Writing Rhetorically
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.
Jennifer Fletcher is a Professor of English at California State University, Monterey Bay and a former high school English teacher. She teaches courses for first-year college students and future teachers and leads workshops on rhetorical literacy skills throughout the country. Her books include Teaching Arguments, Teaching Literature Rhetorically, and Writing Rhetorically.