Readings On Argumentation

"The thirty essays in this book, drawn from the scholarly literature, represent major traditional and contemporary scholarship on argument. The essays display the evolution and widening scope of the scholarship in recent decades, as well as tensions among traditional and recent views and emphases. They reflect an array of scholarly perspectives on the values, rules, and conceptual structures that people bring to public deliberation-and that affect how they achieve agreement. The essays also examine argument in various contexts and spheres, with a particular focus on it as a vital, productive means for people to negotiate differences through discussion, especially in a diverse, democratic society."--pub. desc.

Countering the current climate of "fake news" and "alternative facts," Methods of Argument: An Anthology of Readings showcases well-reasoned and well-supported arguments. The anthology's selections model an array of critical-thinking and writing techniques, covering both simple single-point and complex multi-point arguments.

Evenly divided between practical instruction and exemplary readings, this textbook thoroughly explains what arguments are, why they are important, how to tell good arguments from bad, and how to construct and present original arguments. The readings include philosophical, journalistic, social scientific, and political pieces concerned with lying, witch hunts, love, risk, beauty, and families. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

"This best-selling combination rhetoric and thematically organized reader shows students how to analyze all kinds of arguments, not just essays and editorials, but clothes, smartphone apps, ads, and Web site designs, and then how to use what they learn to write their own effective arguments. Newly streamlined and featuring e-Pages that take argument online, its signature engaging, informal, and jargon-free instruction emphasizes cultural currency, humor, and visual argument."--Back cover.

"Essential Readings on Argumentation offers a compendium of key primary works related to the study of argument. Tracing the expositions on argument from Ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, and an examination of contemporary thought on argument, Essential Readings on Argumentation explores the main thinkers and ideas behind the classical discipline of argument."

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.

For courses in Argument. A refreshing approach to composition, Argument Today prepares students to communicate persuasively and collaboratively in academic, career, and other real life settings. This text equips students to create effective academic papers as well as persuasive compositions in many genres and media relevant in and beyond higher education. Such breadth of applicability is further effected by presenting argument also as a generative form of communication-an ongoing conversation employed by teams or groups of people to share information, formulate new ideas, modify plans, negotiate agreements, and build consensus. Systematically explored throughout, this expanded perspective opens students to the immediate relevance of argument to their multi-faceted lives.