Warm-up:

1. Warm-up: Think about a time you had persuade someone that you had a good idea. What did you do or say to make your case? Or, has someone ever tried to persuade you of the same? Was he or she successful? What were the consequences?

2. Class Agenda • Warm-up • A few announcements • Rhetorical Strategy: Definition and Discussion (Transition from Summary to Analysis) • BREAK • Practical tips for revising Assignment 1.2 • Examples of identifying rhetorical strategy in student papers • Practice close-reading paragraph from Edmundson

3. Some Technical Details • Expect to receive your final Assignment 1.1 before Friday. • Please remember formatting instructions. They are on the website if you have forgotten. *If you email me, please let me know in your email what section you are in** • Use parenthetical citations in all assignments. • Note correct formatting for parenthetical citations: Edmundson writes that consumerism has created a university culture “tensely committed to a laid-back norm” (326). [period goes after parenthetical cite; within parentheses there is only a number, unless it isn’t obvious who author is in which case you would write, (Edmundson, 326). ] • Note correct punctuation for articles vs. books. Articles get “quotes” while books get italics. Mark Edmundson’s article “On the Uses of a Liberal Education” is punctuated differently than bell hooks’ book Teaching to Transgress.

4. Some effective summaries of argument: • In "On the Uses of a Liberal Education - As Lite Entertainment For Bored College Students," Mark Edmundson asserts that students and universities are plagued by a consumer culture that is counterproductive to helping students break out of their comfort zone and become passionate about their education • Mark Edmundson, in his essay “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students,” from the book Teacher: The One Who Made theDifferent (2003), claims that today consumerism has intruded into higher education in America. In order to cater to students, universities lower the standard to create less challenging environments, acting as no less than careful retailers.

5. What is “rhetorical strategy”? A rhetorical strategy is the means by which a writer uses words and language to persuade an audience or reader. It includes how the author makes himself an authority on his subject. A rhetorical strategy could include tone, style, the particular kinds of examples the author uses, or how he anticipates counter-arguments . How does the author lead the reader to share his assumptions?

6. More on Rhetorical Strategy • Rhetorical strategy exists at the level of the essay as a whole as well as at the level of the sentence. • What are some of the rhetorical strategies used by the authors we have read? (In rewriting 1.2, you might ask, does the passage I’ve chosen exemplify a typical strategy of the author, or is it a shift in strategy?) • Group analysis of Edmundson paragraph

7. Rhetorical Strategy in Edmundson • “astonishing frankness” • “categorizes students into types” • “tone casts a dark cloud over the entire student collective” • “draws on first-hand, personal experiences” • “writes from an elitist point of view”

8. From the start, the contemporary university's relationship with students has a solicitous, nearly servile tone. As soon as someone enters his junior year in high school, and especially if he's living in a prosperous zip code, the informational material -- the advertising -- comes flooding in. Pictures, testimonials, videocassettes, and CD ROMs (some bidden, some not) arrive at the door from colleges across the country, all trying to capture the student and his tuition cash. The freshman-to-be sees photos of well-appointed dorm rooms; of elaborate phys-ed facilities; of fine dining rooms; of expertly kept sports fields; of orchestras and drama troupes; of students working alone (no overbearing grown-ups in range), peering with high seriousness into computers and microscopes; or of students arrayed outdoors in attractive conversational garlands. Occasionally -- but only occasionally, for we usually photograph rather badly; in appearance we tend at best to be styleless -- there's a professor teaching a class. (The college catalogues I received, by my request only, in the late Sixties were austere affairs full of professors' credentials and course descriptions; it was clear on whose terms the enterprise was going to unfold.) A college financial officer recently put matters to me in concise, if slightly melodramatic, terms: "Colleges don't have admissions offices anymore, they have marketing departments." Is it surprising that someone who has been approached with photos and tapes, bells and whistles, might come in thinking that the Freud and Shakespeare she had signed up to study were also going to be agreeable treats?