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April 12, 2005
Teaching argument
In yesterday's faculty meeting we were talking about possible upper-division courses in Writing. One of the things we touched on was a course in argument and argumentation. Such courses, taught from the perspective of New Rhetoric, were for a while a staple of UD writing curricula (on the occasions when such curricula had anything but a course called "Advanced Composition").
I'll be teaching a junior-level course this fall in researched argument, and while I never quite synched with New Rhetoric, I do think that argument is a valuable staple of a writing curriculum—both the reception and production of argument. In yesterday's faculty discussion I touched on this but didn't (ironically) argue passionately about it; I really felt I needed to think about it more, think about why I think the study of argument is important still/today.
I think it's maybe more "today" than "still." Perhaps I'm doing nothing more than echoing George Orwell's concern for the operation of propaganda. I think it goes beyond that, though—or maybe it's that the concerns that fueled Orwell are intensified in the environment of new media, where images, ideas, data move faster than ever before. (And so I suppose I'm also echoing Henry Adams' concern, from a century ago, about the ever-increasing speed of information.)
And it's definitely political. As I read posts such as this one from Poor Man, I'm struck by how important it is that readers, writers, and citizens ask, predictably and consistently, about the evidence for claims. And that's one important value of having an argument course in one's upper-level writing curriculum, beyond the argument that's taught in the intro course.
Posted by senioritis at April 12, 2005 09:22 AM