Readings about Rhetoric & Argumentation

Research is essential to argumentation. Before an argument can be made the author must understand what has been argued already and how they can expand upon existing arguments or remediate the argument for new audiences; this requires a thoughtful approach and, of course,  research. The chapters in this section offer different approaches to arguments and reasons that argument is important for research writing.

In “On the Other Hand: The Role of Antithetical Writing in First Year Composition Courses”, Steven Krause provides you with an alternate planning exercise: to explore the antithesis in your writing projects. His objective is to lead you to test the strength of your argument, which provides a way to generate content and strengthen an argument. This chapter provides strategies for developing counterargument and response.

Kate Warrington, Natasha Kovalyova, and Cindy King, in Assessing Source Credibility for Crafting a Well-Informed Argument, discuss how to use critical reading strategies to aid your selection of credible sources, highlighting how sources read throughout the semester are key to the process. The prompts they include will aid you in accessing how the use of persuasive techniques impact the credibility of a particular source.

Rebecca Jones’s discusses the usual blocks to ethical argumentation in Finding the Good Argument OR Why Bother With Logic? She offers three preferred argumentation models that provide theoretical and practical methods for recognizing and inventing good arguments: classical rhetoric, Toulmin, and pragma-dialectics.

Objectives targeted in the Readings about Rhetoric & Argumentation section are Reading, Rhetorical Knowledge, and Information Literacy. Although each chapter makes central reading processes (Reading), Chapter 32 explicitly addresses how information and evidence supports the development of arguments (Information Literacy). And, in Chapter 33, readers will learn about the importance of logic in structuring arguments in written and oral communication (Rhetorical Knowledge).