Preface

Rhetoric and composition is a burgeoning field of study, constantly renewing itself. As its influence expands, the theories that inform its philosophies and practices multiply and, often, diverge. The philosophy that drives What’s Your Point? is a practical synthesis of theory and practice: retain and improve strategies that in the past have helped students use words to express their ideas, even as we incorporate and invent new strategies that result from reinvigorated thinking about the discipline.

Many instructors will recognize the organizing principle for this textbook. We begin with familiar and accessible genres of writing—narration and description—and graduate to increasingly difficult genres—analysis and argument. We have retained this taxonomy because the logic of progressing from personal experience to civic engagement is self-evident.

An improvement we have made to traditional composition pedagogy is a clarification of the genre traditionally called “exposition.” The word means “explanation,” but too often, in their attempts to explain things, students end up describing them. A cause-effect explanation, for example, is descriptive if the cause or effect already is known. Instead of asking students to “explain” something, we use the word “analyze,” and we define analysis as more than breaking down a subject into its component parts. To analyze, one must engage in inductive thinking and draw an inference about how the parts contribute to the whole. If some theorizing or guesswork is not involved, there is no analysis. Our theory is that there are essentially three purposes for analysis: evaluation, interpretation, and speculation about causes and effects. When we analyze, we are doing one or more of these tasks, no matter what we are analyzing. That is why this textbook does not offer a separate chapter on writing about literature: the principles of analyzing literature are the same as those for analyzing an artwork, a dream, a speech, a set of statistics, or a natural phenomenon.

We also retain many classical theories—the five canons of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery), for instance. In the past century, composition textbooks have tended to lop off the final two canons, as they have more to do with spoken rather than written language. This textbook, however, realizes a renewed interest in delivery because new presentation technologies have opened the door to a world of possibilities for delivery of discourse.

We stand behind Aristotle’s recommended arrangement of an argument—announce the subject, explain the issue, state the points you will raise, develop each of your reasons, refute the counterarguments, and sum things up—and we do not find this strategy for argumentation at all tired. Students, we find, are reassured when they are shown a form, as it gives them a place to begin organizing their thoughts. Forms are constricting only when they are followed slavishly, but as signs and guideposts, they are invaluable. Without offering students a form to begin organizing their material, we set them adrift until they discover form on their own, which is often well after the semester has ended.

Another established pedagogy we advocate—indeed, it is the main emphasis of this textbook—is that the writer should be able to state a thesis. Obviously, we must not encourage students to rush to an opinion and defend it to the hilt rather than dwell for a while in the muck of uncertainty, engage in dialogue, conduct inquiries, and test theses before committing to them. While we endorse slowing down the process and discouraging the premature espousing of a thesis, we also believe that the ability to state a supportable thesis signifies clear and sophisticated thinking. Students trained in the art of formulating a thoughtful, accurate, and specific thesis have been prepared to meet the expectations of their college professors or their supervisors and colleagues after college.

Having stated a thesis, students are often told to support it with reasons, but they are seldom given specific instructions on how to do that. Consequently, their potentially persuasive essays lose focus. Our textbook shows students how to take the crucial step toward validating their opinions by means of a “proof question,” which, when articulated, clarifies for students what supporting points they need to make to prove their theses. When students understand and apply this method, their ability to think and write in the more challenging modes of analysis and argument improves appreciably.

We encourage students to proceed through the stages of inventing, planning, drafting, revising, and editing—organizing principles that reflect what we do naturally. Indeed, the process of writing is organic, dynamic, and recursive. When we write, we move back and forth among the stages. Some parts of our draft are ready for editing while other parts remain in the invention stage. Sometimes in the revision stage, we realize a new insight and must devise a new plan for incorporating it. Still, having a writing process, however messy and nonlinear, is more efficient than not having one, and students welcome any guidance in breaking down the task of writing into small, manageable bits. Like form and thesis, process is a natural ally in composing an essay.

A newer responsibility for composition instructors encompasses the skills of digital literacy. Clearly digital media and the Internet are transforming how students learn, socialize, and participate in civic life. It is, in fact, difficult to overstate digital media’s impact on and potential for transforming education. Today’s students are capable of tapping into global news and information instantaneously, entirely outside of the classroom, via the web and social networking. Universities are undergoing seismic changes as a result of web-based venues, such as iTunes U, YouTube, Teaching Company, Great Courses, Electronic Literature Organization, Institute for the Future of the Book, Project Gutenberg, Instructables, and so on—a rich menu of easily accessible, high-quality, low-cost, and even free web-based instructional materials. This textbook acknowledges that the time to confront the learning revolution is now.

In What’s Your Point? students are shown, not just through verbal instruction but also through videos and electronic presentations, how to access information in electronic databases, evaluate websites, recognize video hoaxes, read and create graphs and charts, conduct electronic surveys, and evaluate and create advertising campaigns. Readings are enhanced with videos, sound recordings, and links to relevant websites. Students are shown, not just told, how to conduct interviews and create effective oral and electronic presentations.

Instructors will find exercises and assignments for making use of online resources in a variety of disciplines and classroom settings. For example, students might develop educational mashups to combine a writing assignment with a civic engagement project or an education-advocacy project. Students are encouraged to create multimodal presentations; for example, a proposal to increase people’s awareness of the proliferation and impact of nuclear weapons might combine writing a proposal with Google Maps and DeviantArt photos. Students might create a public Instructables document on sustainability as an alternative to writing a paper. Students might search or create wikis containing collaboratively built content or create a blog as a discussion forum.

The idea is to revitalize subject matter in both troubling and hopeful times, and to keep an open mind about pedagogies and views on how composition should be approached and taught. When we factor in technological changes, the new ways in which students glean information, and issues of global urgency, no wonder the community of writers ponders how to communicate clearly and with originality. A clear understanding of one’s purpose and how to approach, structure, and develop a sharply focused essay that makes a point allows students to smooth out the rough accounts of experience and research and convert them into polished pearls that can be understood by the world community.

When you write, you bring to bear your richest experiences and influential learning to communicate personal narratives, vigorous descriptions, critical analyses, and balanced arguments. You can verbalize your ideas and, when you do it well, influence your listeners. But your most serious and sophisticated ideas, the ones you hope will endure beyond the spoken moment, you commit to writing—crafting the exact word, lucid sentence, unified paragraph, and enduring essay.

Writing persuasively is difficult, and the subtler the idea the greater the difficulty. As you write, however, ideas come into focus. Writing becomes the means of sparking ideas and then clarifying and sharpening them. What’s Your Point? is written to assist you in seeing your important ideas understood and appreciated, encouraging you to ask, as you think and write, “What’s my point?”

Of course, stating a point, or a thesis, with clarity is not the only objective in persuasive writing. You must provide evidence that the thesis has validity, formulating words and sentences that your readers will understand and find engaging. The point of What’s Your Point? is not to encourage you to play it safe but to challenge, provoke, venture, and, most importantly, communicate with your readers through your stories, observations, analyses, and arguments.

What’s Your Point? is interactive. You can move around in the text; search for keywords; navigate between concepts and chapters; scale images; add and view notes; and highlight, bookmark, and participate actively in the book. You can make it your own.

The chapters in What’s Your Point? correspond with each other. They are consistent in the way they present planning, drafting, revising, and editing instruction, model student essays, professionally written essays, concept checks, peer reviews, writing assignments, and checklists to ensure that you feel confident before moving on to the next step.

By the way, if any of the videos in this book do not play for you, try installing a current version of Adobe Flash, or try using Chrome as your browser.

Chapter 1 “Strategies for Making Your Point” lays the groundwork by discussing tactics pertinent to all persuasive writing, beginning with the thesis, which may be either explicit and strategically positioned or implicit but real nonetheless. The chapter also explains the interplay of rhetorical elements—the writer, reader, and subject—and how they influence each other in rhetorical situations. Generating ideas, gathering and evaluating evidence, and exercising logic—skills needed in every rhetorical situation—are discussed, as is choosing a suitable structure for your writing. The chapter examines the qualities of unity, development, organization, and coherence in paragraphs as well as how to support your thesis with evidence that is accurate, specific, relevant, and sufficient. A section on style and tone gives advice on establishing rapport with readers and appealing to their aesthetic sense. Finally, the chapter gives advice on gathering feedback from peers—classmates and colleagues—to improve your communication skills.

Chapter 2 “Reading Critically” features a remarkable essay by David Foster Wallace titled “Consider the Lobster.” The essay serves as a vehicle for interacting with the text and studying ways in which a sophisticated essay advances ideas. The chapter will help you to read for an essay’s main point, draw inferences, identify logical fallacies, and detect bias. In this chapter you also will encounter instruction on reading images critically and on assessing websites.

Chapter 3 “Writing Life Stories” focuses on the special characteristics that make writing a story more than the recounting of a personal experience. The narrative employs devices and techniques: conflict, plot, point of view, characters, dialogue, setting, theme, sensory images, and figurative language. The chapter takes you through the planning, drafting, revising, and editing stages, while offering intriguing model memoirs written by both students and professional story tellers such as humorist David Sedaris and Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. If you are assigned to write a memoir, a literacy narrative, or a rhetorical awareness narrative, you can depend on this chapter to help you write a focused, well-developed story that carries importance for your reader as well as for yourself.

Chapter 4 “Writing Observations” acknowledges the prevalence of description and its importance in all writing modes. This book, for example, is largely descriptive, objectively imparting information about the complex business of writing. However, a descriptive essay is more than a collection of objective facts and details. It focuses on a dominant impression and explores the subject’s essential nature using sensory images and specific details. You will be guided through planning your essay, developing a descriptive thesis, and choosing an organizational pattern that suits your story. Students relate their observations of subjects (like a child’s T-ball game), and professional writers, such as comedian George Carlin (who entertains with a comparison of baseball and football), demonstrate how the the principles of description advance and illustrate an idea.

Chapter 5 “Writing Reviews” teaches how to entertain readers while helping them make an informed decision about a product, service, or event. In addition to the enjoyment of testing a new product or experiencing the cultural riches your community has to offer—plays, films, exhibitions, concerts, festivals, or restaurants, for example—reviews are fun to write because they employ an informal style. You will discover how to develop a controlling idea in your introduction; state a thesis; and support it with criteria that are fair, logical, relevant, and specific. You will choose an organizational pattern that is right for your review. Topic suggestions are plentiful. Reviews of events, such as a theatrical performance of The Taming of the Shrew set in 1950s Miami, and products, like an IQ test for dogs, Guitar Hero, and space cuisine (yes, food for astronauts), demonstrate the principles and processes of writing lively and informative reviews.

Chapter 6 “Writing Interpretations” explains how to examine something, such as a poem, a painting, a dream, or a natural phenomenon, and discover how its parts contribute to the meaning of the whole. You will be guided through the planning, drafting, revising, and editing stages of your interpretive essay. The chapter offers a variety of essays by students who have interpreted subjects like a political cartoon on gay marriage and paintings by Botticelli and Manet. The chapter also offers interpretations by professional writers—such as psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of dreams and anthropologist Mary Leakey’s interpretation of ancient, fossilized footprints—to demonstrate the wide variety of topics subject to interpretation.

Chapter 7 “Writing about Causes and Effects” discusses writing about causes and effects as an act of analysis. In this type of analysis, one derives a theory about what causes people to make certain choices or to take certain actions. One theorizes about the effects of inventions, artistic choices, political decisions, or how one thing affects another. Besides guiding you through the planning, drafting, revising, and editing stages of crafting your cause-effect essay, you will encounter essays written by students on subjects such as the appeal of the comedian Charlie Chaplin and the music of Joni Mitchell, as well as essays written by professionals like Stephen Jay Gould, who wonders why Mickey Mouse looks so much younger than he did back in the 1920s when he was created; Abigail Tucker, who wonders what caused a plethora of cats on the Internet; or Daniel Ellsberg, who examines the effects of groupthink on bureaucrats.

Chapter 8 “Writing Arguments” begins with a celebration of the freedom to argue in democratic societies and encouragement to engage in civic discourse. The chapter discusses the classical rhetoric system and rhetorical appeals handed down to us from the ancient Greeks. You will learn four strategies of persuasion—kairos, ethos, pathos, and logos—and how claims of truth and claims of policy are supported. The chapter explains how to persuade readers by anticipating and refuting the opposition’s strongest arguments. The chapter offers essays by students on topics such as the ethics of declawing cats and legalizing steroids in professional sports. The chapter also features professionally written essays on topics ranging from whether Pete Rose should be allowed into the Baseball Hall of Fame to whether pregnant women should be prosecuted for not following their doctors’ orders.

Chapter 9 “Writing Proposals” discusses the proposal as an argument for change. You will be guided through choosing a topic, posing a focus question, pitching a solution, gathering evidence, developing a thesis, anticipating counterarguments, designing points of proof, and thinking through the proposal. The chapter offers proposals by both students and professionals looking to change things such as dormitory meal plans and methods of teaching grammar. Professional writers are proposing free college tuition, a new way to challenge the Dakota Access Pipeline, the restoration of Glen Canyon in Utah, and an obesity tax (facetiously). The chapter also covers designing visual, oral, and electronic proposals.

Chapter 10 “Writing Research Papers” takes a detailed look at composing the research paper, including conducting primary research (searching archives, interviewing, surveying, and observing) and secondary research (finding books and periodical articles). You will be guided through taking notes, paraphrasing, summarizing, quoting, and documenting sources to avoid plagiarism. In addition, there is a section on visualizing data with graphs, diagrams, and charts. The chapter offers model research papers in three modes of discourse: description, analysis, and argument. Student research papers modeled in the chapter are on the subjects of the legacy of immigrant labor activist Cesar Chavez, the psychological motivations of the characters in the animated feature film The Brave Little Toaster, and the ethics of clinical AIDS drug trials in Africa.

Chapter A “Appendix A: Applying Critical Theories” defines and exemplifies sixteen critical theories—systems for analyzing works of art and literature—from archetypal criticism to structuralist criticism. Each of the theories is accompanied by a Concept Check that encourages you to test your understanding of the theory by applying it to an essay, exercise, or concept discussed in a chapter of What’s Your Point?

Chapter B “Appendix B: Documenting Sources” is a complete handbook on documenting sources in three styles: Modern Language Association (MLA), American Psychological Association (APA), and Chicago Manual of Style (CMS).

Chapter C “Appendix C: Writing with Style” offers grammar instruction and examples of proper use in the English language. The chapter defines and explains parts of speech, sentence parts, word choices, sentence structures, punctuation, and mechanics. A glossary of correct usage defines words that are often confused or misused and offers helpful examples.

We may never approach a writing assignment with the same zeal with which we approach a trip to the Galapagos to see the blue-footed booby or giant tortoise, but we might think of drafting and redrafting as mental traveling and finally arriving somewhere with, as historian Barbara Tuchman puts it, “a sense of excitement, almost of rapture, a moment on Olympus.” Welcome to the inquiry, invention, and supreme adventure of writing, for yourself and for others.