The Edge

Response — Rhetorics (September 16)

Okay, now for something I really like about two pieces.  Both Booth and Hocks provide me with a nice framework to give students to use to analyze different kinds of texts.  Especially given that I’m new to the lexicon of rhetorical pedagogy, and to the idea of analyzing and creating multimodal texts, I am relieved that I don’t necessarily have to re-invent the wheel.

And now for something out of left field:  should FYC students be exposed to texts like Booth’s, Berlin’s, Hocks’, and Halbritter’s?  In other words, how valuable is it to actually give students the work of the scholars from which we borrow?  Enough to do it, and risk showing them the inside of our bag of tricks?  I say yes–doing so would reinforce the idea that the person at the front of the clasroom actually has done WORK to become the expert he or she has been anointed to be.  (It would in fact simply remove some of that work from its hiding place in our bookbags.)

Responses to this idea are welcome.  (I should note that more than one custom composition textbook I’ve reviewed this semester uses material from English Studies scholars; Gerald Graff’s “Why Johnny Can’t Argue” is a favorite chapter in many such texts.)