Teaching Strategies
Essential Questions
Who is the speaker and how do they establish ethos?
What is the speaker’s intent?
Who is the intended audience?
What is the rhetorical situation?
How does an author use rhetorical devices to communicate characters’ point of view?
How do the form and content of the message interrelate?
How can you effectively use rhetoric to challenge current thought and bring positive change to the world?
How do we interpret, evaluate and analyze content in our world to discover our own thoughts and opinions?
Annotating
Learning to annotate text in a careful and deliberative manner is perhaps the most essential skill I will impart to my students, as these notes will inform their writing, thinking and conversations. “Reading Rhetorically” is a text that provides strategies for reading critically to support writing and conversation about a text with a focus on determining the audience, purpose and genre. Educators are incessantly asking students to analyze a text, but what does that really mean? Analysis means that an understanding of the rhetorical strategies used by the author is evident and that they are evaluated in light of the author’s purpose; it is a marriage of both the ideas explicit and implicit in the text and your opinions about those ideas. “On the one hand, you will be expected to represent what the text said accurately and fairly. On the other hand, you will be expected to offer your own analysis, interpretation, or critique in a way that enables readers to see the text differently.”14
The initial read-through of a piece of text should be active, involving students noticing and circling organizational signal words such as however, therefore, or likewise. Additionally, students will put a question mark next to words, terms or references they are unfamiliar with, and return to them after the initial reading. Bracketing ideas that seem difficult of confusing will also allow students to continue reading through their confusion and later pose questions or determine whether the passage is more clear once they have completed the reading. As students are completing this initial read, they should annotate the text by highlighting main ideas and evidence that supports the writer’s assertions, draw arrows to significant word choices and otherwise note questions, objections, and connections. Once they have reviewed their questions, looked up vocabulary, analyzed the impact of specific word choice, and discussed the reading with their peers, the second reading should occur. This is the point at which I ask them to engage in descriptive outlining. On the left margin they will write a note for each segment that addresses what is said--a summary of the content--and on the right what is done, a statement of how that segment interacts with the whole, usually preceded by words such as describe, explain, or argue.15 This strategy will be useful for students to practice close reading skills, but will be predominantly used with the “Logos, Ethos, Pathos: Three Ways to Persuade” article and the sample personal essays, such as Joseph Epstein’s "The Divine Miss H, Revisited” and Horace Miner’s “Body Rituals Among the Nacirema”, which students will review prior to writing their final product
They Say I Say
Developing students who are able to speak clearly and effectively to communicate an idea is incumbent upon educators. The authors of They Say I Say have created an approach to classroom conversations that is rooted in the idea that they are not merely preparing to discuss the author’s argument, but also the arguments it is responding to. Students become active and critical readers as they seek to parse out “not only what the author thinks, but how what the author thinks fits with what others think, and ultimately with what you yourself think.”16 In order to help students learn how to express their ideas, this strategy offers sentence frames to help them utilize appropriate academic language that focuses on ideas. The frames can be categorized into groups such as those that capture authorial action, such as “X demonstrates that _____” or “X urges us to ______.” Disagreeing, with reasons, might lead to the use of the frame: “X’s claim that _____ rests upon the questionable assumption that _____.” Agreeing with qualifications could be aided by the use of the frame: “I agree that ______, a point that needs emphasizing since so many people believe _____.” Agreeing and disagreeing simultaneously could be expressed through the frame: “Though I concede that _____, I still insist that _____.”17
SOAPSTone
This acronym (Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Subject and Tone) is intended to help students consider and evaluate an argument through a series of questions. Students will ask themselves, who is the speaker and what personae they have created, with a focus on ethos. Next, the occasion can be understood in terms of time, place, context and background information. Audience necessitates consideration of the intended audience, which may only be a segment of the population with access to the rhetoric, as well as the three rhetorical appeals utilized. Purpose is the implicit or explicit intention of the speaker. The worldview, assumptions and philosophies that inform the subject of the text must be carefully considered. Tone requires students to consider the attitude of the speaker towards the subject and perhaps even the audience.
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