Writing / Grammar Handout

Teaching Arguments: Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response 

About the book...

- The main purpose of this book is to give teachers strategies for how to teach students to comprehend, analyze, and respond to arguments. 

- The skills taught in this book are meant to prepare all students to be college and career ready even if they don't view themselves as good students.

-Activities and scenarios are provided for teaching the elements of the rhetorical situation (audience, occasion, and purpose) to high school students.

-Most of the activities provided in this book include examples of authentic student work or possible responses crafted by the author.

-At the end of each chapter, there are lists titled "Points to Remember" and "Prompts for Quick Writes or Pairs Conversations." 

-Rhetorical approach to arguments- based on situational awareness and responsiveness instead of rules and formulas. 

Overview of the Chapters:

Chapter 1: Starting with Open-Ended Inquiry
   -Writing begins with reading. Students have to know what has been said before they can enter the conversation. 

Chapter 2: From Comprehension to Critique 
   -Being able to switch between reading for comprehension (believing) and reading to critique (doubting) is not an easily acquired skill. 

Chapter 3: Fostering a Deeper Understanding of the Occasion
   -To really understand occasion, audience, and purpose, students have to reconstruct the messy social worlds in which texts were written. 

Chapter 4: Fostering a Deeper Understanding of Audience
   -Everything may be an argument, but not everyone is in the audience.

Chapter 5: Fostering a Deeper Understanding of Purpose
   -A writer's purpose if shaped by the audience and occasion of the rhetorical situation. 

Chapter 6: Analyzing and Integrating Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
   -A deep understanding of the three rhetorical appeals includes the ability to analyze, evaluate, integrate, and apply them.

Chapter 7: Aristotle's Guide to Becoming a "Good" Student 
   -Strategies for promoting students' academic identities and habits.

Why I Chose This Book...

This was not my first choice for this presentation. I requested a book from the library about teaching writing to adolescents, opened the book, scanned the pages, and promptly put the book in the return bin. It had not interested me and I knew I couldn't create a presentation centered around a book that I didn't even like. I went to Sean's office to try and find a book I liked. I flipped through quite a few books in the stack before this one caught my eye. The title pulled me in because I love writing argumentative essays and it intrigued me how I could teach students to craft arguments. This book changed my thinking about teaching because now I know that teaching arguments is about more than just the argument. It is about close, focused reading, rhetorical situations, and much more. 

Teaching Ideas: 

1. Writing as Inquiry

     This activity is an extended version of a quick writ known as loop writing. Students are shown the first line ("When I first think of my issue, I think of...") and they are given five minutes to write. Then they are shown the next line ("Next I think of..."). The process continues for the third ("Then it occurs to me...") and fourth ("Now I wonder..") lines of the prompt. By the end of the activity, students will hopefully have gone beyond surface level understandings and discovered new perspectives. This would be great to use when students get stuck in the writing process or when they overthink their topic or issue. 

2. PAPA Square 

     This activity is a great way to help students break down and visualize the elements of the rhetorical situation. It can be used when reading an article or for a student assessing their own writing. On the outside of the square, the students identify the purpose, argument, persona, and audience of the article. Once they have that filled in, they can move to the inside of the box where they identify the rhetorical devices and strategies used by the author to try and persuade their audience. 

3. Translating for Outsiders 

     This activity helps students understand the importance of their audience when they write. Students are asked to choose a topic on which they are an "expert" and write as if they are talking to a fellow expert on that topic. Students are able to personalize the assignment based on their own interests and the teacher gets a little insight into that student. Their next step would be to change the target audience to a "non-expert" such as their grandma or a doctor to practice writing for a specific target audience. To wrap up the activity, students would reflect on what they had to change or elaborate on when they switched audiences. 

4. Kairos Analysis

     Prior to this activity, students will need to know that kairos is a window of opportunity or the immediate social space and situation in which arguments must be made. This activity assists students in reaching a deeper understanding of occasion by identifying the time, place, and social expectations of a rhetorical situation and reflecting on whether the author made the most of the given rhetorical situation. 


Challenges... 

-Even though the chapters and activities can be used independently, the concepts in this book would take substantial time to teach and for students to understand. 

-Students may not "buy" into the rhetorical approach.

-Some schools may have unit plans or pacing guides that do not emphasize the rhetorical approach to arguments. 

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