Imitation exercises are one of my favorite ways to teach students sophisticated writing. In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s powerful rhetoric, I pulled five incredible quotes from his speeches and writings and created sentence frames that students could use with their own content. If you'd like this in handout form, I included this … Continue reading Five Sentence Structures Every Student Should Adapt From Martin Luther King, Jr.
Essential Tools for Teaching Rhetoric: Logos
What are the essential tools for teaching rhetoric and rhetorical analysis? This blog series will explore one tool each week. Logos Logos: it's "the principle of reason and judgment," according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Our current understanding of logos in rhetoric is actually linked with Jungian psychology (the same Jungian psychology that gives us … Continue reading Essential Tools for Teaching Rhetoric: Logos
Essential Tools for Teaching Rhetoric: Ethos
What are the essential tools for teaching rhetoric and rhetorical analysis? This blog series will explore one tool each week. Ethos As we established in last week's post about rhetorical appeals, ethos is an appeal to personality or character. Aristotle conceptualized ethos as morality, expertise, and knowledge. A speaker's ethos might rely on virtue and goodness, … Continue reading Essential Tools for Teaching Rhetoric: Ethos
How Assertion Journals Can Inspire and Challenge Your Students
They're analytical. They're argumentative. They're intriguing. They're bite-sized. Assertion journals are hands-down my favorite way to teach and assess writing. Here's how they work: Students are given an assertion, usually in the form of a pithy quotation. How much context you want to give your students is totally up to you. I just project the assertion … Continue reading How Assertion Journals Can Inspire and Challenge Your Students
Trash It or Stash It?
Giggles in the back corner. Whispers in the middle. A shifty glance. Knowing nods in the front. No, my students are not plotting to mutiny (not today, at least). "TRASH IT!" They chorus. A sticky note gets crumpled and tossed in the recycling bin on my desk. A few students scribble frantically in their notes. … Continue reading Trash It or Stash It?
Get Out of the Kiddie Pool!
This was the mantra repeated by a presenter at one of the first AP conferences I attended. We were examining methods to break students out of shallow analysis. The past few years of teaching AP Lang have convinced me that teaching students to write really comes down to three things: thesis statements, organization, and support. … Continue reading Get Out of the Kiddie Pool!
How to Teach Analysis Like a Boss
In my last post, I made a case against the five paragraph essay as an appropriate analytical structure for high school students. The closed thesis, redundancy, and built-in limitations to critical thinking ultimately hold students back from their best work. If not the five-paragraph essay, then what? I'm going to take you on a tour … Continue reading How to Teach Analysis Like a Boss