Process 3 Readings
Getting Started:
Read the tips given on The Argument Essay web site (ESP. being
aware of the other sides of the argument, being fair to these):
http://www.eslplanet.com/teachertools/argueweb/frntpage.htm
Read these sections from:* (BR) and (PEN)
(BR) CH.5 Description: Writing with your senses.
(PEN) p. 26-27 Description and organizing.
* Do not complete the
exercises listed in these chapters (unless you really want to).
Reading for Ideas:
Rhetorical
triangle: Every speech or text can be viewed as a communicative
triangle composed of
speaker(writer), speech (text), and audience (reader).
Writer
^
/ \
/_____\
Text Reader
Identify purpose in
the Bedford Reader selections below. What audience is the
writer
attempting to persuade of
what point (s)?
- "Arm Wrestling with My Father," p. 122.
- "Marrying Absurd," p. 145.
Even fiction may be
written for the purpose of persuasion. Like the writer of
"Arm Wrestling with my
Father," novelist Charles Dickens was concerned
about preserving the quality
of childhood and the family. He feared that England's schools
were turning children out to
be cogs in the mills, when they needed to remain
children with a bit of magic
in their lives. He wrote Hard Times (1854) to show
the folly of these schools,
based upon a strictly "Utilitarian" philosophy. In the novel,
Dickens shows that the
calculating and cold young Bitzer is the result of such
an education. Dickens used
both cause and effect and persuasion in this novel.
Our class webpage has a
short chapter, Ch. 1, of this novel:
To look at fiction from a rhetorical
perspective, just ask:
- Who? Wrote this and in what era? (Context of writing)
- Why? What question did this attempt to answer?
- For whom? Who was the audience?