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Argument PersuasionUnited States writing teachers (except those whose scholarship and field are rhetoric) tend to use the term “persuasive” more often than “argumentative” when discussing this particular form of writing. There has not been a recent renewal of interest in classical argumentation for the writing classroom (although there have been some great collections like “Teaching Argument in the Composition Classroom”). There has not been, of course, in the United States the change in national curricular standards to foster such a renewed interest, as seen in France. Teaching persuasion strategies is part of the high school curriculum in many states and part of some college first-year writing programs as well. The persuasion essay, for example, has kept its status as a central form of school writing over the years. “Expository writing” class, often essentialized into a course in persuasion, remains key for college-bound students in many situations, although the way it is taught is far from uniform. A division between persuasion and narration is well established in secondary school: each form has its own rules and values, its own development, with the underlying belief that it is easier to write-narrate than to write-argue/persuade (we see this belief in France as well). The key to United States school versions of argumentative or persuasive writing is that students are taught systematically to put their thesis statements up front (see, in this glossary, “thesis”). The very nature of a persuasive essay is thus deductive and not deliberative, although students are encouraged in earlier drafts to be deliberative, to “discover” their stance. The idea of “audience” took a central role in US composition instruction early on. If in France the role of the audience is mentioned but rarely fully developed, in the United States any teaching of persuasive writing (and often even of writing in general) focuses on detailed analysis of the recipient of the text the student is writing. These analyses highlight the needs, the knowledge and the beliefs of the recipient as imagined (or researched) by the student writer, who is then to construct his or her text in response to these perceptions. The argumentative structure of the enthymeme is at the heart of this strategy, but the reductive (even caricatural) version taught is more like marketing than global awareness of the eventual reception of an essay. In this model, the student writer is supposed to be demonstrating a superior degree of maturity because he is able to take into account his audience. Certain composition theorists have wondered, however, whether the student who moves from writer-focused to reader-focused prose is actually making progress. The phenomenon of rhetoric reduced to simple manipulation is, of course, not unique to the United States. But in France, the influence of new rhetoric helped to balance the discussion, while in the United States the new rhetoricians had little influence on composition instruction, other than with S. Toulmin’s work. In both cases, however, we are not seeing student essays constructed for Perelman’s universal reader, nor for an entirely individual reader. Pedagogical perspectives on teaching argument are often pedagogies of situational or expressive issues related to the student subject’s relationship with the theme in question. This means that these perspectives often connect to an explicit use of “I” or to the introduction of a student’s experience or point of view into the text. |