INSTRUCTOR’S MANUAL
to accompany
EVERYDAY USE
Rhetoric at Work in Reading and Writing
Second Edition
Hephzibah Roskelly
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
David A. Jolliffe
DePaul University
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Instructor’s Manual to accompany Roskelly/Jolliffe, Everyday Use: Rhetoric at Work in
Reading and Writing, Second Edition
Copyright ©2009 Pearson Education, Inc.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Instructors may reproduce
portions of this book for classroom use only. All other reproductions are strictly
prohibited without prior permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews.
ISBN: 0-205-59110-8
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10–OPM–11 10 09 08
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Everyday Use: Rhetoric in Our Lives
1
19
Chapter 2: Understanding the Traditional Canons of Rhetoric:
Invention and Memory
29
Chapter 3: Using the Traditional Canons of Rhetoric:
Arrangement, Style and Delivery
37
Chapter 4: Rhetoric and the Writer
43
Chapter 5: Rhetoric and the Reader
49
Chapter 6: Readers as Writers, Writers as Readers:
Making Connections
75
Chapter 7: Rhetoric in Narrative
89
INTRODUCTION
Everyday Use: Rhetoric at Work in Reading and Writing is designed for
college and university courses that aim to teach students how to read
carefully and critically and how to write purposefully, effectively, and
correctly in a variety of situations, both within academia and beyond its
walls. Everyday Use is based on a theory of rhetoric, an ancient and
honorable art of discovering all the things one might do with language in a
situation to produce meaning, achieve a purpose, and/or create an effect
with readers or listeners. Everyday Use teaches that all of us are
surrounded by rhetorical activity in our lives as students, as citizens,
indeed as human beings, and it suggests that students will succeed more
readily in school and beyond if they understand how people employ the art
of rhetoric as they read and write—in other words, if they can comprehend
what it means as a writer and a reader to become skilled at rhetoric.
Everyday Use can be used in any college writing course. It reprints three
substantial, complete primary texts that students can read, analyze, and
write about: Henry David Thoreau’s essay, “On the Duty of Civil
Disobedience”; Alice Walker’s short story, “Everyday Use” (from which
the title of the book is borrowed); and Eavon Boland’s poem, “It’s a
Woman’s World.” Each chapter either contains or refers students to other
works of nonfiction prose, fiction, poetry, and drama that they can read,
analyze, and write about. The book includes a final section of additional
readings that provide opportunities for students to study further the
rhetorical concepts explored in each chapter. The texts have been selected
to represent a variety of styles, authors, genres, and periods. We have
grouped the selections in three categories linked to themes and arguments
presented by Boland’s poem, Walker’s story, and Thoreau’s essay: Civil
Rights and Responsibilities Feminism and Women’s Issues, and Ethnicity
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and Culture. We show in the sample syllabi how the book can be used
with a range of primary works or with the texts we offer in the Additional
Readings. Some instructors might also want to use Everyday Use in
combination with a brief handbook covering grammatical usage and
mechanical issues.
We have designed Everyday Use so that students can answer a series of
questions, each of which leads logically to the next. Chapter 1 poses the
questions: “What is rhetoric?” and “How does understanding rhetoric help
us comprehend the work we must do as students and our responsibilities as
citizens?” Chapter 2 asks: “How does understanding two of the traditional
canons of rhetoric—invention and memory—contribute to a writer’s goal
of creating meaning, purpose, and effect?” Chapter 3 follows, then, with
this question: “How does understanding the other three of the traditional
canons of rhetoric—arrangement, style, and delivery—similarly contribute
to a writer’s goal of creating meaning, purpose, and effect?” Chapter 4
focuses on the questions: “How is the writing process essentially a
rhetorical process, and how do writers purposefully use the art of rhetoric
as they compose texts?” Chapter 5 focuses on reading, asking: “What are
the rhetorical choices a person makes as he or she reads to determine the
meaning, purpose, and/or effect?” Chapter 6 probes the connections
between reading and writing, asking the questions: “From a rhetorical
perspective, how does reading help a person learn to write and how does
writing help a person learn to read?” Chapter 7 looks specifically at issues
involved with reading and writing about imaginative literature and raises
these questions: “How do literary texts function rhetorically? How do they
develop an idea? How do they create meaning, purpose, and effect? How
do they appeal to readers?”
These questions suggest a series of assignments or projects a student
might complete in a course that uses Everyday Use.
•
Working with the material in Chapter 1, a student might
focus on a significant piece of nonfiction prose and analyze
how it establishes the writer’s persona, appeals to the
2
audience, addresses the arguable nature of its subject,
reflects its rhetorical context, and uses a recognizable genre
to achieve a purpose. A wonderful complement to this
project would be to ask the student to do the same kind of
analysis with a piece of everyday rhetoric—banners
hanging in a neighborhood, advertisements received in the
mail, or a story told by a friend.
•
Working with Chapters 2 and 3, a student might examine
another text and analyze: (a) what strategies of invention it
uses to develop its ideas; (b) how it arranges and organizes
its material, perhaps using a conventional generic format;
and (c) how it crafts words and sentences so that it achieves
meaning, purpose, and effect. A student might analyze
drafts of published work to discover how changes in
diction, or omissions and additions, alter readers’
responses.
•
Working with Chapter 4, a student might produce an initial
draft of an argumentative paper and, in so doing, analyze
and write about his or her own writing processes and
rhetorical decisions. A student might comment on the effect
of sharing a draft with a peer group and discuss how
reading the drafts of others affects his or her own thinking.
•
Working with Chapters 5 and 6, a student might complete
the argumentative paper and, in a separate document or
journal, reflect on the background reading used to
strengthen the argument and the writer’s authority. The
student might analyze how he or she made decisions about
the meaning, purpose, and effect of the texts he or she read,
and how those readings were used in the final argument.
•
Working in particular with Chapter 7, but more generally
with the entire book, a student might produce an additional
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argumentative paper, drawing on both nonfiction and
imaginative literature to support his or her claims and, in a
separate document or journal, write reflectively about the
development of ideas, arrangement, and style of both
fiction and nonfiction, as well as about the genre and style
of the paper the student has written.
Some instructors prefer to expose students to a wide range of subject
matters in a writing course, so these projects could all be about different
topics—current events, cultural understandings, local issues, history, or
economics. Instructors who prefer to teach thematic writing courses could
ask students to complete all of the projects about the same topic or issue—
for example, the role gender plays in the depiction of the character and
development of an argument, or the importance of location to writers.
Indeed, the first sample syllabus illustrates a writing course designed to
investigate issues related to human work, and the second sets out a course
that asks students to write about relationships between men and women.
We have written this manual not as a cookbook, containing a set of recipes
that an instructor must follow. Both of us have been working with
university writing programs long enough to know that the best teaching
and learning happen in courses where the instructor has enough autonomy
to develop lesson plans, bring in readings that he or she knows and likes,
and develop student projects that bear an individual’s own stamp. To
foster this work, we have tried to describe a wide range of discussion
topics and classroom activities instructors can ask students to do, knowing
that no course will involve all of the activities we offer. We present two
sample syllabi as preliminary templates for instructors who want to design
a course using Everyday Use. Then we look at each of the seven chapters
(and interchapters) individually, explaining the highlights of the chapter,
listing questions that instructors and students can use to frame learning
goals, sketching out teaching suggestions and classroom activities, and
providing notes on the student activities. We do not always list answers to
the student activities—many will vary from student to student.
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How to use Everyday Use: Two Sample Syllabi
A. For a Writing Course using a Variety of Primary Texts
Course aims: This syllabus helps you to become a more confident and
skilled writer and reader by learning to devise strategies that you can use
in all your college work. To read and write effectively you must do more
than follow set rules or formulas. You must understand and use the
relationship between who writers are and who readers might be, as well as
how writers get across their intentions and how readers read those
intentions. Understanding communication between readers and writers
means you are using rhetoric.
During the semester we’ll learn about rhetoric through the reading and
writing we accomplish. You’ll write for yourself in a journal, for others in
your small group and larger, more anonymous groups. You’ll analyze one
another’s texts, published texts of several kinds, and your own. We’ll
discuss how you develop a style, how you develop ideas and change them,
and how you come to understand audience.
Class discussion will often happen in small groups, and your work in your
group is important to your success. Reading in this class will strengthen
your ability to enter the world of a text and to understand writers’ motives
and their effect on you. Writing in this class will make you more confident
of your ability to write for a variety of purposes and help you learn how
much writing matters to thinking.
This semester our running theme throughout the course will be the world
of work and the worker in America. We’ll read fiction, nonfiction, plays,
and poetry from recent and nineteenth-century works.
Texts:
Everyday Use, Roskelly and Jolliffe
Nickeled and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich
Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
5
Working, Studs Terkel
Work, Louisa May Alcott
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee
Poems: Rita Dove, James W. Johnson, James Wright,
Robert Frost, and Lucille Clifton
Weeks 1–2:
Course introduction: What is Rhetoric? Chapter 1, EU.
Ehrenreich, Nickeled and Dimed.
Assignments: Using the rhetorical triangle, practice with
Ehrenreich.
Reporting on employment in the community.
Weeks 3–5:
How to derive ideas and change them
Using the Canons: Chapters 2 to 3, EU
Selected poetry
Assignments: Inventing connections between poems
Writing or finding a poem of one’s own
Weeks 6–9
Rhetoric and the Writer and Reader: Chapters 4 to 5, EU
Terkel, Work
Assignments: Group projects on work and workers
Writing about personal writing processes and problems
Group presentations of projects
6
Weeks 10–12
Making Connections: Chapter 6, EU
Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Assignments: Research and inquiry on the Depression, reading
primary accounts
Analyzing appeals in Agee
An argument for today’s “famous people”
Weeks 13–15
Rhetoric in Narrative: Chapter 7, EU
Alcott, Work
Miller, Death of a Salesman
Assignments: plot analysis of Alcott, connections to Terkel
Group work: Salesman revisited, contemporary play
Week 16
Portfolios
Final evaluations
Final speech: The value of work/the problem with work
Assignments for First Year Composition with Primary Readings on Work
The Journal:
The journal will be useful as a place to comment and respond to readings,
to locate ideas for writing, to record observations of people at work and of
the sites of work, and to think through past experiences, memories, and
family stories that connect to themes in the course.
7
The journal provides students a space to begin to hear their voices, to play
with forms and ideas, and to feel the kind of freedom that comes from a
belief that your words will not be corrected or censured. The journal is
never graded, only responded to.
A teacher may wish to provide prompts for some journal entries. Here are
a few possibilities:
l. Comment on these lines from a poem by Marge Piercy:
“Work is its own cure. You have to / like it better than
being loved.”
2. What kind of work would you most like to do? What would be
the worst work?
3. The top ten reasons people can’t find work.
4. Dialogue between Louisa May Alcott and Studs Terkel.
5. What do you remember about learning to read? Or write?
Students should keep the journal by writing two or three times a week.
Asking students to devote fifteen minutes to the writing rather than
requiring a page limit suggests that engagement rather than filling a
requirement is the aim. Students can occasionally share journal entries in
small groups or, with advance notice from the teacher, trade journals for
commentary from classmates.
Group work:
Some assignments should be small group tasks to underscore the
importance of the group to the work of the course. After class discussion
of EU chapters on rhetoric, invention and revision, students are well
prepared to read one another’s work and to investigate ideas and present
them to the class as a team. Earlier in the semester, students practice
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writing together, locating patterns of response from individual pieces, and
creating beginning arguments.
Groups work best when group members know and trust one another. In a
typical 15- to 16-week semester, with classes meeting two or three times a
week, some time each week should be devoted to group work to build this
knowledge and trust. Establishing permanent groups with a group name
aids the process as well.
In addition to asking students to share ideas for papers, to consider
interpretations of readings, and to offer suggestions for revision of work,
groups can provide opportunities for shared writing and investigation.
Here are possibilities for group assignments for each unit of the course.
Weeks 1–2:
Take the first few paragraphs of Ehrenreich and change the writer’s
persona. Consider changing vocabulary, examples, opening, and
punctuation. Read aloud to one another to test for effectiveness.
Share findings from investigation about employment rates, types of jobs,
and who fills them in the community. Consider other sources and data
together. Present to the class.
Analyze advertisements from a variety of media. Discuss together the
effect on community and on consumers.
Weeks 3–5:
Find a poem that emphasizes one appeal over the other. Read to the class
and comment on how appeal is effected.
Use a current event and analyze it using Burke’s pentad and the
journalist’s questions. Consider what each reveals and present findings to
the class.
9
Create a common poem by beginning with a line and then each person in
the group writing the next line. Revise poem together and read aloud to the
class.
Weeks 6–9:
Interview workers from a variety of fields. Derive questions in the group,
conduct interviews, share findings, create patterns, and draw some
tentative conclusions. Write findings and make presentations to the class.
Discuss case studies in EU. Which one of the student cases seems closest
to your own writing issues? Share with the group and write responses to
one another.
Bring ideas for essays to group. Ask questions of the group and have them
ask questions of you. Take notes for drafting responses.
Weeks 10–12:
Share accounts of Depression-era writers, musicians, artists, and
filmmakers. Connect accounts to Agee’s work
Discuss case studies in Agee’s book, creating a dialogue between one of
the characters in that book and either Terkel’s or Ehrenreich’s study.
Find a 1930s-era film and have your group watch it to analyze its voice
and intention or to predict its ending. Present the movie in part or in whole
to the group at large.
(Some suggestions for movies: My Man Godfrey, Sullivan’s Way, The
Grapes of Wrath, Angels with Dirty Faces, or They Made me a Criminal).
Weeks 13–15:
Stage a part of Miller’s play for the class. Discuss elements of setting,
costume, positioning of characters, that contribute to rhetorical effect.
10
Create a scene of a play based on Alcott’s Work.
Present to the class. Consider whether characters are flat, round, static or
dynamic.
Revise a bit of Death of a Salesman to take place in contemporary times.
Act out for the class.
Use the pentad to consider motives for all the characters in Miller’s play.
Work on portfolio revision together, making suggestions and listening to
revised work.
Week 16:
Give final speeches to one another in small group as practice for final
speech before the class.
Read portfolios and comment for each group member.
Possibilities for Essay Assignments:
Many suggestions for writing tasks are offered in each chapter of
Everyday Use. Here are others, some directly working with primary texts,
and some more generally considering the issues EU explores:
Weeks 1–2:
l. Record a conversation between two people—an employer and a worker,
a couple, a mother and child—as closely as you can. Then, in a page or
two, explain the conversation, using what you know of the rhetorical
triangle.
2. Choose one chapter from Ehrenreich’s book to take a look at how the
writer establishes a connection with her readers. Consider her use of
examples and appeals, as well as her use of language to make her points.
11
3. Find an issue of local importance at your college, in the community, or
state, and consider how rhetoric is used to present the issue. Bring in any
ads or letters or news reports to help you explore the rhetoric being
employed.
Weeks 3–5:
l. Write quickly about the connections you find between any two poems in
the set of poems we’ve read. Highlight the connections you find most
productive. Then write a brief analysis of the two poems, considering their
relationship in terms of theme, tone, genre, form, voice, setting or other
details.
2. Look back at your journal, and at other readings, to find one word or
line that strikes you. Use this line as the beginning for a poem on work or
a related issue. Revise the poem with your group. Read aloud to the class.
Weeks 6–9:
l. Use a paper you’ve written in the past to consider your writing process.
Write about how you got ideas, changed them, and completed them, how
you discovered purpose, how you felt as a writer during the process, and
how you feel looking back.
2. Revise a paragraph or two from your first essay. Begin with a paragraph
or line that you like. Then, in a page or two, explain your reasons for
revision and how you might complete the revising of the essay.
3. Choose one section of Terkel’s Working to analyze and use as evidence
for an argument you make about class issues, gender, racial issues in
work, age, ethnicity-related issues, or others. Consider how best to place
Terkel’s commentary in your own text to highlight both your argument
and your speaker’s persona.
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Weeks 10–12:
l. Analyze song lyrics, movie scenes, or magazine articles for their
presentation and illustration of the effect of the Depression on American
life. Use the pentad to help you uncover agendas and patterns.
2. Discuss Agee’s use of appeals in his work. Include reviews of the book
that suggest Agee’s motives and his effectiveness.
3. Write a two- or three-page character study that praises a famous person
of your own, someone you know or who you have researched. Include
dialogue or direct quotes from the person if you can.
Week 13–15:
l. Compare Alcott’s persona and use of characters in Work to Little
Women. Consider plot, voice, and language, as well as your own reader’s
reaction to the differences between the two.
2. Develop an argument for the heroic character of any of the main
characters in Death of a Salesman.
3. How has working life changed for women and men between the time of
Alcott and Terkel? Use any sources, including ones from earlier pieces of
your writing, to consider the issue.
Portfolios:
The writer’s portfolio is useful for a number of reasons: to reflect on the
semester’s work; to illustrate development of writing, revising, and critical
skills of reading; to demonstrate the variety of rhetorical forms and
strategies writers can employ. Students often find this compiling and
revising exercise the most rewarding in the semester’s work.
Teachers need to allow time for the portfolio work to be accomplished
most effectively by allotting group work time to portfolio discussion and
13
often by meeting with students in individual conferences to help with
organization, making decisions about what to include, and giving feedback
and suggestions for revision.
Many good books on portfolios are available, including Bonnie Sunstein,
Portfolio Portraits and Kathleen Yancey, Reflection in the Writing
Classroom.
In general, most portfolios include:
l. a reflective statement that discusses a writer’s reasons for selections, as
well as commentary on difficulties and opportunities presented by tasks, a
consideration of voice, audience, and subjects, and a recognition of
processes and development.
2. a selection of writing ranging from formal to informal pieces, with at
least some of the work revised for the portfolio.
3. a commentary and selection of material from group presentations and
meetings.
4. a table of contents
Some portfolios include writings from other courses or other pieces that
suggest writer’s growth and development.
Final speeches:
Oral communication has always been a part of rhetoric of course, and it is
increasingly a part of the work of the first-year writing program as well.
Students can use written compositions to develop speeches or can create
new pieces designed to be heard rather than read.
Teachers should help with the format of speeches, helping with
organization and development, providing feedback on voice and stance,
14
and allowing time and space for informal occasions where students speak
aloud to the group as a whole.
Using text selections in EU:
If teachers wish to add them, Thoreau, Walker, and Boland all fit into the
theme of this composition course syllabus. Thoreau’s argument for action
in the face of injustice would work well in Weeks 10 to 12, where
parallels could be made to Agee’s work. Students could explore Thoreau’s
statement in Walden that the “mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”
and apply that statement to “Civil Disobedience,” as well as to Agee.
Walker’s discussion of work as art and of differing definitions of use
could be included in early weeks of the course. Her “Everyday Use” could
be included in Weeks 13 to 15 as well, where a discussion of how
narrative works rhetorically could illuminate conflicts among the three
central characters.
Boland exposes the unchanging nature of women’s work and creates a
powerful demonstration of women’s hidden anger and despair about the
value society assigns to that work. The poem could be used with others in
Weeks 3 to 5 or as detail and support for final speeches in Week 16.
B. For a Writing Course Using the Additional Readings:
Note: Sections on course aims, group work, and portfolio from previous
syllabus may be used with this one. Writing assignments are suggested
within each section of the syllabus.
Weeks 1–2
Course introduction. What is rhetoric? Everyday Use, Chapter 1
Readings:
Morrison, Nobel Lecture
Dylan, “The Times They Are a’Changin’”
15
Swift, “A Modest Proposal”
Rock the Vote Web pages
Assignments: Using the rhetoric triangle, practice with all four texts
Informed reports on most important issues involving civil
rights and responsibilities
Weeks 3–5
How to derive ideas and change them
Using the canons: Everyday Use, Chapters 2 and 3
Readings:
Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village”
Pitts, “The Game of Justice is Rigged”
Shakespeare, “Shylock’s Defense”
Department of Homeland Security, “Border
Apprehensions”
Spiegelman, from Maus II
Riis, Lodgers in a Crowded Bayard Street Tenement
Assignments: Analyzing the rhetorical appeals in essays, poems, stories,
and visuals
Analyzing argument structure: the enthymeme
Analyzing the relation of genre and style to meaning,
purpose, and effect
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Synthesizing arguments about ethnicity and culture from
different genres
Weeks 6–9
Rhetoric and the Writer and Reader: Everyday Use, Chapters 4 and 5
Readings:
Gandhi, “Seven Social Sins”
Glaspell, “Trifles”
Donne, Meditation 17
Erdrich, “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways”
Assignments: Describing and analyzing one’s own writing processes
Analyzing how one predicts when reading any text
Doing rhetorical analysis of nonfiction prose and short
stories
Weeks 10–12
Making connections: Everyday Use, Chapter 6
Readings:
Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?”
Woolf, “Shakespeare’s Sister”
Pollitt, “Girls Against Boys”
Haun, “A Woman’s Trip Across the Plains in 1849”
Assignment: An argument to address an important issue involving
feminism and gender.
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Weeks 13–15
Rhetoric in Narrative: Everyday Use, Chapter 7
Readings:
Chopin, “The Story of an Hour”
Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”
Assignments: Analyzing the plot of short stories
Drawing connections: rhetorical appeals in all genres
Week 16
Portfolios
Final evaluations
Final speech: A comment/solution/compromise about an important issue
involving civil rights and responsibilities, feminism and women’s issues,
or ethnicity and culture.
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CHAPTER 1
Everyday Use: Rhetoric in Our Lives
Chapter Highlights
Chapter 1 leads students through discussions and activities designed to
illuminate three robust but fundamental topics:
•
A definition of rhetoric in its two senses: the art of analyzing all
the language choices that a writer, speaker, reader, or listener
might make in a given situation so that the text becomes
meaningful, purposeful, and effective; and the specific features of
texts, written or spoken, that cause them to be meaningful,
purposeful, and effective.
•
The use of the rhetorical triangle as a template for analyzing any
rhetorical situation. In Chapter 1, the triangle is first explained in
its basic formulation, as a window for identifying the writer’s or
speaker’s persona, the three basic rhetorical appeals, and the
rhetorical treatment of subject matters. The triangle is then
presented again in a modified formulation, guiding students to
understand rhetorical context (audience, time, and place),
rhetorical intention or purpose, and genre, used in this chapter to
refer to textual organization and structure.
•
An understanding of the centrality of rhetoric in people’s lives, not
only in school but also in their communities, their nation, and their
world.
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Questions Leading to Learning Outcomes
When they have worked through Chapter 1, students ought to be able to
answer the following questions:
•
What does it mean to say that a person is skilled at rhetoric?
•
To what would you be referring if you made a claim about the
rhetoric of a particular text—an essay, an editorial, a speech, an
op-ed column, a short story, a poem, and so on?
•
For any text they might read and any text they might write
themselves: Who is the writer and what kind of person does he or
she seem to be? To whom does the text seem to be addressed?
What are the circumstances that motivated the writer to write?
How does the text make a logical, reasonable point? How does it
establish the writer as a trustworthy, credible person? How does it
appeal to the emotions and interests of the readers? What is the
writer’s apparent purpose, aim, or intention for the text—in other
words, what does he or she intend for the audience to do with it?
What is the organization, structure, form, and/or style of the text,
and how do these features contribute to its meaning, purpose, and
effect?
Teaching Suggestions and Classroom Activities
To reinforce the idea presented at the beginning of the chapter, that the
“rhetoric” of a movie’s opening scene is a clue to how the plot, characters,
and theme are going to develop, show the students the opening scene of a
popular movie, and ask them to predict what will eventually happen, how
the characters will relate to one another, and what the central idea will be.
Ask them how they know these things and how they will be able to justify
their predictions by making specific references to the scene’s details.
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Definitions of Rhetoric
Perhaps the most notorious abuser of rhetoric in human history was Adolf
Hitler. Students will probably know that Hitler used rhetoric to rally huge
groups of Germans in the run-up to World War II. They need to
understand, though, it was the message Hitler was spreading with his
rhetoric that was so repugnant, not his rhetoric itself. Rhetoric, they must
understand, can be used to promote good causes just as effectively as it
can promote evil ones. You can find clips of Leni Riefenstahl’s most
famous Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, and Charlie Chaplin’s
hilarious take-off on Hitler’s rhetoric, The Great Dictator, at
www.activehistory.co.uk. Or show the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup for a
satirical look at fascism in general.
To bring alive the activity on pp. 4–5, designed to introduce students to a
common rhetorical situation that embodies the three appeals, have students
play the parts of Randall, Brandon, Kim, and Nate in a brief skit.
The Rhetorical Triangle
To help students understand the basic formulation of the rhetorical
triangle, teach them the acronym SOAPStone, a term coined by Tommy
Boley in a 1985 article. S stands for subject—the students should be able
to understand the central idea a rhetor is developing. O stands for
occasion: Students should be able to understand what action or set of
circumstances motivated the rhetor to speak or write. A stands for
audience: Students should be able to understand the primary and
immediate audience for the discourse, as well as important secondary and
mediated audiences. P stands for purpose: Students should be able to
understand what the rhetor intended for the audience to know, think, or do
as a result of having experienced the discourse. S stands for speaker:
Students should be able to understand what kind of persona the rhetor
portrays and, therefore, be able to analyze how the tone of the discourse
makes this persona manifest.
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To help students understand persona, consider reproducing for them two
speeches given by President Bill Clinton concerning the Monica Lewinsky
scandal. One speech was delivered to a national television audience, and
the other to an audience at a prayer breakfast. The two speeches, examined
side by side, illustrate persona well. Using any Web search engine, enter
“Clinton speeches about Lewinsky” in the search box.
To help students understand how the three basic appeals—logos, ethos,
and pathos—work in real situations, ask them to work in groups and
brainstorm about the following questions: (a) If you were applying to a
bank to provide you with a loan to start a small business, how would go
about doing so? (b) If you were trying to start a specific social-justice
movement or organization at your college or university, how would you
appeal to your fellow students, the faculty and staff of the school, and the
people in the community?
A document in which the three basic appeals are used to excellent effect is
the Declaration of Independence. Find it online and share it with your
students. Jefferson’s skill with rhetoric is thoroughly admirable.
To help students understand the concept of an arguable subject, ask them
to generate details and examples that might support the two following
assertions: (a) Britney Spears was very popular in the late 1990s; (b)
Britney Spears influenced a generation of teen pop-music stars and her
influence is still visible in the contemporary music scene. The first is
clearly not arguable, while the second is.
To help students understand the concept of rhetorical context, ask them to
generate, individually or in groups, a piece of local contextual
information, a piece of national contextual information, and a piece of
global contextual information about one or more of the following topics:
health care, pollution control, employment and unemployment, the welfare
state, family values, immigration.
22
To help students understand the different aims or purposes a writer might
intend for a text, ask them to consider again the topics mentioned in the
previous bullet point. Then ask them to describe in some detail a
document that would be used primarily to inform readers about the topic,
another document that would be used primarily to convince readers to
accept a central idea about the topic, and finally a third document that
would be used primarily to persuade readers to act in a new and different
way in regard to the topic. Then ask students to read an op-ed column
from any respectable daily newspaper and to determine what the text’s
primary purpose is and how it accomplishes other secondary purposes in
addition to the primary one.
To introduce students to the concept of genre, ask them to find definitions
and examples of the following kinds of texts: editorial, home page, news
story, news analysis, lab report, scientific research report, case study, grant
proposal, application letter, memoir. Individually or in groups, ask them to
analyze and describe how the form of the genre helps it accomplish its
purpose or aim for the audience. For background reading on genre in
academic writing, instructors can consult Mary Kay Mulvaney and David
A. Jolliffe, Academic Writing: Genres, Samples, and Resources (New
York: Pearson, 2005).
To help students understand the concept of genre, talk with them openly
about the benefits and drawbacks of the five-paragraph theme, a formulaic
genre that many students will have been taught in previous schooling as
the archetypal, and always called-for, genre of academic writing. Students
need to understand that the problem with the five-paragraph theme is not
its form—there is nothing inherently wrong with offering a strong thesis,
supporting it, and reaching some conclusion about it. The problem lies in
what student writers put into the five paragraphs they write. If students
write an introductory paragraph that baldly asserts some self-evident
claim, then support it with three paragraphs of pre-formed “truths,” and
then conclude by repeating their claim, they will have a thoroughly dull
composition. Students must see the five-paragraph theme, or any
argumentative composition they might write, as engaging the reader in a
23
complex, thoughtful discussion of their topic. The five-paragraph theme
that lectures to its readers will not succeed. Instructors who want to
invigorate the five-paragraph theme should use the epilogue, “How to
Write an Argument—What Students and Teachers Really Need to Know,”
in Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life
of the Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
Rhetoric in Everyday Lives
Examples of how the rhetoric of everyday life influences students are
abundant on most college and university campuses. Ask your students to
attend a student-activity or student-involvement fair or a job fair. Direct
them to look at the banners, posters, and brochures at these events, and ask
them to analyze these documents using the basic and modified
formulations of the rhetorical triangle. Ask them to report back to the class
about the way a particular banner, poster, or brochure tried to achieve a
particular meaning, purpose, and effect for the audience at the event.
Notes about the Activities
pp. 4–5:
Randall appeals to Brandon by sounding logical: he is important to his
employer; therefore, he must show up for work. Brandon’s negative
response is not necessarily a reflection on Randall’s rhetorical ability.
Next, when Brandon appeals to Kim, he makes a blatant appeal to
emotions. He seems facetious, and Kim rejects him. Finally, Randall
makes an ethical appeal to Nate by citing their past experiences together.
He successfully convinces Nate that he will repay him the $1.50.
p. 7
What kind of persona did Randall try to present to each of this three
audiences—Brandon, Kim, and Nate? Randall tried to be Brandon’s
buddy. He acted almost too comfortable with him and expected Brandon
24
to lend him the money. Randall took an authoritative stance with Brandon
by saying, “You know how important I am to the store.” Brandon tried to
be suave with Kim. He used flattery (and some would say sarcasm) to
appeal to her. With Nate, Randall tried to appear more like an
acquaintance than a buddy. He wanted to seem honest and dependable
with Nate. What assumptions do you think Randall made about each of the
three audiences—Brandon, Kim, and Nate—that led him to make
decisions about how to present his case? Randall assumed that Brandon
likes him. He also assumed that Brandon agrees that he is important at the
store. Randall assumed that Kim would be impressed or flattered by his
comments. He assumed that Nate would be more serious with him than
Brandon or Kim had been. He assumed Nate is nice, might feel sorry for
him, and might feel obligated to lend him the money. What kind of plea,
evidence, or proof did Randall employ with each of the three audiences to
try to persuade him or her to lend him the bus fare? With Brandon,
Randall tried to make it sound as if the boss would need his help. He
implied the store could not run without him. With Kim, Randall put
himself down when he asserted he was a “fool” and forgot to bring money
with him. He was asking for her pity. With Nate, Randall used honesty
and admitted he “absent-mindedly” forgot to bring the money. He also
highlighted how dependable he was when the two were lab partners. What
do you think Brandon, Kim, and Nate knew about Randall—his
personality, his job, and so on—that led them to react the way they did to
his entreaties? Brandon might have known Randall the best. He might
have thought of Randall’s situation as typical because he knows Randall to
be forgetful. Kim might have thought Randall came on too strong. She
probably believed he needed the money, but he was not going to get it
from her. Nate probably did know Randall well. He probably thought that
Randall was smart, considerate, and dependable.
pp. 10–11
Ideally, students will be able to see that Twain’s inflated, overblown
diction and his frequent exclamations of emotion produce a persona that
seems overly formal and, quite frankly, silly.
25
pp. 14–15
While students’ answers will vary in response to the bulleted questions,
the following are some possible responses. Anderson and Cohn are writing
to the well-educated citizen who reads newspaper columns and who thinks
occasionally about the best way for education to function. Assuming one
segment of this audience might consist of college students, they might feel
as though studying just one subject at a time would be tedious and boring.
Anderson and Cohn don’t answer this possible objection, but instead argue
that students would learn their subject matter more thoroughly. The
principal claim is that students will learn a subject more completely if they
study just one at a time. A secondary claim is that students’ lives are
fragmented. Anderson and Cohn support the former with reasoning. The
latter is only mentioned, not fully supported.
pp. 23–24
Students’ answers about the editorial writer’s persona, his or her appeals
to the audience, and his or her work with the subject matter at hand will
allow them to review thoroughly the material covered earlier in the
chapter. Their own written responses to the editorial will vary.
pp. 26
Ideally, students will be able to see not only the establishment of logos in
each advertisement but also the effective use of ethos and pathos. Here is
the argument of the Lee Fabrics ad on page 27: Good textile and fabric
companies are environmentally-conscious. Lee is an environmentallyconscious textile and fabric company. Therefore, Lee is a good fabric and
textile company. While the logos of the ad is quite clear, perhaps its
stronger appeal is to ethos. Essentially, the Lee Corporation is saying to
potential buyers who are concerned about the environment: “You can trust
us.” The visual image of the ad is quite strong: The couch seems to
emerge from the field, of which it is part—it has indeed, as the ad puts it,
“become one with nature.” The Lee Corporation emphasizes its stability
26
and trustworthiness with the ad copy stating that “[s]ince 1969,” the
company has “kept its promise” to be “environmentally-conscious.” In
addition to assessing the appeals of the ad, students should notice how it
uses language cleverly. It incorporates the name of the company in two
puns that emphasize the ethos: “naturalLee” and “responsibLEE.” It
provides a sound of stability and trustworthiness with the alliterative
phrase “fabrics, finishes, and frames.” The goal of the ad is to get potential
furniture buyers to look for products that use Lee fabrics, and it works
toward this goal by emphasizing that Lee products are good for the
environment.
The World Wildlife Foundation ad on page 28 also establishes its logos
clearly—everyone should support organizations that strive to eliminate
pollutants from our food sources; the WWF strives to eliminate pollutants
from our food sources; therefore, everyone should support WWF—but the
ad also creates a powerful emotional appeal. First of all, the visual image
of the ad is quite stark and eye-catching: A child is gestating in its
mother’s womb—perhaps the most fundamental image of safety and
protection our culture recognizes. The WWF emphasizes its care for this
child—and by extension all humankind—by highlighting two phrases:
WHO CARES at the top of the page, and TAKING ACTION at the
bottom. Notice that both of these phrases are calls to action, connections to
the readers’ emotions, reminders that dangers exist in the world that would
disturb this innocent, protected child. The diction used in the ad
emphasizes the emotional tension between the safety of the womb—and,
by extension, all humankind—and the pollutants that could end up in our
food. Students should notice the loaded diction meant to elicit emotional
responses: “contaminated,” “man-made chemicals,” “intensively-farmed
food.” Students should notice that WWF, in contrast, offers itself as an
emotional counterbalance to the potentially damaging forces of chemically
polluted food and polluting farm practices. WWF is “TAKING ACTION
FOR A LIVING PLANET”; the foundation is represented by the logo
containing a panda, surely a symbol for childhood innocence and safety
for people in many countries around the world. The ad has two important
goals. The foremost is to get viewers to support WWF by contributing to
27
it. The second, however, is to get viewers simply to be aware that forces
exist that might pollute our food sources with damaging chemicals that
could be passed on to generations of children to come.
28
CHAPTER 2
Understanding the Traditional Canons of Rhetoric:
Invention and Memory
Chapter Highlights
Chapter 2 is the first of two chapters that teaches students about the five
traditional canons of rhetoric—invention, arrangement, style, memory,
and delivery—and in doing so lays the groundwork for students’ analyzing
the rhetorical effectiveness of works they read and compositions they
write. Chapter 2 explains the two traditional canons of rhetoric typically
associated with the generation of material, invention and memory; while
Chapter 3 unpacks the three traditional canons associated with textual
production: arrangement, style, and delivery. While we separate these
chapters into two because of the bulk of the material covered in them, we
urge instructors to think of them in relation to one another and to urge
students to see the connections between and among the five canons.
In particular, here are the connections we stress: As students learn about
how writers go about generating material for a text (invention), developing
that material in conventional and appropriate genres (arrangement), and
making choices about effective sentences and words (style), they are
regularly reminded of two things: (a) every choice a writer makes about
invention, arrangement, and style affects the meaning, purpose, and effect
of the text—in other words, rhetorical choices cannot be viewed as
isolated acts, but instead must be seen as interrelated and unified; (b)
rhetorical choices are made by readers as they read and writers as they
write. Chapters 2 and 3 include a wide range of activities that encourage
students to make analytic and productive decisions about invention,
arrangement, style, memory, and delivery in the works they read and
write.
29
Questions Leading to Learning Outcomes
When they have finished working through Chapter 2, students should be
able to answer the following questions:
•
How do writers go about making an inventory of what they know
and what they need to know in order to compose a text?
•
What are the essential differences between systematic strategies for
invention (the journalist’s questions, the pentad and ratios, the
enthymeme, and the topics) and intuitive strategies (freewriting,
journaling, and conversing)?
•
How do contemporary writers tap into memory—individual,
societal, and electronic?
Teaching Suggestions and Classroom Activities
To introduce the canons of rhetoric, ask students to look up definitions of
canon to see similarities to how the word is used in literary criticism,
theology, and rhetoric.
To review the relationship between rhetorical context and the three
appeals, ask students to read William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance
speech, available at ww.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/lib_nobel.html.
Have students identify Faulkner’s appeals to logos, ethos, and pathos;
describe the ways the appeals work together to achieve meaning, purpose,
and effect; discuss Faulkner’s organization and arrangement of material in
the speech; and contextualize the speech for the contemporary world by
inferring what he is saying to the generation of students who read the
speech today.
Invention
The essential point to teach about invention is abundance. A good writer
can usually generate far more material than he or she will actually use in a
30
composition, and that’s a good thing. Being a robust inventor of material
allows a writer to choose the best and most effective material to include in
a composition, not just whatever he or she can think of. An old adage from
folk wisdom supports this notion: If you buy a pair of pants that are too
long, you can always have them shortened, but if you buy a pair of pants
that are too short, you can’t do much with them.
To illustrate the use of the journalist’s questions as an invention heuristic,
ask students to examine the first paragraph (or in some rare cases the first
two paragraphs) of a news story on the front page of the New York Times.
Ask them to identify evidence of how the journalist used the questions to
generate material for the story.
When students work with Kenneth Burke’s pentad as a systematic
invention strategy, they generally have little problem with generating
material using the five points of the pentad itself, but they are sometimes
baffled by the ratios. Remind students that they should use the ratios as
little generative “what if?” strategies, rather than worrying about one right
answer. Burke’s point in fact is that in looking at elements of the pentad in
pairs, analysts understand how much perspective determines “truth.” Have
them ask questions like these: Given the scene, what act would be
appropriate? Given the agent, what act would be appropriate? Given the
purpose, what agency would be appropriate? Given the act, what
additional act might follow? Once you unleash students from looking for
the “right” answer, you will find they have fun generating material using
the pentad and ratios.
Inventing enthymemes about any topic is a great way to illustrate that it is
an arguable, rhetorically generative subject matter. Look again at a claim
we used in a classroom activity in Chapter 1 of this manual: Britney
Spears influenced a generation of teen pop-music stars and her influence
is still visible in the contemporary music scene. Assuming that statement
to be the claim in an enthymeme, ask students to work individually or in
groups and do two things: Generate data that would support the claim, and
explain the unspoken assumptions that would connect the data and the
31
claim. For example, would an understood, yet unstated, definition of
influence be operating in this enthymeme?
Direct your students to reread Joel Caris’ column, “Corporate Sponsorship
of Our Schools,” on page 41. Using the Caris column as a jumping-off
point, students can practice inventing material by generating enthymemes.
Ask students to start with this claim: Mike Cameron’s actions at
Greenbrier High School were disloyal to the school. Ask them to generate
material that would substantiate that claim and to explain the unspoken
assumptions connecting the “proof” to the claim. For example, students
might cite this fact: Mike Cameron deliberately wore a Pepsi tee shirt on a
day when school officials had announced the school would be honoring
Coca-Cola. The unspoken assumption is that school officials have reason
to believe that students are willing to act in the best interests of the school.
The column suggests additional claims that the students could examine
and build enthymemes upon.
Analyzing the enthymemes in an argument is a good way for students to
understand whether the argument is ironic or satirical. Many students will
be familiar with Jonathan Swift’s famous satire, “A Modest Proposal,”
which is included in the Additional Readings in this edition. Ask students
to examine each of the six advantages Swift enumerates as a claim in an
enthymeme, and then to unpack the proof Swift offers in support of the
claim and the unspoken assumptions connecting the proof and the claim.
Ideally, students will be able in so doing to detect Swift’s satiric purpose.
When some students (and instructors) encounter the common topics
(specifically, definition, division, comparison and contrast, cause-andeffect relationships), they may be tempted to equate them with the
rhetorical modes they may have been taught (or taught themselves!) in
previous writing courses. The rhetorical modes are usually described as
narration, description, exposition, and argumentation; exposition is often
further subdivided into such activities as definition, division, comparison
and contrast, cause-and-effect, and so on. Remind your students that the
rhetorical modes are not invention heuristics; most commonly they are
32
taught as organizational strategies for paragraphs and entire compositions.
(Remember the classic demonstrations of comparison and contrast
compositions, for example, as either point-by-point or block-by-block.)
The basic and common topics, in contrast, are touchstones for generating
and inventorying material. About any arguable subject matter, (return to
the claim about Britney Spears, for example) students can ask the
following: What is possible in regard to it? What is impossible in regard to
it? What happened in regard to it in the past? What might happen in regard
to it in the future? How can I make it seem larger? How can I make it
seem smaller? What terms involved with it need defining? How can I
divide it into parts? How can I compare or contrast it with something else?
What caused it? What logically follows from it? What contradicts it or
what does it contradict? What do people generally say about it? Students
will be successful in using the topics to invent material if they realize that
the topics produce no “right” or “wrong” answers, but instead provide
perspectives from which to examine any subject matter.
Many writers and writing teachers recommend using the intuitive
invention strategies as preparation for more systematic invention
heuristics. In keeping with this idea, teachers who have assigned a
composition that students are working on while they are studying Chapter
2 might ask students to freewrite, produce journal entries, or have
brainstorming conversations with a classmate or their writing-group
partners, and then use what they have generated as the basis for asking the
journalist’s questions, establishing the pentad and several ratios,
generating enthymemes, and employing the basic and common topics.
Notes about the Activities
p. 35–36
By citing quotations from Ms. and the New Yorker magazine, the ad
appeals primarily to ethos. Students could rewrite the ad so that it
appealed primarily to pathos by posing questions directly to parents of
eight- to thirteen-year-olds (“Isn’t it time that your child started to write
33
creatively?) or to the children themselves (“Would you like to see how
other kids your age express themselves in writing?). The ad could also
establish a strong sense of logos by emphasizing that students who start to
write creatively early in their lives end up becoming more successful
students as they proceed through high school and college.
p. 38
Who is Mohammed Yunus? What did he do to win the Nobel Peace Prize?
When did he do it? Where did he do it? Why did he do it? When and
where did he receive the prize? Who awarded it to him? What is the nature
of the prize?
pp. 40–41, also p. 42
As with all activities involving Kenneth Burke’s pentad and ratios,
students’ responses will vary depending on what they label as “act.” If
they call Mike Cameron’s suspension the act, then the agent would be the
school administrators, the agency would be their power to suspend, the
scene would be the administrator’s offices, and the purpose would be to
eliminate from the school a person who was embarrassing the
administrators. If, however, students listed Mike’s wearing the Pepsi tee
shirt as the act, the terms in the pentad would change, as they would if the
students listed Coca-Cola’s decision to sponsor Coke Day at the school as
the act.
p. 46
The minor premise would consist of all the data Bradsher provides about
SUVs. The conclusion would be that they are the most dangerous vehicles.
The unspoken assumption on which this enthymeme is built would have to
encompass a definition of a “dangerous” vehicle.
34
pp. 50–51
Students’ responses will vary, but here are a few ways that Morse uses the
basic and common topics to develop her ideas. The greater: If 2 million
kids from different economic classes are being home schooled, then
maybe her child could be, too. The possible: If there are so many
resources available to parents who want to home school, perhaps I can do
it. Division: What are all the types of resources available at the homeschooling convention in Denver? Cause and effect: Because home
schooling is growing so much, lots of materials are being generated.
Comparison: She compares the stereotypical home-schooled kid
(supposedly highly intelligent) with the reality (they are children from
different social and economic backgrounds).
35
CHAPTER 3
Understanding the Traditional Canons of Rhetoric:
Arrangement, Style and Delivery
Chapter Highlights
Chapter 3 continues unpacking the five traditional canons of rhetoric,
helping students understand how the decisions a writer makes with
arrangement (ordering and organization of material), style (choices
involving sentence structure, diction, and figurative language), and
delivery (for writers, issues of text size and visual features such as bullet
points, white space, hypertext links, and so on.) When students have
finished Chapter 3, they should be able to use the material in Chapters 2
and 3 to understand how to write a substantial rhetorical analysis of any
text—nonfiction, fiction, poetry, or visual.
Questions Leading to Learning Outcomes
By the time they have finished working through Chapter 3, students ought
to be able to answer the following questions:
•
How does the arrangement of a composition support its
establishment of meaning, purpose, and effect?
•
What is the difference between structural arrangement and
functional arrangement of a composition?
•
What is style, and how do stylistic choices influence a
composition’s establishment of meaning, purpose, and effect?
•
What are the major dimensions on which style varies?
37
•
How do the graphic elements of a text—for example, bullet points,
white space, font style and size, hyperlinks, and so on—affect its
delivery to an audience?
Teaching Suggestions and Classroom Activities
Arrangement
The most important thing to teach about arrangement is the distinction
between structural parts and functional parts. A view of structural parts
would essentially talk about a composition in terms of beginning, middle,
and end, and transitions between these sections; whereas a view of
functional parts would talk about what the parts of a composition do in
terms of establishing its meaning, purpose, and effect. Emphasize that
form follows function—the parts of any good composition are constructed
to help the text to achieve its meaning, purpose, and effect.
Notice that you can teach the six-part Roman oration form outlined on
page 56 (exordium, narration, partition, confirmation, refutation, and
peroration) as a functional arrangement instead of a structural one if you
don’t insist that the parts must come in that order. In other words, you can
look at any composition and ask the following:

What part of the text draws the audience in?

What part of the text provides necessary background information?

What part of the text divides it up into smaller units and focuses on
one or more of them?

What part of the text primarily offers support for points the writer
wants to make?

What part of the text anticipates objections from the audience and
answers them?

What part of the text draws together all the material in the text and
provides a sound of finality?
38
Columns in the back of news magazines and on the op-ed pages of
newspapers are good primary sources to use with the material on pages 53
to 56, which asks students to divide a composition into functional parts
and then asks more particular questions about those parts. To find a good
column, look in the back of Newsweek for pieces by George Will and
Anna Quindlen. Or use any good search engine to find columns by
Maureen Dowd, Nicholas Kristof, E. J. Dionne Jr., William Raspberry,
Clarence Page, and others. Ask students, individually or in groups, to read
the column and discuss the functional questions about the six “Roman
oration” parts listed in the previous bulleted list, noting again that the parts
they discover in the columns may not come exactly in this order. Then ask
students to pose and answer the series of questions listed on pages 53 to 56
to understand the functional arrangement of the column.
To reinforce for students the connection between arrangement and genre,
ask them to interview a professor or a graduate teaching assistant in three
distinct academic disciplines, one in the humanities (for example, English,
history, art history, music, film), one in the natural or life sciences (for
example, biology, chemistry, physics, geology), and one in the social
sciences (for example, sociology, political science, anthropology,
communications). Direct the students to ask their interviewees to describe
the structure and organization of (a) an article they would submit to an
academic journal in their field and (b) a paper or presentation they would
deliver at a conference in their field. Ask students to use what they
discover in their interviews to discuss this question: How does the form of
any composition reflect its audience and its purpose?
Style
The essential concepts to teach about style are choice and
appropriateness. Emphasize to students that every word, every phrase,
every sentence they write represents a choice they make. Effective writers
make choices that are appropriate for the situation at hand. These writers
know how to craft words and sentences to create an appropriate persona,
to address an appropriate audience, and to achieve an appropriate purpose.
39
One way to attune students to the relation between style and jargon is to
teach them the term discourse. Broadly defined, a discourse is any stretch
of language that both reflects and influences the social, political, and
knowledge-making practices of a specific group of language users. (For
further reading, see David Jolliffe, “Discourse,” Routledge Encyclopedia
of Postmodernism, eds. Victor Taylor and Charles Winquist [London:
Routledge, 2001], 101–03.) Ask students to read the lead article in three
sections of a major daily newspaper—the sports section, the business
section, and the arts and entertainment section—and discuss the
differences in terms of word choice and sentence length and structure. In
the discussion, encourage students to explore why the writers of the three
articles made the stylistic choices that they did.
Two texts that are worth examining in detail when teaching style and
sentence structure are Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham
Jail” and his “I Have a Dream” speech, both widely available on the
Internet. Ask students to read either or both of these texts and then analyze
all of the dimensions of sentence length and structure explained on pages
60–66. Remind students always to conjecture about why Dr. King made
the sentence-level choices he did: What persona was he trying to project?
Who was his audience? What meaning, purpose, and effect was he trying
to achieve? How did his sentences support his achieving these goals?
A classic text that examines the relation between word choice and
meaning, purpose, and effect is George Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Politics and
the English Language,” also available on the Internet. Students can use
this essay as a starting point for analyzing all the features of word choice
explained on pages 66–72. After teaching the Orwell essay, you might
direct the students to www.pbs.org/greatspeeches and ask them to select a
speech and analyze how its diction supports its establishment of persona,
meaning, purpose, and effect.
The most enjoyable way to teach students about schemes and tropes is to
ask them to create them, themselves. Select any topic that would stimulate
interest and discussion among your students. Ask students to write a one40
paragraph argument about this topic. Then ask them to rewrite the
paragraph a number of times, each time including a new scheme or trope
in it. Finally, ask them to compare and contrast their original and rewritten
paragraphs, noting how the change in style influences the persona,
meaning, purpose, and effect.
Notes about the Activities
p. 70
The sentence is largely periodic. It could be made even more periodic:
The slaves, in order to defend and protect the women and children who
were left on the plantation when the white males went to war, would lay
down their lives. A loose version: The slaves would lay down their lives in
order to defend and protect the women and children who were left on the
plantation when the white males went to war.
pp. 72
Students, obviously, should notice the extensive parallelism in the second
sentence of the Williams’ excerpt.
41
CHAPTER 4
Rhetoric and the Writer
Chapter Highlights
Chapter 4 focuses on the processes involved in writing. The chapter
purposefully avoids making the writing process a singular entity that must
be taught in a lockstep fashion and instead emphasizes the many complex
processes involved in writing. The chapter first explains six processes
involved in writing—inventing, investigating, planning, consulting,
revising, and editing—by showing how the first three can be subsumed
under a more general label of invention and the latter three under a more
general label of revision. The chapter then explains how each of the
processes is rhetorical in nature and involves a writer’s decisions about
shaping material to achieve meaning, purpose, and effect with an
audience.
Following this introductory material, the chapter then offers a series of
actual case studies of real writers in school settings. These case studies
illustrate how writers go about locating strategies for beginning a task,
defining the rhetorical situation at hand, finding and defining an audience,
discovering purpose, adapting writing processes to draft a composition,
and revising the product.
Questions Leading to Learning Outcomes
By the time they have finished working through Chapter 4, students ought
to be able to answer the following questions:
•
What are the major processes involved with writing a paper, and
how are they essentially rhetorical processes?
43
•
What are the best ways for a writer to get started on a writing task?
•
How does a good writer find and define the rhetorical situation at
hand?
•
How does a good writer define and interact with his or her
audience?
•
How does a good writer discover a purpose for his or her
composition?
•
How does a good writer revise a paper most effectively?
Teaching Suggestions and Classroom Activities
Students may need help in understanding the variations in what we call the
writing process both in terms of how various elements may combine—
invention within revision, revision while drafting—and to see the
individualized procedures that determine any writer’s process for any
writing task.
Students need to perceive the fluidity of writing processes, as well as the
variety of approaches writers take as they work, just as they must be aware
that what appears to be the careful, rational move from thinking to writing
to changing ideas to editing is often short-circuited or collapsed to meet
the exigencies of a particular writing situation. Their growing
understanding of rhetoric will help them as they investigate writing
processes, of both published writers and their own.
Reading Assignments to Explore Processes
Reading writers who talk about how they go about their work can help
students explore variations and permutations. Some good possibilities
include:
44
Joan Didion, “Why I Write”; “On Keeping a Notebook”
Stephen King, On Writing
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Interviews with writers are useful as well. A good source for interviews
with writers like Alice Walker and Saul Bellow can be found in Writers on
Writing, a New York Times series on writers. The Web site for this series
is:
www.nytimes.com/book/specials/writers.html
An exercise to help students understand how processes and purposes vary
among writers is to ask them to read the Nobel Prize lectures given by
William Faulkner in 1949 and Toni Morrison in 1993. Each writer
discusses writers’ decisions and aims and can provide an interesting
beginning point for discussion of how writers write. Comparing the
comments of other writers, like those listed above, reinforces the point that
writers go about their work in many ways.
Writing Assignments to Explore Processes
For Invention
•
Ask students to respond to an in-class prompt like “What makes
writing good?” or “Why I procrastinate.” After they write for ten
minutes or so, ask them to comment on how they made decisions
as they responded to the prompt. Students are used to writing in
class, but they are not used to discussing the different strategies
they use to generate ideas and commit them to paper immediately.
What happens to revision? Does editing disappear?
•
Students can talk with a lot of authority about how they respond to
essay test questions or produce reports and how the genres they
write in alter the process they use to accomplish it. Ask them to
explore their process in producing one of these genres.
45
For Planning and Drafting
•
Often in a composition course, students are working on the same
assignment. Meeting in small groups early in the process, students
learn how to articulate ideas about how they will proceed, and as
they hear from others, develop, recast and shape their plans and
drafts more effectively.
•
Ask students to interview a writer on his or her writing process.
Students can interview anyone who writes—a roommate, a
classmate, a family member—as well as a person who writes for a
living, a journalist, a professor, or a fiction or poetry writer. If
students meet in groups to discuss the writers they’ve chosen, they
will discover similarities and differences among the writers as they
describe their procedures and aims.
•
Allow students in a group to take on the role of “ethnographer for a
day.” The student observes and records conversation, gesture, and
activity in the group and reports it. These conversational records
become dramatic demonstrations of the effect of collaborative
discussion on planning and drafting an assignment. For more
information about how ethnographic observation works, see
Bonnie Sustein and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater, Fieldworking, 3rd
edition (New York: Prentice Hall, 2007).
For Revision and Editing
Small groups are used frequently as revision workshops for writing
assignments. When students bring drafts of a piece, and their group
members comment on those drafts, students learn the importance of
considering audience in quite direct ways. Still, the effectiveness of peer
revision workshops is dependent on the clarity of the audience’s response,
and first-year writing students are often unprepared to take on revising and
editing roles, especially at first. They may write innocuous comments like
“very good” or “add some more details,” in an attempt to mimic a
46
teacher’s commentary or to keep from being critical of their classmates’
attempts. Even a checklist of details to look for—thesis sentence,
evidence, details, etc.—won’t necessarily help the writer revise well if the
responder doesn’t comment specifically.
To alleviate these potential problems with peer group revision, here are
some suggestions:
Make sure that groups have met often before they begin a revision task.
Students comment to one another most honestly and specifically once they
know one another, and know at least something about how their fellow
group members write. Beginning group tasks might include responding to
an essay or story, writing questions together for other groups, or talking
together about an in-class writing and sharing their conclusions with the
class at large.
Encourage writers to begin a workshop by explaining where they are in
the process, what they’re working on, and what they’re worried about.
Ask each writer to read all or part of a draft aloud before beginning the
process of reading and commenting on drafts.
Suggest that each student write questions or comments at the end of the
draft, which will ask the group directly about the issues that seem most
important or the places in the draft that seem most problematic to the
writer. The group can respond directly to those questions.
Ask writers to bring copies for each member of the group. Responders will
feel freer to write when they are not repeating someone else’s commentary
and have more space for their own. In addition, when writers examine the
comments from the group, they can see where comments are repeated or
where the same sections are marked, which will guide them to the areas
most in need of revising.
47
Assign a recorder for the group who will summarize the suggestions and
comments the group has offered to each group member about the draft.
•
Reading aloud helps students hear where they might need to add
detail, supply transitions, or change word choice. It also helps with
editing for syntactical problems or spelling errors.
•
When students read from end to beginning of a draft, they focus on
the mechanics of the writing rather than its coherence, and that will
allow them to recognize faulty constructions and other errors more
easily.
For a fuller discussion of how groups work and what strategies teachers
and students can use to make groups successful, see Hephzibah Roskelly,
Breaking into the Circle: Group Work for Change in the English
Classroom (Heinemann, 2004).
Processes at Work
Intention
Students need to have a reason to write beyond completing the assigned
task, and helping them discover intention is sometimes the most difficult
task a teacher faces, especially in a required composition course. James
Britton calls this intrinsic motivation, where the task itself, rather than the
potential reward, motivates and sustains the writing. As we’ve suggested,
the primary way students find a reason to write comes as they make
connections between the task and their own experiences, observations, and
ideas.
•
Reading assignments help students make these connections. As the
activity with Sandra Cisneros’s story demonstrates, a writer who is
asked to talk about names after having read “My Name is
Esperanza,” is afforded a model for exploring the connotations a
name might carry. A further assignment that expands the concept
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of names to stereotypes plays on the connections students have
made with the story. One good assignment might be titled “A Myth
About Me,” which asks students to reflect on something that
people have thought about them, based on a group affiliation or a
habit of dress or talk that was false.
•
Assign a section of Russell Baker’s memoir Growing Up, which
discusses an assignment given to him by a teacher to write an
informal essay. When he was told he could write about “The Art of
Eating Spaghetti,” he remembered a family dinner: “Suddenly I
wanted to write about that—wanted to put it down simply for my
own joy, not for Mr. Flagle.” Students can write about why Baker
suddenly wants to write and when they themselves have felt that
need to express something in writing.
•
Rhetorical purpose begins with the self, and students’ growing
understanding of rhetoric will help them perceive that intention
develops as the writing develops. When students are completing a
draft of an essay, ask them to describe their own persona or voice,
as well as what they intend to convey to their readers, as a way to
help them see the relationship between rhetorical situations and
intentions.
Observation
Good writers are good observers of the world around them, as well as of
what they read and write. Exercises in observation, therefore, strengthen
writing skills and writing confidence.
•
Ann Berthoff’s double-entry notebook (see her book The
Making of Meaning, Portsmouth, NH: Boynton-Cook, 1980),
provides a method for students to observe their own critical
processes as they respond to texts or ideas. Students draw a
vertical line down the middle of a page in their journals and use
the right-hand side to comment on a prompt or an idea or a
49
piece of writing they’ve read. After a period of time (a few
hours or a day), they read their own comments and on the lefthand side of page respond to their responses. This “thinking
about thinking,” as Berthoff describes it, allows students to
observe their strategies for making meaning out of what they
have read or considered. Students may have difficulty with this
task at first; they are not comfortable with looking back on
what they have written and commenting again. Providing an
example of how the double-entry notebook works is often
helpful as they begin the process.
A model double entry
I guess I don’t understand
why she was so upset here.
It sounds like I don’t like Esperanza seems not to like her
my name much either. I grandmother or being named for
don’t.
her at least. She talks about her
leaning on her elbows looking out
the window. My mother named me
but not for her mother. She named
I use the name “Esperanza” me instead for a rock song. I
guess that’s what Esperanza
a lot. I like saying it.
doesn’t like: somebody giving you
a name and then that’s your
identity. Esperanza wants to make
her own identity.
The name
Esperanza won’t let her do that.
50
I like her spirit. Look at the
exclamation points!
But ZEZE the X will!!
•
Berthoff provides another good exercise in observation based
on natural objects. Students are given a natural object (piece of
bark, a shell, a leaf, clump of dirt, flower, etc.) and keep it for a
week, recording and observing several times during the week.
They write on the right-hand side of their double-entry
notebook their observations and then on the left-hand side their
reflections on those observations. Interestingly and not
surprisingly, the left-hand column grows longer the further into
the week the observation goes, since students believe they have
come to the end of the observation of the object rather quickly.
But, as the exercise can point out, observation is never
complete. If students stay with it, and if they bring observations
and group members ask them questions, they discover how
much more there might be to observe, even when they believe
they’ve seen it completely.
A good essay to accompany this exercise is Samuel Scudder,
“Look at Your Fish,” included in Bonnie Sunstein and
Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater’s, Fieldworking, 3rd edition (New
York: Prentice Hall, 2007).
•
One other good exercise with observation is the ethnographic
essay assignment. Increasingly popular in composition
classrooms, the ethnography is an observation and reporting on
a “culture” that students define and explore. The ethnography
is based on the qualitative research accomplished by
51
anthropologists and some education researchers, and it has
interesting and useful applications for the composition
classroom.
Students are engaged in primary research.
They become the experts in the area of inquiry.
They learn about perspective, detail, generalization.
Begin the ethnography with some discussion of terms: artifacts (the tools
of the culture), totems (the items or ideas the culture values), taboos (those
items or ideas prohibited or disliked by the culture), participant-observer
(the role of the writer who becomes part of the culture by talking to those
within it and stands outside it to describe it), field notes (the record of
observations).
Ask students to find a culture by describing what a culture might be: A
setting where there are insiders and outsiders, where certain actions or
codes are in place, where specialized language might occur, and which is
ongoing. A coffee shop, a tattoo parlor, a library, a study room in a dorm,
a Sunday School class, a special street corner, are all small cultures that
our students have chosen for their ethnographic observation.
Set the terms of the observation: number of times to visit, how to take
field notes, including abbreviations, drawings, and conversations.
Give time for students to share field notes and discover patterns emerging
from those notes.
Discuss how subheadings give structure to the notes and suggest patterns
and generalizations.
For good examples of ethnographic essays, see Bonnie Sunstein and
Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater’s Fieldworking (Prentice Hall, 2003). This book
also gives helpful directions and discusses how to engage students in
accomplishing this kind of research.
52
•
Keeping a journal encourages both the discovery of intention
and of learning to observe clearly. Journals are most effective
when they’re ungraded and when the subjects are derived by
the students themselves. Assigning journal topics, or asking
students to come up with journal topics for their classmates, is
a good way to begin the process, especially for students who
are unused to writing for themselves. Keeping the journal
regularly is important, three times a week is enough to make
writing in the journal a habit.
Students can trade journals occasionally and comment on one
another’s writing as a way to stimulate conversation and
realization of the variety of ideas and topics students write
about. Online discussion groups or forums provide a kind of
journal keeping with the addition of immediate audiences for
reflections.
Students can examine and write about Weblogs, where writers
keep journals on the Internet and invite readers to respond.
Writers’ published journals are good sources of writing
assignments and discussions of rhetorical understanding of
voice, audience, and intention. May Sarton’s Journal of a
Solitude is a good example for students to examine and write
about.
Here’s an example of a first-year writer’s journal that shows her growing
awareness of herself as a thinker, a reader, and a writer:
10/16: In reading The Diary of Anne Frank, I was impressed at how
mature she was and how she handled the changes in her life. In one part of
the book Anne talks of how she is frightened by the bombing and she goes
and sleeps with her father. She says in the book that she is acting like a
frightened little child. I think that just by recognizing that she was acting
like a child that it showed how mature she was. Because if you are
53
immature than you really can’t recognize when you are acting immature,
but if you are mature then you can recognize when you are being
immature.
11/27: Well, I am now nineteen and just recently my mother went to the
hospital for her asthma. I remember feeling the same way as I did when I
heard about it the last time. At first I was scared. But this time I was able
to understand more, and I didn’t have all those crazy ideas that she would
never come home or die. I knew this time that she would be fine and the
doctors would help her. This time I was thinking more about her than
about myself. I feel I have matured and can look at things like this much
clearer.
The Extended Project
The sample project suggested in this chapter is useful for students to
practice and extend all the skills we’ve outlined: their observations in
reading, in making experience part of their writing procedure, in gathering
and organizing data, and in considering comparative perspectives on an
issue.
Writers should consider what their readers know about the subject and
how to increase their knowledge. Writers should also decide how they
want to sound, and what kinds of evidence and uses of language, as well
as organizational form, will convey their intention and persona most
effectively.
Other longer projects might include:
1. an ethnographic look at new immigrants to the
community
(A teacher could accompany this assignment with a reading
of Mary Pipher’s book The Middle of Everywhere, the story
54
of the changes to America being brought about by new
populations of immigrants and refugees).
2. family stories that illuminate geographical, cultural or
ethnic traditions
(Saul Bellow, Frank McCourt, Julia Alvarez, Amy Tan, and
many other writers explore their own ethnic and cultural
traditions in their work and would make good background
reading for this assignment. Students might use
ethnographic methods for this task as well or use
conversations or artifacts to tell their stories).
Rhetorical Revision
Revision for Audience
Students are familiar with how to alter language, situations, or
evidence for various audiences. Here are two assignments that allow
students to discuss how audience is implied in a text, and how ideas can be
communicated in different forms for different groups.
•
Read an essay, or part of an anthology or textbook from
another class and describe its audience. Revise for another
audience, based on age or another demographic. How does the
vocabulary change? The format? Your intention?
•
Revise a children’s book for an adult audience. Or vice versa.
Revision for Subject
Teachers often ask for revisions of a subject, but students are not always
conscious of the rhetorical dimension of that request. When students begin
a writing task, they might first write what they already know about the
subject and what they need to find out, as well as what they think an
55
audience will know and will want to know. This activity will focus on the
areas of the subject that students might begin to explore more deeply.
•
To help students see how additional evidence might make a
subject more convincing to an audience, include in the
writing assignment the instruction to use two quotes or one
story. Ask them to begin with an anecdote. Or to find one
piece of conversation to insert. Suggest they create one
personal definition. These suggestions are arbitrary, of
course, but they give students a focus for developing the
subject. Students like finding a place in their developing
texts for such details, and those details usually strengthen
the writing.
•
Ask students to decide where they have used appeals to
ethics, reason, or emotion, and which seems to be strongest
or in need of most attention.
Revision for Writer’s Persona
Many composition teachers focus on the writer’s voice as the most
important component of writing, and for many students, an authoritative,
controlled and, confident voice—one that they believe reflects them—is
the most difficult to achieve. Instead, many first-year writing students
mimic a composition voice that they believe is academically acceptable.
Hearing the variety of voices among their classmates as they read one
another’s work encourages students to exercise their own. Reading a
variety of published texts and writing about the voices in those texts is
another way of helping students consider how to develop a strong voice
and persuasive persona in their own writing.
•
Have students read aloud from readings for the class or
their own drafts. Read aloud to students to encourage their
use of emphasis and pause. Ask students to describe the
personality of a writer whose work has been read aloud.
56
•
Ask students to describe how they want to sound as they’re
writing a draft and to speculate about what words or
phrases might get that sound across.
•
Have the small group create a character description of the
writer whose draft they read.
Notes about the Activities
All activities in this chapter require students to write original prose, to
reflect on something they have recently written or are currently writing, or
to discuss their own informed opinions in their groups.
57
CHAPTER 5
Rhetoric and the Reader
Chapter Highlights
Just as Chapter 4 teaches students about writing processes as inherently
rhetorical, so does Chapter 5 teach them about reading processes. It
introduces students to the cloze test as a way to see how they, as active
readers in a rhetorical situation, make meaning by predicting how a text
will materialize—“play out” its meaning—as they read it and then
determine the degree to which their predictions are correct. Drawing on
the work of Louise Rosenblatt, the chapter distinguishes between efferent
reading—reading for content and information—and aesthetic reading—
reading to participate in the imaginative world that a text creates, and it
explains how a person’s positioning as an efferent or an aesthetic reader
influences how he or she constructs the meaning, purpose, and/or effect of
a text. Next, the chapter shows how reading all kinds of texts—literary or
otherwise—is essentially a process of rhetorical analysis. It illustrates how
readers operate with unstated assumptions and on their prior knowledge as
they read a text, how they come to conclusions about an author’s purpose
or intention, and how they deal with intentional and semantic gaps when
they encounter them in a text. The chapter concludes by showing students
how to build a reader’s rhetorical repertoire and especially how to become
a rhetorical reader of their own writing in order to promote effective
revision of their work.
Questions Leading to Learning Outcomes
By the time students finish working through Chapter 5, they ought to be
able to answer the following questions:
59
•
How does a person use prediction while reading a text to construct
its meaning, purpose, and/or effect?
•
What is the difference between efferent reading and aesthetic
reading, and why is it an important difference for readers?
•
How do readers build on unstated assumptions and prior
knowledge to construct the meaning, purpose, and/or effect of a
text?
•
How does a person transfer the analytic abilities he or she has
learned to use when reading other’s texts in order to read and
potentially revise his or her own texts?
Teaching Suggestions and Classroom Activities
The epigraph at the beginning of the chapter, “One must be an inventor to
read well,” comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar”
(1837). The essay makes an argument for a new American literature, but it
is also, and more importantly for contemporary readers, a statement about
how to become a critical, engaged thinker in the world.
Have students read Emerson’s essay, or some portion of it, to discuss the
role of invention in reading and in becoming an American scholar, or, as
Emerson puts it, “man thinking.” (That phrase alone could provoke
interesting discussion and good writing from students).
The paragraph the line comes from reads in part:
“I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any
exaggeration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that
as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were
boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed
by any knowledge. And great and heroic men have existed who
had almost no other information than by the printed page. I only
would say that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be
60
an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, “He that would bring
home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the
Indies.” There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.”
Prediction
Readers always predict, but they are often unaware of how much
prediction affects how they read and what they will learn from the reading.
As an activity to make students conscious of their predictions, ask them to
write a few new lines that might follow these sentences:
•
“It was a dark and stormy night.”
•
“These reasons are often cited as the causes of the Civil War.”
•
“Ladies and gentlemen ...”
•
“I regret to inform you…”
When they share their responses with one another in small groups or in
large class discussion, students may discover similarities in both subject
and tone. Ask them to speculate about why they made the choices they
did.
Genre is a powerful guide for readers’ predictions. Genres of the horror
story, the history textbook, the opening to a speech, or the rejection letter,
carry tones, personae, subjects, and vocabulary that readers unconsciously
respond to and use in their reading and writing.
Cloze Test
Use the cloze test as a prereading activity with an essay or book length
piece the class is reading. This exercise is especially useful if, as in The
Bridge of Beyond used in the chapter, the setting is unusual for many
students or where time period is distant. Doing a cloze test and then
61
discussing it together, students feel connected to the text as they find
themselves helping to create it.
Differences emerge using cloze tests from various genres. Nonfiction,
especially textbooks or other explanatory texts, often depends on
specialized vocabulary, data, and definitions. Students may find
difficulties predicting with texts like these, and that difficulty offers an
opportunity to discuss differences in reading strategies and reader roles in
reading for information.
The Reading Process
Efferent and Aesthetic Reading
Louise Rosenblatt’s Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978) is a readable
theoretical statement about how readers make sense of texts. Students
might read selected chapters from the book to learn in more detail about
the distinctions Rosenblatt develops between kinds of reading and
methods of interpretation. Teachers might also be interested in examining
Richard Beach’s A Teacher’s Introduction to Reader Response Theories
(NCTE, 1993).
It’s sometimes a challenge to engage students in aesthetic responses to
texts they read when they are required to read them and will be evaluated
on their understandings or interpretations of them. Even with fiction or
poetry, students have been trained to examine the texts for what they can
carry away with them, or use, rather than simply experience. Their
reading, in other words, is often efferent rather than aesthetic even when
teachers hope that students will react aesthetically to the text.
Ask students to discuss Rosenblatt’s analysis of efferent and aesthetic
reading in terms of their response to a title like “The Life Cycle of Bees.”
How much does their response depend on genre? Are they more likely to
read efferently with just the title to guide them? What if the title begins a
short story?
62
When students have a reading assignment, ask them to find and mark the
line in the text they find most lovely, scary, boring, mystifying, annoying,
or incendiary. As they read these lines in class and compare them with one
another, they will be describing their aesthetic response to the text. This
kind of close reading activity highlights both their own role as readers and
their understanding of textual cues.
Students can use the triangle of the reading process on p. 126 to explore
their reading of a particular text. With a text like the Chaos excerpt, for
example, students can write about their own background with chaos theory
or science, their ideas about the textual voice, or their familiarity with
other books like this one. On the other side, they can write about what they
hear the text offering, the places they’re invited to consider, the arguments
the text makes, the choice of words. Finally, they might explore what they
have taken so far from the reading, and what kind of response they have.
This exercise works well with longer, and complete, texts as well.
Readers’ Experiences/Writers’ Intentions
Ask students to find gaps in texts they are reading. Gaps are easy to locate
in novels, since the end of each chapter and the beginning of the next
signals a gap. They may have more trouble finding the gaps in shorter
texts and in nonfiction, but their understanding of how arguments are
implied, how metaphors work, and how the voice of the speaker suggests
attitudes and stances for readers to assume, will help them. Students can
write the ways in which they fill in the gaps they locate.
Morrison’s Nobel Prize speech, excerpted in the chapter and included in
full in the Additional Readings and William Zinnzer’s essay on “College
Pressures” provide two good examples for students to fill in gaps and
compare the ways they filled them in.
Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue” allows students to understand how
writers use unstated premises, or create gaps, for readers to fill in and
become convinced by the argument the writer makes. Ask students to read
63
the entire essay by Tan and discuss what they knew about secondlanguage speakers before they began reading and what they learned as
they read.
Using the Journal
Journals are useful for students to highlight their own experiences in
reading a text; they drive home the point that their reactions are important
to making meaning out of the texts they read. Students should begin a
reading journal by writing responses after reading for a short amount of
time. They can react immediately or write highlights from the places that
engage or even confuse them most.
They can write marginal comments as they read in the journal and
comment on those responses in a double-entry format.
Peer responses to journal entries carry many of the same effects as the
double entry, allowing students to think about their thinking and to
interpret their own interpretations of what they have been reading.
Electronic formats that operate as journal entries and responses are useful
for students developing ideas about the reading they are accomplishing.
Building the Reader’s Repertoire
Teachers are comfortable with increasing the knowledge and
understanding of readers by providing background and context for the
texts students are about to engage in reading. It is a useful and even
necessary method to make sure students begin to read with some similar
level of confidence and perception. Many essays or stories students read,
especially those written in other periods of history or from cultures quite
different from that of the United States, become both more understandable
and more enjoyable once some context accompanies the reading. The
Silko essay, for example, presents opportunities for teachers to talk about
native folkways and to relate information about oral culture and
64
generational difference in Native tribes. Silko’s homepage is available at
literati.net/Silko/index.htm.
Although the teacher’s role is crucial in building a reader’s repertoire,
group work is perhaps an even more important way to develop readers’
experience and understanding of the cultural, social, thematic, or
philosophical elements presented by a text. Students all bring individual as
well as collective backgrounds to the writing class, and those backgrounds
become a resource for teachers to use as they begin reading a work.
Students often learn more from one another and listen more intently to one
another than to the teacher in front of the room. As well, the social
character of the group presents informal occasions for learning to take
place, and learning often takes place more effectively when it is informal
and conversational than when it is formal and structured.
With any story or text, begin by asking students to share their knowledge
or experience of events or contexts in the piece in small groups or in a
class discussion. With the Stephen Gould excerpt on p. 128, for example,
some students may be familiar with the book of Ezekiel from the Bible or
with drawings of dinosaurs or with the Canadian Rockies. Giving students
time to discuss these elements that present themselves at the opening to
Wonderful Life will enhance their reading experience and allow them to
understand the rhetoric Gould is using more clearly.
Ask students to write one thing they know about a subject or author or
setting that they will be reading about. Once they have written it down, let
groups share their findings with the class.
Rhetorical Analysis
Effective rhetorical analysis relies on readers’ ability to use their own
experience and knowledge to locate a writer’s intentions through the
words and signals the writer gives in the text. As they begin to read,
students can note what strikes them first—a metaphor, a tone of voice, a
setting, a word. Then, asking questions about the speaker, the subject, the
65
audience, and the aim will allow students to begin the process of
responding to the rhetoric of the texts they read.
The entire text for Naomi Shahib Nye’s essay “One Moment on Top of the
Earth” is provided at the end of the chapter. Ask students to do a rhetorical
analysis of this piece, concentrating on how they use their reader
knowledge to predict events in the essay and to come to understand its
argument. Check Naomi Nye’s biography through the American Poets
Web site, www.poets.org, a Web site that includes a thorough discussion
of many contemporary poets.
Students Reading Their Own Writing
As an experiment, ask students to make the font color on their word
processors white and try to write a paragraph or so without being able to
look back at what they’ve just written. Discuss how the inability to read
back affects their writing.
Ask students to write about the gaps they’ve created for their readers.
What do they imply and ask readers to infer? Why do they create these
gaps? Which ones are most consciously chosen?
Encourage students to write about what they hear when they read a draft
of their own work by describing the writer’s voice and their reaction to
that voice as a reader.
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Notes about the Activities
p. 128
Response to Cloze test The Bridge of Beyond
“A steep road runs along by cliffs and wastelands,
leading, it appeared, to nothing human. And that was why
it was called the deserted path L’Abandonee. At certain
times everyone there would be filled with dread, like
travelers stranded in a strange land. Still young and strong,
always dressed in a worker’s raiment, Minerva had on a
glossy, light mahogany shirt and black eyes brimming over
with joy. She had an unshakable faith in God. When things
went wrong she would realize that nothing, no one, would
ever take out the soul that God had chosen just for her and
put in her heart. All the year round she fertilized soil,
picked coffee, hoed the banana groves, and weeded the
rows of sweet potatoes. Similarly her daughter Toussine
was no more prone to dreaming than she.”
Notice how often the student uses synonyms for the actual words of the
text, which is a mark of grammatical awareness and growing
understanding of rhetorical considerations of voice, context, and approach.
By the end of the paragraph, the student understands much about the time
and place of the tale, as well as its form.
67
pp. 128–129
Response to Cloze test Chaos
“Chaos breaks across the lines that substantiate scientific
disciplines. Because it is a component of the global nature
of systems, chaos has brought together thinkers from fields
that had been widely separated. ‘Fifteen years ago, science
was heading for a period of increasing specialization,’ a
Navy official in charge of scientific financing remarked to
an audience of mathematicians, biologists, physicists, and
various doctors. Dramatically, that specialization has
reversed preconceptions of chaos. Chaos poses problems
that disrupt accepted ways of working in science. He makes
strong claims about the universal theories of complexity.
The first chaos theorists, speculative scientists who set the
discipline in structure, shared certain sensibilities. They
had an interest for pattern, especially pattern that was on
different scales at the same time. They had a taste for
randomness and complexity, for jagged edges and sudden
stops.
Following in chaos—and they sometimes call
apostles believers, or converts, or evangelists—explains
about determinism and free will, changing evolution, about
the nature of conscious thought.”
68
This student had more difficulty with the nonfiction passage than with the
piece of fiction above. The student does fill in with appropriate
grammatical constructions for the most part, but unlike the passage above,
fails to predict as accurately by using structural cues or other means, in
part because the nonnarrative structure seems more difficult and because
the subject itself appears further away from the student’s experience.
p. 138
Response to Amy Tan exercise
One enthymeme students derived from the excerpt from
“Mother Tongue” is:
Major premise (unstated): People demean the speech of
those whose native tongue is not English.
Minor premise: The author’s mother is not a native
speaker of English.
Conclusion: People demean the author’s mother’s English
speaking.
Several other enthymemes are possible with the excerpt.
p. 139
Response to William Zinsser exercise
The aim of the essay might be:
69
to talk about the pressures on college students and how they
cope with those pressures.
to stress the number of students who feel stress about
school.
to describe the role of a counselor.
to portray the kinds of students who are doing poorly in
school.
to propose a method for helping students cope more
effectively with pressures.
The rhetorical effect might be:
to dramatize the magnitude of the problem
to create a connection to readers who may be students
themselves or counselors.
to provide credibility for the author.
to interest the reader with small narratives.
The syllogistic reasoning might be that:
students experience pressure because they mismanage their
time and priorities.
these students are experiencing pressure.
they have mismanaged their time and priorities.
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Or that:
students need help to cope with the pressures of college.
counselors help with coping strategies.
students need to have counselors available to them in
college.
pp. 140–141
Response to questions about Sula
Here are responses from one student to the list of questions in the
activity:
How do details contribute to the rhetoric?
“There are plenty of details—about Irene’s shop and the owner of
Reba’s Grill— that lend credibility to the narrator’s knowledge of the
subject and that help the reader imagine the people and the place the
narrator is speaking of.”
What is the tone? How do you decide?
“The tone is informal. It reminds me of a story someone would tell
friends or younger relatives.”
Where do you detect irony?
“She talks about the name of the town. She says it was called ‘The
Bottom’ when black people lived there but that now it is called the
suburbs of Medallion.”
“She doesn’t really specify who lives there now. It is also ironic
that the shops described as so full of life are going to be knocked down.
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The beeches and pear trees are gone now; they sounded beautiful. The
reader wonders why they are no longer there.”
pp. 142–143
Response to Silko essay “Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit”
“Until the last sentence, I thought she might write about women’s strength
and ability to take care of themselves. When she spoke of her grandma and
her vivacity, I thought that maybe later she would talk about how and what
she has learned from her grandma. When she introduced the aunts, I
thought maybe she would talk about how and what she learned from them
since she spoke of their strength and interest in books. All of a sudden,
because of the last sentence, I think she might talk about the role of a
teacher and how only schoolteachers have that role now as opposed to the
instruction among the Laguna Pueblo when all the adults in a child’s life
taught the child. The title seems to support the earlier predictions, though.
Maybe Silko talks about the Laguna Pueblo’s use of oral speech to teach
in order to contrast today’s emphasis on written language in our schools.
She might also talk about the Laguna Pueblo’s methods for educating
youth in order to prove that it is every adult’s responsibility to talk with
children. She mentions that her aunts allowed her to listen in on their
conversations. She may suggest later in the essay that people don’t spend
enough time talking with their children, especially compared with the
older adults she knew as a child.
Maybe she will digress from the anecdote and move into the more
academic aspects of her argument. Perhaps she will return to the anecdote
at the end to prove or solidify her view.”
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p. 145
Response to Nye essay “One Moment on Top of the Earth”
Based on the dedication “For Palestine and for Israel,” we suspect that this
piece is a memoir of a death in a family, interwoven with a political
message.
We say this because Palestine and Israel have long been arguing over each
other’s legitimacy. But while we know a little about the narrator of this
excerpt, we don’t know who the characters are in relation to her. Who is
dying? Who is Fahima? Was the person who is dying always an
independent type? She certainly sounds independent, maybe cynical, or
just humorous when she says: “You go be with [the dead ones] if you like.
Be my guest. . . .”
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CHAPTER 6
Readers as Writers, Writers as Readers: Making Connections
Chapter Highlights
Chapter 6 focuses on differences and similarities between reading and
writing. It asks students to examine their memories of learning to read and
write, and it explains the processes involved with making meaning
through both reading and writing, prediction and revision. It then stresses
the role that the concept of voice plays in learning to read and write
effectively, showing how voice comes into play as readers and writers
predict and revise texts. Finally, the chapter shows how both readers and
writers attend to the appeals of logos, ethos, and pathos in making
meaning, illustrating its points by examining fiction by Beryl Markham,
drama by William Shakespeare (in particular, Mark Antony’s famous
speech in Julius Caesar), and a speech by Sojourner Truth.
Questions Leading to Learning Outcomes
By the time they have finished working through Chapter 6, students ought
to be able to answer the following questions:
•
How did I learn both to read and to write?
•
How does a person use the processes of prediction and revision in
both reading and writing?
•
How is voice a useful concept in both reading and writing?
•
How do both readers and writers attend to the appeals of logos,
ethos, and pathos?
75
Teaching Suggestions and Classroom Activities
The quote from Eudora Welty at the beginning of the chapter comes from
her memoir One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1986)
and provides an interesting and useful description of the necessary
connection between reading and writing for this highly acclaimed
contemporary writer. Welty’s description of the “reader voice,” a sound
that allows a reader to enter the world of the text and help make meaning
from it, can become a useful beginning point for discussing any text
students are reading. As students attempt to characterize the voice they
hear as they read a text, they discover why and how they engage or are
distant from the reading and why and how they understand what they read
easily or with difficulty. Students will enjoy speculating on how the voice
of the text is different from or similar to their own voices and how the
voice of the text inevitably contains something of their own voices when
they read.
Other works to read by Welty include her stories “Why I Live at the P.O.”
and “The Worn Path,” both anthologized often in college readers. Her
novel The Optimist’s Daughter (1972) won the Pulitzer Prize and will
engage students with its rich evocation of place and its carefully drawn
characters. If students read Welty’s fiction and some of One Writer’s
Beginnings, they can discuss the differences in the reader voice between
nonfiction and fiction, using her work as an example. Their analysis of
differences or connections can begin a discussion of how genre affects the
reader voice and the process of reading itself.
Reading and Writing Similarities
•
Ask students to create their own lists of descriptions of reading
and writing activities to add to the list in the chapter. When
they discuss these lists, students can write or talk about their
reasons for placing items on their list, and that will inevitably
lead to their writing or talking about their own experiences.
They might also begin to talk about how they see the processes
76
as similar or related to one another. The literacy memory, an
activity suggested in the chapter, easily follows from a
discussion of reading and writing lists.
•
Have students use body language and gesture to convey an
attitude and then ask others to describe how they “read” that
attitude. This activity reinforces the idea that reading involves
more than words on a page, that reading the page, in fact, is an
extension of how people “read” all kinds of signs around them.
For good background information, see Paulo Freire, Literacy:
Reading the World and the Word (Bergin and Garvey, l987).
Freire’s position is that people learn to read language in the
same ways they already read experience and the world around
them.
•
Give students some practice with reading the visual by asking
them to describe an old photograph of a group of people.
Students might bring in a family photograph or a teacher can
provide several photographs to groups for examination. Ask
them to read expressions, background, relationships among
figures, what appears to be going on, what the meaning of the
photograph might be. Groups can trade photographs and
compare responses. Students can perceive in this activity the
tension and connection between reading the photograph and
writing about what they read.
Prediction in Reading and Writing
•
Frank Smith’s Understanding Reading (Lawrence Erhlbaum,
1988) provides background information for the cognitive
processes that enable reading, including prediction and
revision. Students often believe they read every word on the
page, but Smith demonstrates that it is impossible to read
fluently if a reader attempts it. Asking students to read from
Smith’s work, especially chapters on memory and the “Eye and
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Brain” will reinforce the point and engage them in discussions
of how they read.
•
Ask students to complete the multiple choice test and then
account for the choices they made. Students can engage in a
discussion of how they use prediction and revision to guide
their decisions. Other multiple choice exams, old questions
from the SAT exam for example, are useful for discussing how
reading happens in this context. Students can also create their
own multiple choice exam questions from texts they are
reading together in class. If they accomplish this activity in
small groups, they can give questions to the other groups in the
class and discuss how they made decisions about writing
possible responses, as well as responded to questions.
•
Beryl Markham has a collection of short fiction, The Splendid
Outcast: The African Stories of Beryl Markham, that is
interesting for a comparison of genre and voice. See also the
Web site www.karenblixen.com for an account of the
controversy surrounding whether or not Markham is the author
of West With the Night.
•
Helping students to see how they predict when they read the
opening to West With the Night will underscore what they
know already about rhetoric from preceding chapters and will
heighten their awareness of how writers use format, genre,
typeface, as well as voice and detail to convey theme and
attitude. Ask students to write the opening to an essay of their
own that mimics the pilot’s log that Markham begins with.
They might compare that opening to the beginning of the
Zinsser essay in Chapter 5.
•
Markham’s use of the weaving metaphor in the excerpt can
prompt a writing assignment that involves students in creating
their own metaphor for their writing. Ask students to begin
78
simply with “Writing is like . . . ” ; the writing expands and
explores how the metaphor fits the writer’s process and
feelings about writing. Metaphor assignments like this one
stimulate connections that students might not be aware of even
as they begin to write.
Prediction and Revision: Writers as Readers
•
Encourage students to begin a writing task at times by using
Elbow’s free-writing method. Students work without a thesis or
even a focused topic clearly defined for themselves. After they
write for a few minutes, ask them to read what they have written
and mark the sentence that locates something of what they might
want to say. The “center of gravity” sentence becomes a new
beginning place for the writing.
•
Asking students to read one another’s work in small groups
nurtures the reading-writing connection. Ask students to describe
the “reader voice” they hear as they read a classmate’s work and
ask writers to describe the writer’s voice they are attempting to be
heard.
Voice and Rhetoric
As Peter Elbow’s work suggests, voice is a good test for writers and
readers as they listen for authenticity and control over a piece of writing.
Practice in listening for a writer’s voice is also practice in discovering
rhetorical moves in a text. Students can look back to the many pieces of
reading in this book with an ear attuned to voice, discussing the variety of
voices they hear and how they understand the voice.
•
Ask students to find examples of writing with what Elbow calls
“no voice.” Have them read their examples to one another and
describe the characteristics of writing that exhibits the quality of no
voice. As the chapter indicates, writing without voice is writing
79
that pays little attention to rhetorical considerations. Students
might rewrite a section of a piece that has no voice to give it one.
•
Using the three appeals of rhetoric allows students to see how
voice alters when a writer is persuading with logic, emotions, or
ethics. Ask students to highlight in their own drafts where they
have used one of the appeals, as well as to consider how their voice
sounds as they are making the appeal.
Logos, Ethos, and Pathos
•
As they consider the logical appeal, ask students to decide whether
the writer is using deductive or inductive reasoning. Or ask them to
vary their own logical reasoning, trying first deductive and then
inductive logic to make their case. Students can also practice their
control over logical reasoning by formulating syllogisms or
enthymemes from a piece they’re reading or from one of their own
compositions.
•
Some essays and short fiction that make deliberate use of logic in
reasoning include Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” which will
stimulate discussion since the logic is twisted. The speeches of
Jane Addams, especially “The Bayonet Charge Speech” is a good
example since it deals with an emotionally-charged issue—
America’s entrance into World War I—in a logical way. Sojourner
Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” included in this chapter, provides a
dramatic instance of logos. Contemporary journalists, like
Maureen Dowd, Leonard Pitts, Clarence Page, and George Will
make careful use of logical appeals in their columns.
•
Writers use the ethical appeal first by convincing an audience that
they are credible and interesting enough to be read. They use ethos
directly as they speak of their character, their experience, or their
connection to readers. Ask students to consider where they use
ethical appeals as they write and whether their use of the appeal
80
consists of creating a voice that is credible, or where they use
other, more direct ways.
•
Ask students to consider the values or beliefs that underlie a piece
of writing they’ve produced and how those values or beliefs
connect to those they suspect a reader to hold.
•
Some readings that might be helpful for considering ethos include:
The Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Sentiments,
Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize speech excerpted in the book, Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, or any political speech, especially
Inaugural Addresses. Students might look back to find examples
in this book of writers who highlight the ethical appeal.
•
Ask students to find advertisements that exhibit each of the appeals
and to explain how the ad maker is using details and language to
make the appeal.
•
A good source for responses to the September 11 tragedy, mentioned
on page l72, is at the Web site www.americanrhetoric.com. Students
can examine how pathos is used effectively in these essays, poems
and comments.
•
Audiovisual clips of significant speeches from more than fifty
movies—from Amistad to Citizen Kane—can be found at
www.americanrhetoric.com/moviespeeches.htm. Students can
analyze how emotional appeals affect audiences in the movie, as
well as the techniques of language and gesture speakers use to
highlight emotional appeal.
•
An interesting alternative to Mark Antony’s speech as an example
of how the three appeals combine is the St. Crispin’s Day speech
from Shakespeare’s Henry V. Ask students to consider repetition,
detail, pause, metaphor, as they consider how the appeals are used
81
in this speech and in Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman?” on p.
172.
•
Some works useful for considering the use of pathos include
Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Walt
Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain,” Lord Byron, “She Walks in
Beauty,” Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Renascence,” David Sedaris,
Me Talk Pretty One Day, Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading
Gaol,” Lorraine Hansberry, Raisin in the Sun, Langston Hughes,
“A Dream Deferred.”
Notes about Activities
p. 155
Response to the Literacy Memory
“In second grade, my class was divided up into three reading groups. I
can’t remember the names of the groups, but they were animals that had
adjectives about reading ascribed to them like Reading Worm. I loved
reading, but being quite an animal lover, I especially enjoyed my group
simply because of the name. It must have been an animal I wanted. My
reading group was the most advanced of the three. The first half of reading
class was spent in those three groups, and the second half combined the
class into one. During that second half, each student and even the teacher
would take a turn reading aloud. I read all the time at home, so I felt
confident about reading. When it was my turn, I thought it was really cool
to read as fast as I could. I just loved reading class. That was, until one
day, while reading aloud my assigned portion, I stumbled across a word. I
tried to sound it out, but I just couldn’t. It felt like I tried a hundred times,
and it still didn’t sound right. Finally, my teacher spoke up and corrected
me. I wish I could remember what word it was because since that day, I’ve
felt butterflies in my stomach when it’s my turn to read aloud.”
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p. 157
Reflecting on the Literacy Memory
The student whose memory piece appears above reflected in this way:
“In my memory piece, I tried to demonstrate that I used to
be a show-off with reading but that one bad experience put
me back on Earth. I wanted to relate the names of the
reading groups because I think a lot of kids had reading
groups that they loved just because of the name.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember the names of them. I
tried to relate to other students who felt confident reading
by mentioning my desire to read as fast as I could. I wanted
to give a sarcastic tone to the part about reading as fast as
possible out loud since that is not the most effective way to
read. I thought admitting my fear of reading groups might
make me seem more humane now as opposed to the showoff I used to be.
p. 158
Completion of sentences by predicting.
l. The mate ordered the mate to drop the anchor.
2. These words must be the title of an album or a book or a
movie because some of the words have capital letters and all the
words are in italic type—like titles are.
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Here are students’ thoughts that led to prediction:
“The question—almost subconscious—that I had about item 1 was
simply, “In what context would I find a captain and a mate?” It was easy
to answer that question and make this prediction. The appearance of the
words captain and mate in the sentence must mean that the sentence has
something to do with water and boats or ships. The final word has to be
anchor.”
“Why are some words capitalized? Only proper nouns get
capitalized. Maybe these words are the name of something. A title.”
“What is the importance of the word cholera? I think cholera is a
disease, but I don’t have a clue why it would be in a book title. It’s not a
book about cholera is it?”
“What about Love in the Time of Cholera? What happened to that
love, or what did that love make happen? The words Love in the Time of
Cholera are not a sentence; they’re either the beginning or the end of a
sentence. They’re a phrase—again, like a title of something.”
p. 160
Response to multiple choice questions:
l. The answer is A. The first paragraph is abstract, but in the
second paragraph, the writer focuses on one particular type of worker—
84
the person who puts definitions into a dictionary—and it becomes clear
that the writer feels sorry for such a person.
2. The answer is C. The three parallel structures within the
paragraph begin “to be . . .driven,” “ to be exposed,” and “to be
disgraced.”
3. The answer is D. Choice B seemed a possibility for a while, but
the paragraph is about more than the lexicographer’s research.
4. The answer is E. The antecedent of “who” is “Learning and
Genius.”
p. 164
Response to activity with Sula
Part of a student’s freewriting response to the Sula passage in Ch. 4:
“For sixteen years, I played at 4900 S. Gilbert Avenue in
LaGrange. My family had a big white house on seven acres of playground
equipment, trees, and a walking path. There used to be a patch of chives
growing in the forest just behind the big slide. I loved to walk through that
path on the way home from school and smell the strong scent of chives. I
used to run from my back door to the playground and play for hours in the
rocks under the old wooden playground equipment. Camping out in the
back yard in the summertime was the most frightening and thrilling time
for my sister and me. From my bedroom window I could see the whole
park. My family had to move out of the park district house because they
were going to tear it down to build a recreation center. Now, where my
85
house used to be is a patch of grass. There is no rec center. That beautiful
house that filled so many of my childhood memories is no longer there. “
Here is the additional line the student wrote after looking back at
the text above:
“What happened or didn’t happen in the park district that forced
the house to be torn down and nothing to be built in its place?”
p. 169
Response to syllogism about The Scarlet Letter:
Major premise: Victims don’t act on their own behalf.
Minor premise: Hester acts for herself and in her own behalf.
Conclusion: Therefore, Hester is not a victim.
p. 173
Response to advertisements activity:
Here are kinds of responses students may come up with as they figure out
their emotional appeals to consumers.
•
Mountain Dew commercials tend to have extreme things happen to
people who drink the product. The commercials appeal to
outdoorsy, wild, extroverted, extreme sport enthusiasts by making
them feel good about themselves as people on the cutting edge.
•
Athletic shoe commercials show people running marathons or
doing wondrous things while wearing the shoes advertised. They
86
appeal to people who want to believe they too can be great
athletically.
•
Perfume ads generally rely on sex to appeal emotionally to women
and men. Magazine ads for perfumes tend to show beautiful people
engaging with other beautiful people, all of whom, supposedly, are
drawn to the perfume.
•
Food products geared specifically toward one sector of society
show a person from that sector benefiting from the product in ways
the average man or woman would want to benefit: women working
out their trim bodies, taking care of healthy-looking babies, and
wearing tiny bikinis; or men lifting weights, doing other physical
activities, or appearing to be a master of the universe in a business
suit.
•
Presidential commercials deal with emotions also. They try to
show the candidate’s connection to the demographic group he or
she is speaking to.
•
Antidrug commercials, as well as commercials arguing against
drinking and driving, use emotional stories about lives ended or
damaged because of drugs or driving under the influence.
p. 176
Response to appeals in Marc Antony’s speech:
Emotional appeals
•
Addresses crowd as “friends” and “Romans” and
“countrymen”
•
Uses “noble” in a sarcastic way
87
•
Repeats that Brutus is an “honorable man.” Begins as
emotional appeal but changes to an ethical one as crowd
realizes that Brutus’s honor is questionable.
•
“He was my friend, faithful and just to me.” Ties of friendship
are emotional.
•
Mentions his distress and uses the word “heart” to explain his
sadness
Ethical appeals
•
Asks crowd to consider the meaning of “noble” and
“honorable”
•
Links Brutus’s honor with the honorableness of the other
conspirators
•
Shows that the ties of friendship are ties of honor, that it’s only
just to speak at the funeral of a good friend
Logical appeals
•
“The good is oft interred with their bones / So let it be with
Caesar.”
•
Shows how Caesar worked for the good of the people as he
brought ransoms to fill the public coffers
•
Caesar wept for the poor; therefore, he could not have been
ambitious.
•
Caesar wouldn’t accept the emperor’s crown three times; he
could not have been ambitious.
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CHAPTER 7
Rhetoric in Narrative
Chapter Highlights
Chapter teaches students to read, analyze, and respond to works of fiction,
poetry, and drama as rhetorical artifacts—that is, as pieces of imaginative
literature in which authors have made specific choices to create meaning,
achieve a purpose, and/or produce an effect with an audience of readers.
The chapter defines, and constructs activities, using terms that may be
familiar to students from previous courses: character, setting, conflict,
plot, and theme. But rather than seeing these terms as isolated components
in a literary interpretation, this chapter portrays them as sites of purposeful
authorial activity, loci where authors work with the audience’s
assumptions and craft their texts so they operate as rhetorically effective.
Questions Leading to Learning Outcomes
By the time they have finished working through Chapter, students ought to
be able to answer the following questions:
•
How does the author of a short story, novel, poem, or play use
narrative to achieve effects based on his or her understanding of
the interrelationships among reader, speaker, and subject?
•
What are flat, round, static, and dynamic characters, and how do
the characteristics influence a reader’s construal of meaning,
purpose, and/or effect in a particular literary work?
•
How do the ratios generated from Burke’s pentad help to analyze
the role characters play in the construction of the meaning,
purpose, and/or effect of a literary work?
89
•
How does setting contribute to the construction of meaning,
purpose, and/or effect of a literary text?
•
How does an author’s creation and pacing of a plot contribute to
the construction of meaning, purpose, and/or effect of a literary
text?
•
How do the ratios generated from Burke’s pentad help to analyze
the roles that plot and conflict play in the construction of meaning,
purpose, and/or effect of a literary text?
•
How does an author use narrative point-of-view and degrees of
omniscience to influence the construction of meaning, purpose,
and/or effect of a literary text?
•
How do the ratios generated from Burke’s pentad help to analyze
how theme is developed in a literary text?
•
How do such elements as symbol, image, diction, and syntax
support the construction of meaning, purpose, and/or effect of a
literary text?
Teaching Suggestions and Classroom Activities
To attune students to the differences between showing and telling in
fiction, give them the opening two or three paragraphs of any short story
or novel. Ask them to draw a straight line under any passage that they
consider to be showing and a squiggly line under any passage that they
consider to be telling. In groups, have the students compare their markings
and explain to one another why they marked each passage as they did.
Character
Help students understand that characters’ names are often mini-arguments
about their actual character. If students have read Death of a Salesman (or,
if they haven’t, tell them a bit about it), have them describe the character
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of Willy Loman—i.e., Low Man—in terms of an enthymeme, as described
in Chapter 2. For example, the unspoken assumption might be that in
twentieth-century American capitalism, the low man was the hero. Willy
Loman was the embodiment of twentieth-century American capitalism.
Therefore, Willy Loman was a great tragic hero. Depending on what
students have read, you can ask them to construct similar arguments about
character using the following characters’ names: Arthur Dimmesdale,
Natty Bumpo, Scout Finch, Boo Radley, Cordelia, Sir Fopling Flutter, and
so on.
Initial introductions of characters in novels, plays, and poems are often
rhetorical moves, designed to encourage readers to interpret what kind of
person the character is, what kinds of actions he or she might take, what
ideas or abstractions he or she might embody. To teach this notion, ask
students to contrast the initial mention of Thomas Gradgrind from Hard
Times to, for example, the introduction of Strether in the first paragraph of
Henry James’ The Ambassadors, or to the introduction of Caliban in his
first speech in Act I, scene 2, of The Tempest, or to the depiction of the
title character in Edward Arlington Robinson’s “Miniver Cheevy.” Direct
students to look at the choices the author makes with diction and syntax in
these introductions of characters, and encourage students to analyze how
these stylistic choices support the depiction of character.
While it’s helpful to define the concepts of flat, round, static, and dynamic
characters, it’s equally helpful to put these definitions on continuums.
Focus on characters in literary works that you have been studying and
classify them as more or less flat, round, static, and dynamic.
Students can do the exercise on page 199 focusing on characters in a play
or a poem, as well as characters in a novel or short story.
Setting
One good way to show how setting contributes to the development of plot,
character, and theme is to show two or three different film versions of a
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play you have been reading. If you’re studying Hamlet, for example, you
can show students the famous “To be, or not to be” soliloquy from Act 3,
Scene 1, as played by Laurence Olivier in 1948, Mel Gibson in 1990,
Kenneth Branagh in 1996, and Ethan Hawke in 2000, and ask them to
analyze how the setting supports an interpretation of Hamlet’s character
and the meaning of the soliloquy.
The questions about the relation of setting to the development of plot,
characterization, and theme on page 203 can be applied to any poem that
either conveys or suggests a narrative. Have students apply them, for
example, to one of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues such as “My
Last Duchess.”
Plot
One productive way to teach students about plot is to have them write the
events that happened in a plot in a strictly chronological story line. After
they do so, ask them to explain why the plotted version of the events was
more effective than a strictly chronological string of events.
To help students understand how an author controls the pacing of a plot,
ask them to identify (a) a paragraph in a short story or novel where it
seems to them that the pace is either picking up or slowing down and (b) a
paragraph where the pace seems about “normal” to them. Then ask them
to compare and contrast the two paragraphs in terms of any of the
sentence- or word-level stylistic features explained in Chapter 2.
Conflict
Students can do the activity involving conflict and the ratios from Kenneth
Burke’s pentad on page 209 by analyzing a poem that conveys or suggests
a narrative. Have them do the exercise, for example, again using Robert
Browning’s “My Last Duchess.”
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Point-of-view
When teaching narrative point-of-view, it is helpful to teach students a
complementary concept, focalization. While a story might be told by a
third-person narrator who is not part of the plot, it is often focalized
through the perspective of a particular character. Henry James’ The
Ambassadors, for example, is told in third-person omniscient point-ofview, but it is focalized through the perspective of Strether. For any piece
of fiction you’re reading, you can ask student to speculate how the plot,
character relationships, and theme would be different if the narrative were
focalized through the perspective of a different character.
Theme
For students who have trouble grasping the concept of theme, return to the
explanations of purpose, aim, and intention in Chapter 2. Just as nonfiction
prose compositions have a main idea that they embody and develop, so do
short stories, novels, poems, and plays have a central issue, concept, or
notion that they develop. Discourage students from seeing the theme of a
work as its “moral.” Literary works do not necessarily take a moral stand,
but they do usually convey a central idea.
While it is helpful to teach students to analyze symbols, images, diction,
and syntax in literary works, always emphasize to students that a short
story, novel, poem, or play needs to be seen as a unified whole, in which
symbol, image, diction, and syntax support the development of plot,
character, and theme.
Notes about the Activities
Most activities in this chapter require students to write original prose, to
reflect on something they have recently written or are currently writing, or
to discuss their own informed opinions in their groups. The following four
activities warrant some comment.
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p. 196
Dickens’ character begins with his name and ends with his name. Name
fixated, he might be called. He does not speak in complete sentences.
Instead, in fragments, he comes across as hyper-realistic, as devoted to
facts and calculations. Serious and exact, he seems like a no-nonsense
type—to a fault or to a laughable degree. Students might notice the
various meanings of peremptorily—it can mean “absolutely,”
“undeniably,” or “dogmatically”—and discuss which meaning Dickens
probably intended.
p. 202
Responding to stage directions for The Real Thing:
The reader of the stage directions might assume that Max not only sits in a
“comfortable chair” but also, by analogy, that he comes from a
comfortable background or, at least, has friends or family with such a
background. It is not clear yet why Max is building a viaduct with the
playing cards rather than, say, playing solitaire with them, but his
endeavor may prove to be important in the play. The detail about the wine
is worth speculating about. Is Max decadent, lacking hope and willpower? Or might the “open bottle to hand” mean that Max is expecting
someone?
p. 209
Agency-Agent: Nora and Torvald’s conflict involves Krogstad. Torvald
doesn’t like Krogstad because he senses he is up to something evil. Nora
lies to her husband about Krogstad’s being there. The scene not only
reveals that Torvald dislikes Krogstad and feels physically ill in his
presence, but also that Torvald treats Nora like a child, shaking his finger
at her. Torvald, rather than Krogstad, may be the hypocrite for treating his
wife in such a childlike way.
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Agency-Scene: The scene reveals the culture that Nora and Torvald live in.
Nora does not speak out against her husband while he acts toward her in a
condescending fashion. It is his role to be the authority figure and her role
to comply.
Agency-Purpose: Nora, by taking her hand out of Torvald’s at the end of
the scene, signals that she does not intend to follow her husband’s wishes.
Even though Torvald does not seem to allow Nora any freedom to make
her own decisions, she may speak to Krogstad.
p. 218
Henry uses two real-world objects to describe what he wants to do with
language: a dance floor and a cricket bat. These familiar, everyday items
make Henry sound insightful without sounding overly academic and, at
the same time, make us think of language as both powerful and ordinary.
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