Understanding Rhetoric: A Guide to Critical Reading and Argumentation

Understanding Rhetoric: A Guide to Critical Reading and Argumentation is a composition textbook that outlines three essential skills - rhetoric, argument, and source-based writing - geared towards newcomers and advanced students alike. Though comprehensive in its coverage, the book's focus is a simple one: how to move beyond a "gut reaction" while reading to an articulation of what is effective and what is not, while explicitly answering the most important question of "Why?" This text gets at this central concern in two fundamental ways.

First, the text teaches composition as a cumulative process, coaching you how to question, challenge, and expand on not just the readings you hold in your hands, but also how to interrogate the internal processes of writing and thinking. The book's blend of composition methods detail the cross-point of product and process to turn reading and writing from a matter of coming up with answers to questions to learning what type of questions need to be asked in the first place. The "right" questions, the text argues, are fundamentally rhetorical in nature.

Second, the content of the practice-based chapters is framed into a larger mesh of intellectual history to show how the writing and thinking you are doing today is continuous with a long history of writing instruction that goes back to the ancient world. This book provides equal representation from classical and contemporary theory with the recognition that theory cannot be fully grasped without practice, and practice cannot be fully understood without its theoretical antecedent. After all, you can't write "outside the box" until you know where the box is and what it looks like.

Author: Eamon M. Cunningham
Publisher: Brown Walker Press (FL)
Published: 01/01/2019
Pages: 470
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.37lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.95d
ISBN: 9781627347051

About the Author
Cunningham, Eamon M.: - Eamon Cunningham is the English Department Chair at Milford High School (Milford, MA) and a lecturer in the English department at Framingham State University (Framingham, MA). He is a featured author in the Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition series (Parlor Press) and has also published with The Journal of Teaching Writing, English Journal, and The Primer. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Amanda, and two sons, Liam and Kyle.

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