The
Teaching
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Special Focus in
English Language
and Composition
Rhetoric
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Table of Contents
Introduction from the Editor:
The Art and Craft of Rhetoric in AP English Language .................................................... 1
by Renee H. Shea
Resisting the Neighborhood:
A Conversation with Richard Rodriguez............................................................................. 3
by Ellen Greenblatt
What Do Students Need to Know About Rhetoric?........................................................................ 7
by Hepzibah Roskelly
Reading Persuasive Speeches: Making the Abstract Concrete..................................................... 14
by Shirley Counsil
Reading Nonfiction Closely: Ben Franklin’s “Whistle” ................................................................ 21
by Nancy Potter
The Rhetoric of African-American Narrative................................................................................ 28
by William Cook
Contributors ....................................................................................................................................... 32
Important Note:
The following materials are organized around a particular theme that reflects important
topics in AP English Language and Composition. They are intended to provide teachers
with professional development ideas and resources relating to that theme. However, the
chosen theme cannot, and should not, be taken as any indication that a particular topic will
appear on the AP Exam.
The Teaching Series
Introduction from the Editor:
The Art and Craft of Rhetoric in AP English Language
Renee H. Shea
Bowie State University
Bowie, Maryland
We’ve all heard the comment “it’s just rhetoric” made as a critical remark, one that
suggests the emptiness of language and an absence of real substance—not to mention a
misunderstanding of the true meaning of the term. The essays in this collection, all
written by experienced AP teachers and university professors committed to smoothing
the transition from high school to college, refute this misperception as they attest to the
power of rhetoric to enhance students’ awareness of language, increase their
understanding of audience, and sharpen their ability to write and analyze arguments.
The interview with Richard Rodriguez, one of the most talented of contemporary
nonfiction writers, turned out to be more timely than any of us working on this project
could have imagined. Ellen Greenblatt interviewed him early in 2004, knowing that his
work had appeared on an exam some time ago but certainly unaware that he would
appear again on the 2004 AP English Language & Composition Exam. Rodriguez stresses
the importance of the writer learning “to see with the eye of the reader” and knowing “the
rhetorical tools” available to describe “the rhythms of our living.” Yet just how important
are the elements of classical rhetoric in a high school classroom, even an AP one? Former
Chief Reader Hepzibah Roskelly addresses this often asked question by identifying a few
specific terms while guiding us toward rhetorical concepts.
Shirley Counsil, Mary Jo Potts (see Chapter V: The Examination), and Nancy Potter—all
successful teachers of AP English Language and Literature—offer classroom-ready
approaches to engage students in close reading, whether on the passages for the essays or
the multiple-choice sections. They focus on a range of genres (e.g., letters, speeches,
essays) and periods as they suggest several strategies to develop students as active,
questioning, critically thinking learners. Each of these teachers offers a possible avenue to
guide students toward analysis not of the “what” but the “how,” and to help them
translate general terms such as “rhetorical strategies” and “resources of language” that
appear on the AP English Language Exam into concrete analysis and interpretation.
William Cook of Dartmouth College provides a rhetorical approach to literary works,
especially fiction and drama. We hope his work will prove helpful to teachers whose
curriculum combines so-called imaginative literature with nonfiction texts. The
dichotomy of “immersion” versus “ascension” rhetoric that he discusses underscores the
point current Chief Reader David Jolliffe makes in his essay “Blending AP English
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Language & American Literature” (see link under Teaching Resource Materials on the AP
English Language and Composition home page at apcentral.collegeboard.com/englang)—
that is, we should “see all pieces of literature as rhetorical transactions, written by real
authors who deliberately crafted their texts to accomplish a specific purpose or achieve a
particular effect with readers.” Dr. Cook’s suggestions provide a way for those teachers
working primarily with literary texts both to include nonfiction narratives such as
speeches and autobiographies and to approach fictional texts through a rhetorical lens.
Putting it all together, Anelle Tumminello, coordinator of English and high school
assessments for the Anne Arundel County Public Schools in Maryland, describes her
district’s efforts to initiate AP English Language in all 12 of its high schools by using the
assertions from past exams as an organizing principle and a way to encourage students to
develop their own argumentative skills (see Chapter II: The Basics for AP Teachers).
In her Nobel Lecture, Toni Morrison eloquently warned against “the policing languages
of mastery [that] cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual
exchange of ideas.” Developing students’ awareness of language’s power to exploit and
abuse along with its power to inform and inspire is a central goal of the AP English
Language course, and each of the writers in this collection offers a way to help students
discern the difference. Taken together, the essays will certainly lead to greater student
success on the exam, but they will also teach students, as Morrison reminds us, that
“Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our
difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life.”
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Resisting the Neighborhood:
A Conversation with Richard Rodriguez
Ellen Greenblatt
University High School
San Francisco, California
“Don’t let your neighborhood define you,” says Richard Rodriguez, the son of Mexican
immigrants to the United States.
Rodriguez, who grew up in Sacramento, California, and attended Catholic schools where
all his classmates were white, has spent his professional life resisting anything that he sees
as allowing neighborhoods to define him, or any of us. He has become a successful
memoirist, essayist, and television commentator even as his work has at times been
surrounded by controversy.
Rodriguez earned degrees in English from Stanford and in philosophy from Columbia,
and he worked on a doctorate in English literature at Berkeley before deciding to strike
out on his own as a freelance writer, supporting himself with temporary jobs along the
way. In his first book, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, Rodriguez
writes about speaking only English at school and then returning in the evenings to the
private world of his family and the comfortable intimacy of Spanish. His second book,
Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, deals with issues of ethnicity
and culture more directly, and in it he further develops his idea of America as a culture of
blurred boundaries and mixed culture.
In his latest book, Brown: The Last Discovery of America, Rodriguez makes his argument
even broader, arguing that his writing itself has become “brown,” and that it is impossible
for a thoughtful writer living in the America of the twenty-first century to write any other
way. According to Rodriguez, to write brownly is to write about living “within the
inconclusiveness of the day, within the conflicted emotions of an afternoon.” Cultures
within a single person and within the society as a whole overlap; therefore, to let “your
neighborhood define you” means that you cannot possibly be representing all that is true.
I spoke with Richard Rodriguez in a San Francisco coffee shop on a sunny afternoon in
March 2004, asking him about his life as a writer and his thoughts for teachers of writing.
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Ellen Greenblatt: In Brown you say “Don’t let your neighborhood define you,” but
doesn’t that go against the classic advice of writing teachers to write about what
you know?
Richard Rodriguez: I think of writing as a revolutionary act. When I began, my writing
was a violation of the very communities from which I came. Writing is at once a
social act—looking for readers to tell stories to and seeking in that act a validation
of one’s own loneliness. But it’s also antisocial because it distances you from the
people you normally keep company with. So, by telling things about my life, I
have already removed myself from the life I have described. At first, I couldn’t
resolve that conflict, and I settled in one world against the other.
EG:
And what world was that?
RR:
I became a scholarship boy, and I determined that I wanted your approval—the
teacher’s approval—more than I wanted my parents’ approval. Hunger of Memory
is, in a way, written against my mother. A lot of us come from families where
there are closed doors and closed windows. A lot of us come from neighborhoods
where the distinction between conventional Standard English and neighborhood
language is everything—and conventional Standard English is a violation.
EG:
Do you mean that when we teachers ask students who come from “families with
closed doors and closed windows” to write about themselves, we are putting them
in an impossible situation?
RR:
Teachers have this assumption that you should just be able to write about your
life—just join the language of Whitman and Melville, join this conversation. But I
remember wondering, “How do I do that? I know how to fit the words in my
mouth, but how can I join the song?”
EG:
So, part of the teacher’s role is to bring students to that point.
RR:
Right, how can you expect an earnest young man or woman of 14 to write with
the confidence of these kids who feel that they own the schoolyard? You just can’t
assume that kids can do that.
EG:
What, then, enabled you to begin to “join the song”?
RR:
I could not have become a writer without the “permission” of other writers I read
as a young man. D. H. Lawrence and James Baldwin influenced me enormously.
What I learned from Baldwin is never to be angry in one’s prose, to withhold the
emotion that you want the reader to have. The elegance of his prose as he
described the experience of some horrific situation allowed us to be horrified
while he retained his calm.
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EG:
Do you see this as conscious understatement, a conscious act on Baldwin’s part?
RR:
He was such a good writer that he would not allow himself to lose his hold on the
nouns and the verbs and the adverbs. They were, in some sense, his protection
against madness.
EG:
That is a passionate statement about the power of language to shape experience
and life rather than the other way around. I can imagine teachers and students
sitting at your feet, clamoring for advice about how to get and retain hold of those
nouns and verbs and adverbs.
RR:
You have to learn how to distance yourself from your own prose—and that takes
some practice. The externalization of the writing process makes a good writer.
You no longer see merely with the eye of the author, but you see with the eye of
the reader.
Sometimes, it’s embarrassing. One of the things you have to learn is how to share
your work with others. You learn how to read it out loud for others, to write it
early enough so that you can rewrite it. Rewriting is absolutely essential because it
allows you on Wednesday to see what you wrote on Monday, and that distance of
48 hours is already part of the distancing process.
EG:
You say that your books are argumentative. When you are writing, do you
consciously construct an argument? Do you have a sense of audience?
RR:
As an American writer, I’ve always had the sense that the writer is born out of
what Cynthia Ozick would have called the daily offenses that many of us endure—
from not getting invited to the junior prom, from not getting picked for the
baseball team—that’s when the writer gets born. It’s out of that sense of isolation,
not from the sense of a great communal voice.
I do have a sense of an antagonist. I wrote Days of Obligation, for example,
because I was haunted all my life by my father’s tragic sensibility. It came at me in
hundreds of ways. My father, who made false teeth for a living, was a gentle and
loving man, but a dark man. His sense of the futility of life and the lack of
seriousness of American life meant that he was always there with an ironic or
sardonic remark about my goals. So my writing is always a dialogue with my
father—or, sometimes, with Octavio Paz, a literary father.
EG:
Do you ever win the argument?
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RR:
No.
EG:
Do you think you can win the argument?
RR:
No, my father will always win, but I can always rhetorically trump him in the
formulation of the argument.
EG:
How do you do that?
RR:
By writing a good sentence—and by turning him into a boy at the end of the book.
EG:
How do you know when you have written a good sentence?
RR:
Sometimes you don’t know. Sometimes writers leave a sentence too early when
they should have worked on it longer. But sometimes you know it is right, and it
will resist you if you try to change it.
EG:
Finally, what are appropriate subjects for writing essays?
RR:
Be awake! Watch everything! This is the way your life becomes an essay. I am
always thinking of my life as the subject of an essay.
EG:
But doesn’t that distance you from living?
RR:
(Laughing) Of course! Writers are not good lovers!
EG:
People often talk about fiction as imaginative literature. But in your essays, you
are remarkably imaginative. Do you think the boundaries between fiction and
nonfiction are becoming increasingly permeable?
RR:
I resent the division, but I don’t read fiction anymore except for books I have
grown up with—I’ll read a chapter of Mrs. Dalloway or Vanity Fair.
EG:
Like visiting an old friend?
RR:
Exactly, or even more, like being visited by an old friend. What I am more and
more interested in are ways of making the essay participate with not only the
rhythms of our living but also the rhetorical tools we have used to describe those
rhythms. Nothing is foreign to the essay. You can use poetry within the essay. You
can turn the essay into anything you want as long as it’s true to the drama of living
that you want to embrace.
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What Do Students Need to Know About Rhetoric?
Hepzibah Roskelly
University of North Carolina
Greensboro, North Carolina
The AP Language and Composition Exam places strong emphasis on students’ ability to
analyze texts rhetorically and to use rhetoric effectively as they compose essay responses.
It’s an important question for teachers, therefore, to consider what students need to know
about this often misunderstood term in order to write confidently and skillfully.
The traditional definition of rhetoric, first proposed by Aristotle, and embellished over
the centuries by scholars and teachers, is that rhetoric is the art of observing in any given
case the “available means of persuasion.”
“The whole process of education for me was learning to put names to things I already
knew.” That’s a line spoken by Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton’s private investigator in one
of her series of alphabet mystery novels, C is for Corpse. When I began a graduate
program that specialized in rhetoric, I wasn’t quite sure what that word meant. But once I
was introduced to it, I realized rhetoric was something I had always known about.
Any of these opening paragraphs might be a suitable way to begin an essay on what
students need to know as they begin a course of study that emphasizes rhetoric and
prepares them for the AP English Language Exam. The first acknowledges that the
question teachers ask about teaching rhetoric is a valid one. The second establishes a
working definition and suggests that the writer will rely on classical rhetoric to propose
answers to the question. And the third? Perhaps it tells more about the writer than about
the subject. She likes mysteries; she knows that many people (including herself when she
was a student) don’t know much about the term. But that third opening is the one I
choose to begin with. It’s a rhetorical decision, based on what I know of myself, of the
subject, and of you. I want you to know something of me, and I’d like to begin a
conversation with you. I also want to establish my purpose right away, and Millhone’s
line states that purpose nicely. Rhetoric is all about giving a name to something we
already know a great deal about, and teachers who understand that are well on their way
to teaching rhetoric effectively in their classes.
The first thing that students need to know about rhetoric, then, is that it’s all around us in
conversation, in movies, in advertisements and books, in body language, and in art. We
employ rhetoric whether we’re conscious of it or not, but becoming conscious of how
rhetoric works can transform speaking, reading, and writing, making us more successful
and able communicators and more discerning audiences. The very ordinariness of
rhetoric is the single most important tool for teachers to use to help students understand
its dynamics and practice them.
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Exploring several writers’ definitions of rhetoric will, I hope, reinforce this truth about the
commonness of rhetorical practice and provide some useful terms for students as they
analyze texts and write their own. The first is Aristotle’s, whose work on rhetoric has been
employed by scholars and teachers for centuries, and who teachers still rely on for basic
understandings about the rhetorical transaction.
The Rhetorical Triangle: Subject, Audience, Speaker’s Persona
Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means
of persuasion.
—Aristotle
Aristotle believed that from the world around them, speakers could observe how
communication happens and use that understanding to develop sound and convincing
arguments. In order to do that, speakers needed to look at three elements, graphically
represented by what we now call the rhetorical triangle:
Aristotle said that when a rhetor or speaker begins to consider how to compose a
speech— that is, begins the process of invention—the speaker must take into account
three elements: the subject, the audience, and the speaker. The three elements are
connected and interdependent; hence, the triangle.
Considering the subject means that the writer/speaker evaluates what he or she knows
already and needs to know, investigates perspectives, and determines kinds of evidence or
proofs that seem most useful. Students are often taught how to conduct research into a
subject and how to support claims with appropriate evidence, and it is the subject point of
the triangle that students are most aware of and feel most confident about. But, as
Aristotle shows, knowing a subject—the theme of a novel, literary or rhetorical terms,
reasons for the Civil War—is only one facet of composing.
Considering the audience means speculating about the reader’s expectations, knowledge,
and disposition with regard to the subject writers explore. When students respond to an
assignment given by a teacher, they have the advantage of knowing a bit of what their
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audience expects from them because it is often spelled out. “Five to seven pages of errorfree prose.” “State your thesis clearly and early.” “Use two outside sources.” “Have fun.”
All of these instructions suggest to a student writer what the reader expects and will look
for; in fact, pointing out directly the rhetoric of assignments we make as teachers is a
good way to develop students’ rhetorical understanding. When there is no assignment,
writers imagine their readers, and if they follow Aristotle’s definition, they will use their
own experience and observation to help them decide on how to communicate with
readers.
The use of experience and observation brings Aristotle to the speaker point of the triangle.
Writers use who they are, what they know and feel, and what they’ve seen and done to
find their attitudes toward a subject and their understanding of a reader. Decisions about
formal and informal language, the use of narrative or quotations, the tone of familiarity
or objectivity, come as a result of writers considering their speaking voices on the page.
My opening paragraph, the exordium, attempts to give readers insight into me as well as
into the subject, and it comes from my experience as a reader who responds to the
personal voice. The creation of that voice Aristotle called the persona, the character the
speaker creates as he or she writes.
Many teachers use the triangle to help students envision the rhetorical situation. Aristotle
saw these rhetorical elements coming from lived experience. Speakers knew how to
communicate because they spoke and listened, studied, and conversed in the world.
Exercises that ask students to observe carefully and comment on rhetorical situations in
action—the cover of a magazine, a conversation in the lunchroom, the principal’s address
to the student body—reinforce observation and experience as crucial skills for budding
rhetoricians as well as help students transfer skills to their writing and interpreting of
literary and other texts.
Appeals to Logos, Pathos, and Ethos
In order to make the rhetorical relationship—speakers to hearers, hearers to subjects,
speakers to subjects—most successful, writers use what Aristotle and his descendants
called the appeals: logos, ethos, and pathos.
They appeal to a reader’s sense of logos when they offer clear, reasonable premises and
proofs, when they develop ideas with appropriate details, and when they make sure
readers can follow the progression of ideas. The logical thinking that informs speakers’
decisions and readers’ responses forms a large part of the kind of writing students
accomplish in school.
Writers use ethos when they demonstrate that they are credible, good-willed, and
knowledgeable about their subjects, and when they connect their thinking to readers’ own
ethical or moral beliefs. Quintilian, a Roman rhetorician and theorist, wrote that the
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speaker should be the “good man speaking well.” This emphasis on good character meant
that audiences and speakers could assume the best intentions and the most thoughtful
search for truths about an issue. Students’ use of research and quotations is often as much
an ethical as a logical appeal, demonstrating to their teachers that their character is
thoughtful, meticulous, and hardworking.
When writers draw on the emotions and interests of readers, and highlight them, they use
pathos, the most powerful appeal and the most immediate—hence its dominance in
advertisements. Students foreground this appeal when they use personal stories or
observations, sometimes even within the context of analytical writing, where it can work
dramatically well to provoke readers’ sympathetic reaction. Figurative language is often
used by writers to heighten the emotional connections readers make to the subject. Emily
Dickinson’s poem that begins with the metaphor “My life had stood—a loaded gun,” for
example, provokes readers’ reactions of fear or dread as they begin to read.
As most teachers teach the appeals, they make sure to note how intertwined the three are.
John F. Kennedy’s famous line (an example of the rhetorical trope of antimetabole, by the
way), “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your
country,” calls attention to the ethical qualities of both speaker and hearer, begins to
propose a solution to some of the country’s ills by enlisting the direct help of its citizens,
and calls forth an emotional patriotism toward the country that has already done so much
for individuals. Asking students to investigate how appeals work in their own writing
highlights the way the elements of diction, imagery, and syntax work to produce
persuasive effects, and often makes students conscious of the way they’re unconsciously
exercising rhetorical control.
Any text students read can be useful for teachers in teaching these elements of classical
rhetoric. Speeches, because they’re immediate in connecting speaker and hearer, provide
good illustrations of how rhetorical relationships work. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,
Marc Antony’s speech allows readers to see clearly how appeals intertwine, how a
speaker’s persona is established, how aim or purpose controls examples. Sojourner
Truth’s repetition of the phrase “Ain’t I a Woman?” shows students the power of
repetition and balance in writing as well as the power of gesture (Truth’s gestures to the
audience are usually included in texts of the speech). Asking students to look for
rhetorical transactions in novels, in poems, in plays, and in nonfiction will expose how
rhetorical all writing is.
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Context and Purpose
Rhetoric is what we have instead of omniscience.
—Ann Berthoff
It’s important to note that Aristotle omitted—or confronted only indirectly—two other
elements of the rhetorical situation, the context in which writing or speaking occurs and
the emerging aim or purpose that underlies many of the writer’s decisions. In part,
Aristotle and other classical rhetoricians could assume context and aim since all speakers
and most hearers were male, upper class, and concerned with addressing important civic,
public issues of the day. But these two considerations affect every element of the
rhetorical triangle. Some teachers add circles around the triangle or write inside of it to
show the importance of these two elements to rhetorical understanding.
Ann Berthoff’s statement suggests the importance of context, the situation in which
writing and reading occur, and the way that an exploration of that situation, a rhetorical
analysis, can lead to understanding of what underlies writers’ choices. We can’t know for
sure what writers mean, Berthoff argues, but we have rhetoric to help us interpret.
The importance of context is especially obvious in comedy and political writing, where
controlling ideas are often, maybe even usually, topical, concerned with current events
and ideas. One reason comedy is difficult to teach sometimes is that the events alluded to
are no longer current for readers and the humor is missed. Teachers who have taught
Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” for example, have to fill in the context of the Irish
famine and the consequent mind-numbing deprivation in order to have students react
appropriately to the black humor of Swift’s solutions to the problem. But using humorist
David Sedaris’s essays or Mort Sahl’s political humor or Dorothy Parker’s wry social
commentary provides a fine opportunity to ask students to do research on the context in
which these pieces were written. Students who understand context learn how and why
they write differently in history class and English or biology. And giving students real
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contexts to write in—letters to the editor, proposals for school reforms, study notes for
other students— highlights how context can alter rhetorical choices in form and content.
Intention
Rhetoric . . . should be a study of misunderstandings and their remedies.
—I. A. Richards
Richards’s statement reveals how key intention or aim is to rhetorical effectiveness.
Words and forms carry writers’ intentions, but, as Richards indicates, those aims can be
miscommunicated. Investigating how readers perceive intentions exposes where and how
communication happens or is lost. For Richards, rhetoric is the way to connect intentions
with responses, the way to reconcile readers and writers. Intention is sometimes
embodied in a thesis statement; certainly, students get lots of practice making those
statements clear. But intention is carried out throughout a piece, and it often changes.
Writing workshops where writers articulate intentions and readers suggest where they
perceive them or lose them give students a way to realize intentions more fully.
Many texts students read can illuminate how intentions may be misperceived as well as
communicated effectively. “A Modest Proposal,” for example, is sometimes perceived as
horrific by student readers rather than anguished. Jane Addams’s “Bayonet Charge”
speech, delivered just before America’s entrance into World War I, provoked a storm of
protest when it seemed to many that she was impugning the bravery of fighting soldiers
who had to be drugged before they could engage in the mutilation of the bayonet charge.
Although she kept restating her intention in later documents, her career was nearly
ruined, and her reputation suffered for decades. I use that example (in part because you
may not be familiar with it) to show that students can find much to discuss when they
examine texts from the perspective of misunderstandings and their remedies.
Visual Rhetoric
One way to explore rhetoric in all its pervasiveness and complexity is to make use of the
visual. Students are expert rhetoricians when it comes to symbolic gesture, graphic
design, and action shots in film. What does Donald Trump’s hand gesture accompanying
his straightforward “You’re fired” on the recent “reality” television program The
Apprentice signal? (Notice the topical context I’m using here: perhaps when you read this,
this show will no longer be around.) Why does Picasso use color and action in the way he
does in his painting Guernica? Why are so many Internet sites organized in columns that
sometimes compete for attention? Linking the visual to the linguistic, students gain
confidence and control as they analyze and produce rhetoric.
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Conclusion
So what do students need to know about rhetoric? Not so much the names of its tropes
and figures, although students often like to hunt for examples of asyndeton or
periphrasis, and it is also true that if they can identify them in texts they read they can in
turn practice them in their own writing, often to great effect. (If you’re interested in
having students do some work with figures of speech and the tropes of classical rhetoric,
visit the fine Web site at Brigham Young University developed by Professor Gideon
Burton called Silva Rhetoricae, literally “the forest of rhetoric”:
humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm. That site provides hundreds of terms and
definitions of rhetorical figures.) However, it’s more important to recognize how figures
of speech affect readers and be able to use them effectively to persuade and communicate
than it is to identify them, and the exam itself places little emphasis on an ability to name
zeugma (a figure where one item in a series of parallel constructions in a sentence is
governed by a single word), but great emphasis on a student’s ability to write a sentence
that shows an awareness of how parallel constructions affect readers’ responses.
Students don’t need to memorize the five canons of classical rhetoric either—invention,
arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—although studying what each of those canons
might mean for the composing processes of today’s student writers might initiate
provocative conversation about paragraph length, sentence structure, use of repetition,
and format of final product.
What students need to know about rhetoric is in many ways what they know already
about the way they interact with others and with the world. Teaching the connections
between the words they work with in the classroom and the world outside it can challenge
and engage students in powerful ways as they find out how much they can use what they
know of the available means of persuasion to learn more.
Some useful books on rhetoric:
Crowley, Sharon, and Debra Hawhee. Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. 3rd
Ed. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2004.
Covino, William A., and David A. Jolliffe. Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries.
Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995.
Lunsford, Andrea A., John J. Ruszkiewicz, and Keith Walters. Everything’s an Argument.
3rd Ed. New York: Bedford, St. Martin’s, 2004.
Mailloux, Steven. Rhetorical Power. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989.
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Reading Persuasive Speeches: Making the Abstract Concrete
Shirley Counsil
Spanish River Community High School
Boca Raton, Florida
Henry David Thoreau once said, “Gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his
hammer. One melts, the other breaks in pieces.” The ability to persuade is a valuable skill,
especially in our modern world where language has the power to motivate, to change, to
dispel, and to create. Students can easily identify strategies of persuasion, yet being able to
articulate why and how they work is difficult for even the best of students. When I discuss
style or rhetorical strategies, many students hear only abstract terms and have little actual
understanding of what they mean. One way to help students is to convert those abstract
concepts into ones that are more concrete. In order to do this, I invoke the broader
umbrella of a category such as persuasive strategies, break it down into its components,
and teach those individual components.
Given the number of persuasive speeches on the AP Language and Composition Exam in
the last few years and the importance I attach to students writing their own speeches, I
have created a sort of “toolbox”—basically a chart where students can see almost every
analytical tool at a glance. (See Figure 1.) During the school year, I teach each major
category listed in bold at the top of the chart and have students practice the components
included in each. My goal is for them to internalize both major categories and their
components so they will be able to structure their close-reading analysis with specific
references.
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Figure 1
Speaker (authority,
integrity)
Education/Experience/
Age
Knowledge/Reliability
Audience
Point of view/Persona or
Mask
Education
Appeals
Emotional/Pathos
Logical/Logos
Ethical/Ethos
Background
Economic level
Strategies/Approaches/
Reasoning
Qualify– Moderate
Logical Fallacies
Circular thinking
Biases
Using pairing and piling
modifiers
Utilizing
negative/positive
statement
Binary classification
Age
Fears
Beliefs
Culture
Aristotelian logic
Inductive reasoning
Deductive reasoning
Drawing inferences
Imagery/Figurative
Language
Simile– Metaphor
Structure/Organization
Syntax
Introduction/Statement
proposition/Argument
Hyperbole,
Understatement/Litotes
Personification
Background, purpose/
Specific support
Aristotelian concession/
Conclusion
Definition/Division/
Comparison/Contrast
Declarative
Imperative
Exclamatory
Interrogative
Loose/Balanced/
Periodic
Convoluted/Centered/
Freight train
Simple/Compound/
Complex/Compound/
Complex
Rhetorical question
Sentence order
Anaphora/Repetition
Apostrophe
Allusions
Antithesis
Paradox
Synecdoche
Metonymy
Sensory perceptions
Problem/Solution
Order of importance
Chronological/Spatial
Order
Abstract to concrete
Comparison/Contrast
Particular to general or
vice versa
Unifying Phrases/
Transitions
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Cause/Effect
Over-generalization
Non sequitur
hypostatization
Begging the question
Argument ad hominem
Quick fix
Either/or thinking
Argument ad populum
Bandwagon
Red Herring
Punctuation
Appositive
Parallelism
Adverbial or dependent
clause beginnings
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Evidence
Personal experience
Anecdotes
Expert testimony
Comparisons/Analogy
Diction
Denotation/Connotation
Professional
jargon/terminology
Verbs/Adjectives/Pronouns
Active/Passive Voice
Attitude/Tone
Serious/Passionate
Humorous/Satirical/Sarcastic
Urging/Righteous
Mocking/Biting
Facts
Statistics
Examples
Charts/Graphs/Diagrams
Concrete details
Quotations
Reasons/Definitions
Tropes/Schemes
Latinate
Colloquial
Informal/Formal
Academic
Abstract/Concrete
Rhythmic/Pedestrian
Ironic
Detached/Objective
Didactic/Dogmatic
Questioning/Curious
Bombastic/Superior
Romantic/Idealistic
Emotional biases
Purpose
Inform
Persuade (to
change ideas)
Explain
Persuade (to
encourage
action)
Learning the various categories contained in the chart provides specific analytical
questions to ask when reading a speech. For example, a student can start with the speaker,
look at diction and then appeals, and from that begin to get an idea of tone and attitude.
If students look at the writer’s strategies, appeals, structure, syntax, and evidence, they can
get a good idea of the writer’s purpose and audience. As students work with the chart,
they become more familiar with the various divisions of each category. Of course, the
chart does not cover everything for every situation, but it is a concrete assortment of the
more salient aspects of persuasive speaking. No single speech will employ everything on
the chart. Some concepts from the chart will be used frequently, and some items will be
used rarely. However, if students are not actively looking for these elements, it is unlikely
they will find enough of them to write an insightful and comprehensive analysis.
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Published in 1997, the following (annotated) speech aimed to establish Tony Blair’s role
in reforming the Labour Party after three years as their leader.
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The following analysis is by no means exhaustive, and, while more or less following the
development of Blair’s argument, of necessity does not cover the moves made in every
individual paragraph.
Emphasis was given to the policy changes in the Party, the revision of Clause IV of the
Party’s constitution, and the concept of stakeholding. In analyzing the speech by Tony
Blair, students could start by considering the speaker, his diction, logic, and strategies.
Next, they might make an inference about the speaker’s relationship to his audience and
purpose. When students begin by looking at the column of Appeals, they can see that
Blair starts with a logical appeal, then later turns to an emotional one: “Unless we act
together…we will be worse off as individuals.” He appeals to his audience’s emotions
when he says, “In particular, those without the best start in life through birth are unlikely
to make up for it.” Focusing on the Diction category, students can observe that by using
the pronoun “we,” Blair establishes common goals and ideals.
By checking the chart as a kind of resource list, students begin to put names to elements
of the seamless whole the speech at first had seemed to be. Blair clarifies and qualifies his
views, explaining that a strong society should not be confused with a strong state or with
powerful collectivist institutions, and attributes this to the confusion of early thinking on
the political Left. Blair is also careful to define “Left,” “community,” and other terms, both
to insure clarity and to keep the audience with him as he continues. All of these strategies
and methods found in the chart can help students see how Blair utilizes them to create an
ethical appeal and establish his knowledge and authority as a speaker.
Returning to the chart, students could observe that in his third paragraph Blair compares
the past and the present to clarify the differences. “The reaction of the Right, after the
advent of Mrs. Thatcher, was to stress the notion of the individual against the state.” He
explains the value of “personal responsibility,” and then talks about the shift as the Right
expanded the definition of “personal responsibility” to include not only “for yourself” but
also “to yourself.” Continuing, he clarifies the various positions of the Left and Right,
using punctuation, specifically dashes, to encourage the reader to pause and think about
the philosophy practiced in the 1980s.
In the fifth paragraph, Blair piles on facts about change, confusion, and the resulting
insecurity and then continues focusing on the insecurities in paragraph six, which begins
and ends with variations on the word “security.” Using anaphora, he emphasizes the
phrase “We do not” three times in order to highlight his desire to move forward, not
backward. He uses emotionally charged words and phrases such as “greater insecurity,”
“massive and rapid changes,” “family life that has been altered drastically,” and “[i]t is
bewildering” to emphasize through pathos the points he is making. Mentioning that “the
world has the nuclear weapons to destroy itself many times over” and then talking about
children is a strong, implicit moral and ethical appeal.
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In paragraph seven, having by now built a strong case for his proposal, Blair comes to his
main point. “People need rules which we all stand by.” Here again he resorts to the
unifying “we.” Using what Aristotle called “concession,” Blair assures his audience that
rules do not mean a return to the past with its unfairness and inequity. In this section he
uses repetition and loaded words such as “old class structures,” “chained,” “birth rather
than merit,” and “bureaucracy and regulation” to show his disdain for the rules of the
past. He ends this paragraph by using repetition: “Bad and foolish rules are bad and
foolish rules, but they do not invalidate the need to have rules.” Using the chart, students
can see the strategies that form the pattern of diction and syntax that Blair is employing.
In the last section Blair continues with his moral appeal, using the biblical allusion that
“each of us is our brother’s keeper.” Here he emphasizes duty beyond self. In the next
paragraph he returns to the past and notes the negatives of the Left, which has “always
insisted that it is not enough…our duty is not to infringe…and this might be called a
‘negative duty.’” Moving on, Blair, in a cause-effect sentence, warns that a “minimal
community creates a society of minimal citizens.” He then quotes an antithetical
statement by William Morris in order to sum up the philosophy of the Left: “Fellowship is
life, and lack of fellowship is death.” Finally, Blair arrives at the pivotal message he wishes
to convey, and mimicking Morris with his own positive-negative sentence, he states that
“solidarity and fellowship are the start of the story, and not the end.”
Figure 2 captures the analysis as a marked-up passage that illustrates all the elements at
work. A student who used the chart to structure analysis would have talked about the
speaker, audience, tone, and attitude of the speech while from the Strategies column
noting examples of qualifying, pairing and piling of modifiers, and negative-positive
statement. From the Appeals column it can be seen that Blair uses emotional, ethical, and
logical appeals. From the Imagery column Blair utilizes allusions and from the Structure
category he chooses concession, definition, comparison and contrast, specific support,
and unifying transitions. From the Syntax column students could perceive the use of
declarative sentences, a rhetorical question, anaphora, punctuation, and parallelism, and
from the Evidence column Blair uses fact, quotations, comparisons, examples, reasons,
and definitions. From the Diction column, connotation or loaded words, powerful verbs
and adjectives, professional jargon, and active voice are used. Looking at the excerpt, one
can discern the tone and attitude of the work through the use of diction, appeals, syntax,
and evidence. Blair is learned, articulate, and professional. His attitude is clearly that
society must work together to achieve the greater good. His tone is authoritative, didactic,
passionate, and serious. It is then easy to conclude that his purpose is to inform, clarify,
persuade, and change ideas. Using the Persuasive Speech Chart, students gain a specific
and concrete method of approaching the analysis of a persuasive speech, and can in turn
use the chart as a guide to compose their own speeches.
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Reading Nonfiction Closely: Ben Franklin’s “Whistle”
Nancy Potter
Newport High School
Bellevue, Washington
If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things
worth reading or do things worth the writing.
—Benjamin Franklin
Blessed with an overabundance of materials worth teaching and reading, teachers often
ignore expository prose in favor of genres more often recognized as “literature,” such as
fiction, drama, and poetry. Yet this genre forms the staple of adult reading and is an
essential component of the AP Language course as it anticipates college freshman
composition. Our students need to explore the rich variety of expository prose forms,
including letters, sermons, speeches, essays, editorials, journals, and diaries. AP Language
questions cover the gamut.
American icon Benjamin Franklin provides many opportunities to teach reading, writing,
and thinking. His eighteenth-century prose challenges students to decipher his syntax
and unravel his irony, providing them with viable practice in analyzing complex texts.
Franklin’s wit and his genially personal or audaciously pungent style communicate
clearly. Though contemporary teenagers often struggle at first to detect the fine shades of
meaning in Franklin’s prose, I find that they are able to enjoy “The Whistle,” a rarely
anthologized letter.
The Whistle
by Benjamin Franklin
To Madame Brillon
I received my dear friend’s two letters, one for Wednesday and one for Saturday. This is again Wednesday. I
do not deserve one for today because I have not answered the former. But, indolent as I am, and averse to
writing, the fear of having no more of your pleasing epistles, if I do not contribute to the correspondence,
obliges me to take up my pen; and as Mr. B. has kindly sent me word that he sets out tomorrow to see you,
instead of spending this Wednesday evening, as I have done its namesakes, in your delightful company, I sit
down to spend it in thinking of you, in writing to you, and in reading over and over again your letters.
I am charmed with your description of Paradise, and with your plan of living there; and I approve much of
your conclusion, that, in the meantime, we should draw all the good we can from this world. In my opinion,
we might all draw more good from it than we do, and suffer less evil, if we would take care not to give too
much for whistles. For to me it seems, that most of the unhappy people we meet with, are become so by
neglect of caution.
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You ask what I mean? You love stories, and will excuse my telling one of myself. When I was a child of
seven years old, my friends, on a holiday, filled my pocket with coppers. I went directly to a shop where
they sold toys for children; and being charmed with the sound of a whistle, that I met by the way in the
hands of another boy, I voluntarily offered and gave all my money for one. I then came home, and went
whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle, but disturbing all the family. My brothers, and
sisters, and cousins, understanding the bargain I had made, told me I had given four times as much for it as
it was worth; put me in mind what good things I might have bought with the rest of the money; and
laughed at me so much for my folly, that I cried with vexation; and the reflection gave me more chagrin
than the whistle gave me pleasure.
This however was afterward of use to me, impression continuing on my mind; so that often, when I was
tempted to buy some unnecessary thing, I said to myself, Don’t give too much for the whistle; and I saved my
money.
As I grew up, came into the world, and observed the actions of men, I thought I met with many, very many,
who gave too much for the whistle.
When I saw one too ambitious of court favor, sacrificing his time in attendance on levees, his repose, his
liberty, his virtue, and perhaps his friends, to attain it, I have said to myself, This man gives too much for his
whistle.
When I saw another fond of popularity, constantly employing himself in political bustles, neglecting his
own affairs, and ruining them by that neglect, He pays, indeed, said I, too much for his whistle.
If I knew a miser, who gave up every kind of comfortable living, all the pleasure of doing good to others, all
the esteem of his fellow-citizens, and the joys of benevolent friendship, for the sake of accumulating wealth,
Poor man, said I, you pay too much for your whistle.
When I met with a man of pleasure, sacrificing every laudable improvement of the mind, or of his fortune,
to mere corporeal sensations, and ruining his health in their pursuit, Mistaken man, said I, you are
providing pain for yourself, instead of pleasure; you give too much for your whistle.
If I see one fond of appearance, or fine clothes, fine houses, fine furniture, fine equipages, all above his
fortune, for which he contracts debts, and ends his career in a prison, Alas! say I, he has paid dear, very dear,
for his whistle.
When I see a beautiful sweet-tempered girl married to an ill-natured brute of a husband, What a pity, say I,
that she should pay so much for a whistle!
In short, I conceive that great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by the false estimates
they have made of the value of things, and by their giving too much for their whistles.
Yet I ought to have charity for these unhappy people, when I consider that, with all this wisdom of which I
am boasting, there are certain things in the world so tempting, for example, the apples of King John,1 which
happily are not to be bought; for if they were put to sale by auction, I might very easily be led to ruin myself
in the purchase, and find that I had once more given too much for the whistle.
Adieu, my dear friend, and believe me ever yours very sincerely and with unalterable affection.
Note
1.
The apples of King John, also called apple-john, reach maturity at St. John’s Day, May 6.
Apparently, these apples keep as long as two years, their resulting shriveled skin only enhancing
their goodness. “I am withered like an old apple-john” (Shakespeare, Henry IV).
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STEP 1: Establishing Setting
I usually prepare students for reading a text as challenging as Franklin’s by asking them to
consider (via a short journal writing) the key idea in question. In this case, I might ask,
“Think about an incident in which you falsely estimated the value of some object or paid
more than you should have for something. How did you feel? What did you learn?”
STEP 2: Providing Context
Many students possess sufficient historical background to know that Franklin was in
Europe during the Revolutionary War as a diplomat for his new republic. The headnote
explanation of the letter provides the rest: “Written at Passy, France, to the young wife of
Brillon, a treasury official. She virtually adopted Franklin as her father.” The passage
features only one allusion (the apples of King John) that is not actually necessary for
comprehension for the text, but is appropriate to explicate before students read or in a
footnote as provided here.
STEP 3: Active Reading
Engaging students in active reading is essential. Providing them with their own copies of
the text encourages their engagement, as Mortimer J. Adler observed with his comment,
“The best way to make yourself a part [of the text] is by writing in it.” If students cannot
write directly on a reading, I suggest Post-It notes or a reusable transparency where you
can model the process.
A good way to scaffold the skills needed for an insightful analytical reading is to use a
heuristic—a kind of template. SOAPSTone, a strategy explained in the College Board
workshop “Pre-AP: Interdisciplinary Strategies for English and Social Studies,” is a
particularly helpful strategy to focus students on the interaction of speaker and audience.
I have this template reproduced on three-whole-punched card stock so students may keep
it in their binders for reference. One of its chief virtues is that every student will write
something down and thus have a start for discussing and doing deeper analysis.
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SOAPStone
Subject:
What is the subject of the text (the general topic, content, or ideas
contained in the text)? How do you know this? How does the author
present the subject? Is it introduced immediately or delayed? Is the subject
hidden? Or is there more than one subject?
Occasion:
What is the rhetorical occasion (the time and place of the piece or the
current situation)? Is it a memory, a description, an observation, a
valedictory, an argument, a diatribe, an elegy, a declaration, a critique, a
journal entry, or…?
Audience:
Who is the audience (the group of readers to whom this piece is directed)?
Does the speaker identify an audience? What assumptions exist about the
intended audience?
Purpose:
What is the purpose for the passage (the reason for its composition)?
What is the speaker’s purpose (the reason behind the text)? How is this
message conveyed? What is the message? How does the speaker try to
spark a reaction in the audience? What techniques are used to achieve a
purpose? How does the text make the audience feel? What is its intended
effect?
Speaker:
Who is the speaker (the voice that tells the story)? Is someone identified as
the speaker? What assumptions can be made about the speaker? What age,
gender, class, emotional state, education, or…?
Tone:
If the author were to read aloud the passage, describe the likely tone of
voice. It is whatever clarifies the author’s attitude toward the subject. What
emotional sense pervades the piece? How does the diction point to tone?
How do the author’s diction, details, images, language, and sentence
structure convey his or her feelings?
STEP 4: Making Meaning
Students can annotate by circling interesting or unfamiliar words, bracketing important
ideas, connecting related concepts with lines, asterisking special ideas, indicating
figurative language, questioning irony, and commenting in the margins. I model active
reading by using a transparency. As I read, I mark the text. Sometimes I read the text to
them, having them actively read along, using their pens to mark the passage. When they
are finished we share samples of their own work; this is more realistic and less
intimidating than a teacher model. Figure 1 is an example of an annotated reading of the
Franklin passage.
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Figure 1: Annotated Version of “The Whistle”
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STEP 5: Asking Questions
After annotating the text, students should be able to articulate how Franklin develops his
thesis. This step—from noting specifics of style to concluding how stylistic choices create
meaning—is crucial. I ask students to generate questions, and we discuss whether they’re
level one literal questions, level two analytical ones, or level three synthesis questions.
More complicated texts usually need to start at the literal level to clarify what’s been read,
but students quickly move to level two or three, which is what most AP analysis requires.
Franklin develops his thesis that people sacrifice too much in life for “possessions” they
deem important. He delineates in each series of observations a personality type that, just
as a child is attracted to a frivolous trinket, expends too much time and energy on
something as meaningless as a whistle. Following are possible questions that not only
focus a close explication of the text’s rhetorical features but anticipate the kind of issues
that multiple-choice items focus on:
• Why is Franklin’s anecdote an effective persuasive technique?
• What is the literal exigence or reason for this text?
• What does Franklin mean by the following line: “that most of the unhappy people
we meet with, are becoming so by neglect of caution”?
• What is the organizational pattern of the text?
• What is the tone of the letter?
STEP 6: Writing
“Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own,” says William
Zinsser in Writing to Learn. “Writing enables us to find out what we know—and what we
don’t know—about whatever we’re trying to learn” (Zinsser 1988). And so, after students
have read and analyzed the passage, writing about it provides a chance for them to share
and organize their thinking. A timed writing on a short passage such as this one simulates
the AP essay questions. After every timed writing, I ask students to write one sentence
indicating what they have learned. I find that such reflection on their reading makes them
better readers.
But in some cases, I realize that a timed writing isn’t the best culminating activity.
Instead, I might ask students to suggest other ways to deliver the same message, rewrite
this eighteenth-century letter as a twenty-first-century email, or pair the text with another
that will illuminate important elements of both. All in all, through this series of activities
designed to expose students to a deep reading of a multilayered text, I hope they also
develop an appreciation of the pleasures and techniques of nonfiction prose.
Source
Zinsser, William. 1988. Writing to Learn. New York: HarperCollins.
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The Rhetoric of African-American Narrative
William Cook
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire
In From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (1979), Robert Stepto offers
a useful approach to classifying and comparing the ways in which writers construct both
fictional and nonfiction narratives. Although his study has specific relevance to African
American writers, Stepto offers both critical and pedagogical tools that clarify narrative
texts in general. His study, based on the construct of “arrangement” from classical
rhetoric, provides a way to approach literary works through a rhetorical lens, in effect
contextualizing and enriching more traditional descriptions of plot, character, figurative
language, and diction.
In “The Response,” the second part of his book, Stepto identifies two broad groupings
within which we can begin to think in a new way about narrative: he speaks of ascension
narratives and immersion narratives. For my own purposes, I have adapted that
discussion, extracting from it a list of short descriptors of each of the two types of
narrative.
Ascension Narrative
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Movement toward a real or symbolic north, movement away from “home” and
membership
Literacy, linguistic “purity,” mastery of the dominant discourse
Loneliness, isolation, and insight
Movement beyond the limitations and restraint of group identity
The self as free from family and community
Linear plot, past to present to future orientation
Achievement of self-creation
Immersion Narrative
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Movement to a real or symbolic south
Orature (a term coined by Pius Zirimu of Uganda to denote oral texts as opposed
to written literature), vernacular, speech of the folk privileged
Community and its rituals
Movement beyond the limits of individual power
Self as anchored in family and community
Circular or recursive plot anchored/re-anchored in past and tradition
Centrality of healing ritual and recovery
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It would be useful to add to this list the presence of “the ancestor” described in Toni
Morrison’s “Rootedness: The Ancestor As Foundation”:
Ancestors are not just parents; they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the
characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain wisdom
(Morrison 1985, 343).
It would be even more useful to add to the presence of the ancestor Farah Jasmine
Griffin’s use of Patricia Hill Collins’ conception of “safe spaces,” those sites where the
migrant can find refuge from “fragmentation, dislocation, and material and spiritual
impoverishment” (Griffin 1995, 8). Not only persons but also cultural sites and practices
may thus function as ancestors.
If we consider the power of the south to north situating of the experience of characters in
ascension or immersion narrative, we can rethink some of the texts before us. In an
example of an immersion narrative, Oceola in Langston Hughes’ “The Blues I’m Playing”
resists the attempt of her white patron to make her a great success. But that achievement
is to be realized only by her breaking all the cultural ties that have sustained her. She
chooses the blues, a black man, and her black neighborhood over concert hall success and
the classical music urged on her by her patron. After all the training in the European
classics, Osceola immerses herself in the blues. She goes back home. On the other hand,
King Solomon Gillis in Rudolph Fisher’s often-anthologized story “City of Refuge” is a
marked example of the tragedy of a failed attempt at ascension. He does not achieve
insight, self-creation, freedom, or literacy. He better exemplifies Griffin’s “fragmentation,
dislocation, and material and spiritual impoverishment.”
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston seems to be writing a
combination of the ascension and the immersion narrative. Janie’s seeming climb up the
social and economic ladder is, however, not a journey of her choosing. She finally resists
being objectified and spoken for when she uses the black cultural weapon of the dozens to
defeat her husband. Her life after her husband’s death is restructured as an immersion
narrative. Just as Janie uses the black vernacular as a weapon, so too does the central
character of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man play the dozens with Brother Tobitt. Both
writers’ characters experience greater power as they become adepts in the language and
mores of the folk. After Tea Cake’s death, Janie, with the power and warmth of her
memories, moves beyond community to an independence and self-mastery she has not
known before. Ellison’s narrative ends in freedom from illusion, in awareness but also in
invisibility. Creation of self is entertained as a possibility, as is the discovery of his social
role, but these lie somewhere in a future that is not yet narrated.
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Hurston and Ellison blend Stepto’s narratives, although they do so to different ends. A
clearer sense of the flexibility of these narratives can be gained by considering the way in
which Toni Morrison in Tar Baby sees the utter impossibility of reconciling the two. Son
can no more step away from his immersion path and join the ascending Jadine than she
can immerse herself in small town of Eloe. When we last see Son, he is galloping away in
the rhythms and sounds of the master trickster in one of the tales he whispered into
Jadine’s ear in a vain attempt to divert her from her ascension. He is not aware—or
refuses to believe—that “she has forgotten her ancient properties” (Morrison 1981, 305).
Note that the novel is dedicated to women who “knew their true and ancient properties”
(dedication page).
A brief glance at Richard Wright’s Native Son gives us a clearer image of ascension
narrative at work in a novel. The opening scene of the trapped rat prefigures Bigger’s
futile attempts to elude his pursuers, but it also demonstrates with brutal clarity that he
has no tender feelings for his family or for anyone else. We see him with friends, his
girlfriend, employers, preachers, social workers, and playtime reformers. From none of
them can he expect help, nor does he desire it. He achieves the insight and the
independence to which he has aspired. At the end he is all right. He needs nothing.
Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow is as clear in its conformity to the
characteristics of the immersion narrative as Wright’s novel is obviously concerned with
ascension. In the title character’s quest to achieve things, she forgets what it is to be
anchored in a community and a culture. The coded words of Billy Eckstine singing “Jelly
Jelly” speak to the passion of her relationship with her husband before they nagged their
way into a concern with things, things she must vomit up if her ritual cleansing is to
work. It is no accident that the presiding spirit here is Lebert Joseph (could this be shapeshifting Papa Legba?). She does not recover the lost past, but she becomes part of a larger
family than she ever envisioned. The songs of pardon and return, which Marshall uses
from the drum dance at Carriocoo, are living images of this ritual of homecoming and
healing.
Stepto, by providing us with a new way of considering narrative, makes it possible for us
to think about narratives we have perhaps until now read only partially. He has added
through his new categories new texts to our shelves.
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The Teaching Series
Suggested Assignments
Following are suggested assignments appropriate to an AP classroom studying the
ascension/immersion dichotomy. The first two refer to speeches and nonfiction prose, the
second two to fiction.
1.
Compare and contrast two speeches that advocate different strategies for racial
equality in terms of ascension versus immersion narratives. Possibilities include
the “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Ballot or the Bullet”
by Malcolm X, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” by Frederick Douglass,
or “Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World” by Marcus Garvey.
2.
Analyze an autobiographical text as an ascension or immersion narrative.
Suggestions: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Incidents in the Life of
a Slave Girl by Linda Brent, Black Boy by Richard Wright, The Color of Water by
James McBride.
3.
In Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon, the journey toward self-knowledge of
Milkman, the central character, could be explored as a movement from an
ascension narrative to immersion. Using the characteristics outlined here, discuss
this interpretation.
4.
Apply the notions of ascension and immersion narratives to such works as The
Great Gatsby, The Glass Menagerie, A Raisin in the Sun, and All My Sons.
Sources
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. 1995. “Who set you flowin’?”: The African-American Migration
Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press.
Morrison, Toni. 1985. “Rootedness: The Ancestor As Foundation.” In Black Women
Writers: Arguments and Interviews. Ed. Mari Evans. Pluto Press.
Morrison, Toni. 1981. Tar Baby. Knopf.
Stepto, Robert. 1980. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative.
University of Illinois Press.
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The Teaching Series
Contributors
Information current as of original publish date of September 2004.
About the Editor
Renee H. Shea is a professor of English at Bowie State University in Maryland, where she
directed the freshman composition program for five years. She teaches courses in
rhetoric, women’s studies, and world literature as well as freshman composition. A
former high school AP English teacher as well as Reader and Question Leader for both
the AP English Language and Literature Exams, she is currently the content advisor for
AP English Language on AP Central. This spring she moderated live online events for AP
Central featuring poets Eavan Boland, Rita Dove, and Li-Young Lee. Dr. Shea publishes
widely on contemporary authors. She’s written many features for Poets and Writers
Magazine, including profiles of Sandra Cisneros, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Maxine Hong
Kingston, Ana Castillo, Suzanne Berne, and Edwidge Danticat. She has also published in
literary and academic journals, including Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, The Journal of
Haitian Studies, and Women in the Arts. Her most recent publication is Marcia Myers:
Twenty Years (Hudson Hills Press, 2004), a study of a painter. She is currently working
on a book about Edwidge Danticat and another on Amy Tan for the NCTE High School
Literature Series.
William W. Cook, professor of English and African American Studies at Dartmouth
College, is also the Israel Evans Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres. He teaches
courses in American drama and poetry, the great migration, and African American
literature and the classical tradition. His current research project focuses on the
relationship of African American literature to the rhetoric, thematics, and narrative
devices of classical literature.
Shirley Counsil is an award-winning teacher of AP English Language and Literature at
Spanish River Community High School in Boca Raton, Florida. She has been a Reader
and Table Leader at the AP English Language Reading for 12 years and regularly conducts
both one-day and weeklong institutes in both AP English Language and Literature, as
well as in AP English Vertical Teams.
Ellen Greenblatt teaches at University High School in San Francisco. She has served on
the AP English Development Committee, and has been an AP Reader and Table Leader.
She has led AP workshops throughout the U.S. as well as in Berlin, Bangkok, and The
Hague; written articles for numerous publications; developed Pacesetter curricular
materials for the College Board; and conducted interviews for San Francisco’s City Arts
and Lectures series with writers such as Jane Smiley, Chang-Rae Lee, Dorothy Allison,
and Joyce Carol Oates.
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The Teaching Series
Nancy Potter is a Table Leader for the AP English Literature Examination and has taught
public school in Washington state for nearly 30 years. A teacher of both AP English
Literature and Language, she has served as a consultant and workshop leader for the
College Board since 1992. She is a former president of the Washington State Council
Teachers of English and was recognized as a Washington State Technology Teacher of the
Year.
Mary Jo Potts serves as dean of faculty, chair of the English Department, and an AP
English teacher at the Webb School of Knoxville, Tennessee. She has been teaching AP
English since 1977 and has been a Reader, Table Leader, and Question Leader for the
exam; a College Board AP and AP English Vertical Team consultant; and a member of
the AP English Development Committee (1998 to 2002). Currently, she serves as a
member of the College Board English Academic Advisory Committee.
Hepzibah Roskelly is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina,
Greensboro, where she directs the Composition Program. Former Chief Reader of the AP
English Language Exam, Dr. Roskelly frequently presents workshops on AP throughout
the country and Europe and is active in the NCTE and the CCCC. Her most recent
textbook, co-authored with current Chief Reader David Jolliffe, Everyday Use: Rhetoric in
the Writing Classroom, will be published in 2005.
Anelle R. Tumminello is the English coordinator for Anne Arundel County Public
Schools in Maryland. An AP English Literature teacher and department chair for ten
years, she is a frequent consultant with the College Board and the Maryland Writing
Project, where she coordinated the Summer Teachers’ Institute for two years. She has
taught at the University of Maryland, the College of Notre Dame, and Towson University.
She is a regular presenter for NCTE, the National Curriculum Network, Maryland
Assessment Group, and the Baltimore Area Consortium for Writing-Across-theCurriculum.
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