained and not necessarily productive ways, or somewhat bored students restricted into talking about arguments through rhetoric and logic.

So, in a nutshell, the same thing I've said elsewhere seems to apply here: I'd take some of the chapters, but wouldn't commit to the whole text. Some of the chapters that look really good to me are the ambiguous word, the evidence (actually two chapters), and significant info omitted.

This textbook looks pretty challenging to me, both to teach from, and for students who are new to rhetoric. It would basically be like handing out Aristotle's On Rhetoric. I think it would only really work for rhetoric majors or advanced classes. I heard that someone is using it in their rhetoric class at UT next year. It would be great to hear what this person does.

On the other hand, I really like the introduction chapter, which provides a very high-level history of rhetoric. It explains to students that rhetoric used to be a key component of the curriculum, and that in times of great cultural change and upheaval, rhetoric becomes important again. The authors do something else kind of nifty in this chapter: showing how a magazine ad and a speech from the Iliad are both texts that can be analyzed using the rhetorical tools presented in the book. The authors also demonstrate the different ways rhetoric impacts the world today. I would definitely hand out this chapter in a first or second semester composition class.

The text includes plenty of sample arguments for students to consider. Some of the authors exerpted are Huxley and Arnold, Thoreau, King, Kennedy, Blair, Woolf, JFK. So, in a nutshell: sophisticated reads and a very formalized presentation of rhetorical theory. Very "old school," but duh, look at the title.

I would categorize this text as a cross between "rhetoric" and a "composition guide," although there is a handbook/reference component to it as well. I haven't used it--just looked it over briefly, and it looks pretty interesting. There's lots of studies that examine how students read when they come to college (I'm thinking of the early WAC scholarship, and especially Haas, in her longitudinal study of how a Biology major reads over the course of four years...) This research suggests students consider texts as collections of facts and understand their role as passively absorbing facts. They don't consider that texts were produced by people in rhetorical contexts; this is partly because they haven't been encouraged to read this way before. This textbook seems intent on changing all that. It's split into two sections, the first focusing on active reading and interpretation, the second on writing. Although the text is organized around this split, it obviously wants students to see the reciprocal relationship between reading and writing as both are "acts of composing." This point is repeated throughout.

The first section provides lots of lists and exercises that instruct students how to read actively. Some examples: identify your purpose, recall backgroud knowledge, plan and predict, reconstruct rhetorical context, "spot reading", noting organizational signals, writing a rhetorical precis, and so on. There is a chapter that instructs students how to question a text--including playing Elbow's believing and doubting games, examining a text's "ideology," looking at different appeals. This chapter ends in a sample student paper on rhetorical analysis that does all these things. This seems like it would be really useful to demonstrate what rhetorical analysis looks like (something that can be hard for students to "get" initially).

The second section seemed somewhat less useful than the first. The focus is on writing, and the text aims to give students aids in developing topics and arguments, conducting research, etc. The last chapter of this section is more of a lesson in academic citation conventions. This chapter looks pretty useful--it is more than just a list of different conventions and rules--it discusses different citation strategies in a more complicated manner. There is also a sample student paper in MLA format.

The chapters are long, with discussion of strategies and exercises for both in-class and at-home work. Each chapter includes small excerpts of texts and sample arguments for analysis. In a nutshell, what this text aims to do is vital for undergraduate rhetoric classes. I would probably copy a few chapters (especially the two discussed above) and give them to students rather than using the whole textbook. I think that if presented with the entire textbook, students would stop "listening" to it. There's so much discussion of how to read, it might be better to move more quickly into modeling how to do it by engaging texts in class.

It would be great to hear from anyone who has used this text.

People refer to "handbooks" as grammar and style references, "readers" as anthologies and collections of essays, and "rhetorics" as texts that present rhetorical theory. Another category is something like guides for reading and writing critically...and these sometimes include rhetorical theory and sometimes don't. Categorizing textbooks into these genres isn't always terribly useful, as lots of texts seem to serve multiple functions. But, it might be worthwhile to use this terminology anyhow. Another thing that might be useful is to learn for what kind of class a text would be appropriate, for example, first or second semester comp class, etc.

This is the rhetoric textbook everyone used for 306 when I taught it last, and I've heard some really mixed reviews. Here's mine.

In a nutshell, I found this text to be very useful, and I think the majority of my students did too. I would like to hear some different approaches to using the text in class, though, as I didn't always suceed in "opening up" discussions about rhetoric using the text. I think students took it more like a textbook full of facts...and I think the authors meant it to be more provocative than that.

The text focuses heavily on (duh) argument, and the book is geared toward production, not reception or interpretation. In other words, the chapters tell readers how to write different kinds of arguments: proposals, definitions, evaluations, arguments based on pathos, logos, ethos, etc. They didn't use too much of the Greek or Roman terminology, which was fine. (So, rather than talking about "deliberative" rhetoric, they talked about arguments about the future, rather than talking about pathos, it was "arguments from the heart.") There's a chapter on Toulmin argument that my students found suprisingly clear and useful. Most of my students also really benefit from the discussion of audience early in the book. At the end of each chapter are some informal class exercises you can use to review concepts with students. I had mixed success with these. I think they were useful in reinforcing concepts to students, but they didn't tend to generate lively class discussion--or inspire students to complicate and expand upon the rhetorical theory introduced in the particular chapter. That may have been my failing in how I used the textbook. I found myself having to ask students to read the text a different way than it was intended: in other words, when reading about the different components of good evaluative arguments, to use those components in order to analyze and interpret other people's stragegies, not just apply a checklist of components.

One aspect of the handbook I thought was really useful was the everyday examples: the authors incorporated plenty of material students would be able to connect with. For example, they used shocking images from a SADD campaign to demonstrate visual rhetoric and emotional pleas. They also cited recent controversies, for example, using quotes from Michael Moore. These examples seems to help students "get" the rhetorical concepts easily enough--but, as I say above, I didn't have as much success getting students beyond the introductory way of thinking about rhetorical theory, for example, how stases are interrelated, and what's a fallacy to one person isn't to anther...In other words, students were prone to read the book as a "how to," and you have to do the work to get them beyond the formulaic reading of some of the rhetorical theory. So, it would be interesting to hear strategies peolple used to do this.