Finding the ghost of Tom Joad

Do you see him?

If you don't, check out this New Yorker article on Pope Francis.

Civil Arguments and Their Claims

The following political cartoon can be found at the beginning of the chapter on Analyzing Arguments from The Language of Composition:

"Toles argues that the country is in danger of being devoured by 'crazed rhetoric'."

This political cartoon helps demonstrate the danger of engaging in arguments that divide and alienate instead of enlighten or accomodate.

1. We discussed the article by Amy Domini at the front of your new photo-copied packet, looking specifically at where she might have given way to accusation or blame or dismissal.

2. We discussed the first building block of a solid argument: A claim.

              We studied page 2 of your packets and completed the activity together, being sure that we                knew the difference between a claim statement and a topic statement.

               There are three types of claims: claims of fact, claims of value, and claims of policy

Students were assigned the rest of the packet as reading for the weekend.  Notes should be taken on the New York Times Editorial "Felons and the Right to Vote," following the directions given at the beginning of the piece (page 92).  Bring your annotations to class TUESDAY.

Tomorrow is our first 4 square debate.  Be sure to bring your Conversational Roundtable to class to use.

Political Cartoons

Cartoon Analysis LINK

Above I have linked a version of the worksheet that students worked on in class today.  IF YOU WERE ABSENT, use the three levels of questioning to help you analyze a political cartoon of your choice.  (You are welcome to look at the page to the right with political cartoons--I think there might be only two there right now though.)

I also introduced the Study Sync assignment.  Please send me a gmail or an edmodo message if you cannot log on tonight; I can access your account and send you your password or username if you are having trouble.  Remember to take notes on the Conversational Roundtable handout from today.

Monday: Intro to Argument

We started class by discussing the argument in this political cartoon, one of the types of visual texts we will be analyzing during this unit.

Then, we read the short introduction to Argument from Everything's an Argument and took notes on the graphic organizer I attached on Friday's post.

On the back side, I showed students a different definition of argument that refers to academic writing and draws a clear distinction between argument vs. persuasion.  Students took notes onto the four square. Here is the handout we took notes from:

Tonight the homework is to reflect on what you learned from reading the chapter and the difference between argument (which applied to the EA chapter is really the argument to convince) and persuasion.

Tomorrow---fallacies!