This ancillary offers a range of perspectives, from Aristotle to the present day, on argument and on teaching argument. The 28 readings — many of them classic works in the field present essential insights and practical information for instructors using any of Bedford/St. Martin’s argument texts and readers.

Forming effective arguments is essential to students′ success in academics and in life. This book′s engaging lessons offer an innovative approach to teaching this critical and transferable skill.

Offers teaching strategies and resources to instruct sixth- through twelfth-graders on how to prepare and write strong arguments and evaluate the arguments of others, providing step-by-step guidance on arguments of fact, judgment, and policy, and including advice to help students understand how judgments get made in the real world, how to develop and support criteria for an argument, and related topics.

If you want to learn how to shoot a basketball, you begin by carefully observing someone who knows how to shoot a basketball. If you want to be a writer, you begin by carefully observing the work of accomplished writers. Recognizing the importance that modeling plays in the learning process, high school English teacher Kelly Gallagher shares how he gets his students to stand next to and pay close attention to model writers, and how doing so elevates his students' writing abilities. Write Like This is built around a central premise: if students are to grow as writers, they need to read good writing, they need to study good writing, and, most important, they need to emulate good writers. In Write Like This, Kelly emphasizes real-world writing purposes, the kind of writing he wants his students to be doing twenty years from now. Each chapter focuses on a specific discourse: express and reflect, inform and explain, evaluate and judge, inquire and explore, analyze and interpret, and take a stand/propose a solution. In teaching these lessons, Kelly provides mentor texts (professional samples as well as models he has written in front of his students), student writing samples, and numerous assignments and strategies proven to elevate student writing. By helping teachers bring effective modeling practices into their classrooms, Write Like This enables students to become better adolescent writers. More important, the practices found in this book will help our students develop the writing skills they will need to become adult writers in the real world.

In Writing Rhetorically: Fostering Responsive Thinkers and Communicators, author Jennifer Fletcher aims to cultivate independent learners through rhetorical thinking. She provides teachers with strategies and frameworks for writing instruction that can be applied across multiple subjects and lesson plans. Students learn to discover their own questions, design their own inquiry process, develop their own positions and purposes, make their own choices about content and form, and contribute to conversations that matter to them. Inside this book, Fletcher helps remove some of the scaffolding and explains how to put in practice some methods which can successfully foster: Inquiry, Invention, and Rhetorical Thinking Writing for Transfer Paraphrasing, Summary, Synthesis, and Citation Skills Research Skills and Processes Evidence-Based Reasoning Rhetorical Decision Making Rhetorical decision making helps students develop the skills, knowledge, and mindsets needed for transfer of learning: the ability to adapt and apply learning in new settings. The more choices students make as writers, the better prepared they are to analyze and respond to diverse rhetorical situations. Writing Rhetorically shows teachers what it looks like to dig into real texts with students and novice writers and how it develops them for lifelong learning.

The argument builder will train you to build compelling and persuasive arguments, through a blend of logic and rhetoric. You will first study the logical structure of good, clear arguments. Then, you will study how to use the various elements of argumentation, such as examples, analogy, comparison, testimony, and statistics, combining them to construct your own sound and effective arguments. You will also learn about the fallacies often committed when using these elements and how to avoid them in your own arguments.

A large part of our everyday communication involves argumentation and reasoning--for example, when we want to persuade others, make good purchasing decisions, or analyze the messages we receive from advertisers and politicians. But how well do we prepare students for these tasks? Can they critically evaluate a speaker's point of view? Understand rhetorical devices? Apply logic? Build an effective argument, whether written or spoken? In his new book, Good Thinking, Erik Palmer shows teachers of all subject matters how to transform the activities they already use into openings for improving student thinking. Building on his previous work in Well Spoken (Stenhouse, 2011) and Digitally Speaking (Stenhouse, 2014), he reveals how all students, not just those in advanced classes, can begin developing sophisticated reasoning skills that will improve their oral and written communications. Blending theory with practice, Palmer shares a wide range of classroom-tested lessons, including ways to understand argument in paintings and images, address ad hominem attacks using a traveling debate, create a class comedy club, write syllogisms, analyze character and plot development, and teach logic through a class Booger Patrol. He explains complex concepts in simple, practical language that gives teachers a deft understanding of the principles of good arguments, proper use of evidence, persuasive techniques, and rhetorical tricks. "Once you start looking, you'll see arguments everywhere," Palmer writes. "All of them are opportunities to teach good thinking."