English 645 Rhetoric and Composition

Formal Writing Assignment: A Plan for Teaching Rhetorical Strategies

 

Whether we think of it as a discursive practice (rhetorica utens) or as a meta-discursive techne (rhetorica docens), "rhetoric" has survived the past 2,500 years in large measure as a result of its capacity to reinvent itself from one epoch to the next as a means of serving the changing demands of collective judgment.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                          John Luciatas

 

Length (minimum): 6 pages, double-spaced, typed.

 

Description: You’re preparing a sequence of class activities, reading assignments and writing assignments that will give a class of 12th grade writing students an opportunity to realize the importance of both studying and producing “rhetoric.” At the end of this lesson, your students should recognize rhetoric as a (changing) body of knowledge they can edify themselves with (by assimilating bits and pieces). If they also “get” that they can also adapt the rhetorical theory they find to their particular situations, and/or that they already are “rhetors” (theorists of strategic language) themselves, that’s the icing on the cake.

 

More specifically: the formal writing assignments in your plan should call on students to write a real world document that solve some problem facing teenagers (Note: we’ll do some examples of this in class after Spring Break). The first step, then, is to figure out what you want them to write (à consider public writing genre rather than school genre). Then, you have to decide what examples of rhetoric (utens or docens) you want them to read/study before setting out to write. After you have that in mind, you might be easier for you to create your own “theoretical” answer to an important question for any writing teacher: what is Rhetoric?

 

What is Rhetoric?

Putting aside dictionary definitions altogether, your objective is to “theoretically” explain “Classical Rhetoric” and compare and (mostly) contrast it with “Women’s Rhetoric” as evident in what you took away from 2-4 examples of

 

·       the rhetorica utens of letter writing (as explained in Foster’s Boarding School) and public speaking (Wells, Fuller, Kempe, Truth)

or

·       the rhetorica docens of Aspasia, de Pizan, Fuller, or Clark.

 

The long and short of it: “rhetoric” is the theory that guides practice, but it is not a set of ironclad “rules.” Sometimes, the theory comes from people who are intentionally producing theory (rhetorica docens) and sometimes the theory can be extracted from rhetoric that makes sense for a particular time/place (rhetorica utens).

 

 

Sections of the Plan:

 

I.                   Overview/Theoretical Justification: (drawing explicitly on 3 of the readings that describe the scope and value of “rhetoric” your purpose in this 3-page preface is to explain to your secondary audience—other teachers, administrators—why you’re asking students to do the reading and writing assignments in this sequence)

II.                Warm-Up: (some kind of question or scenario where students have to draw on their own experiences and make a judgment about a question or problem pertaining to the focus, “rhetorical strategies: where do we get them, how do we apply them?”)

III.             Reading Prompt One: (some directions on what students are looking for when they’re reading—some direction for how you want them to read actively. It could be as explicit as taking notes or preparing some informal writing.)

IV.           Class Activity One: (some kind of follow up exercise, perhaps collaborative, that students to do to show that they’ve gotten the reading)

V.              Reading Prompt Two: (some directions on what students are looking for when they’re reading—some direction for how you want them to read actively. It could be as explicit as taking notes or preparing some informal writing.)

VI.           Class Activity Two: (some follow up to the second reading)

VII.        Formal Assignment One: (a letter, speech, report…)

VIII.     Formal Assignment Two: (this one can be a reflection or it can be a strategic revision, or a rebuttal, or…)

 

Grading Criteria

 

Objectives

Points

Your Notes/?’s

The overview explains and briefly contextualizes 3 different strategies from 3 different rhetors (be sure that the strategies are CONTRAST dramatically; one rhetor should be from the Classical Greek Tradition)

20

 

the warm-up describes the exercise and explains how it is doable by all and how it anticipates the rhetorical theory that they will need for the formal writing assignment

20

 

The reading prompts guide students in active reading strategies, specifically tailored to find what they need to know to do the formal writing assignment (which you should mention; they should have their “eyes on the prize” from the very beginning).

10

 

The formal writing assignment will explicitly describe the rhetorical situation and provide some grading criteria.

20

 

The document is mostly free of errors (so that they do not interfere with the reading; you might want to take your final draft to the Writing Center)

10

 

The teaching plan’s two central aspects—the Overview and the Detailed Plan—are coherent.

20