Transcript Using Rhetorical Grammar in the English 90 Classroom

Using Rhetorical Grammar in
the English 90 Classroom
RHETORICAL GRAMMAR
Keeping audience, purpose, and topic
central to one’s choices about sentence
structure, punctuation, vocabulary, etc.
 Understanding the grammatical choices
available to you and the rhetorical effects
your choices may have on your reader.

Different rhetorical situations demand
different language choices.
 Use your knowledge of sentence
structure consciously to affect your
reader
 Make grammatical choices with your
reader in mind.

Laura R. Micciche
“Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar”
Rhetorical grammar “presents students
with a framework and a vocabulary for
examining how language affects and
infects social reality, as it also provides
them with tools for creating effective
discourse.”
In teaching grammar, we also teach critical
thinking


“The ability to develop sentences and form paragraphs
that serve a particular purpose requires a conceptual
ability to envision relationships between ideas.”
“The grammatical choices we make – including
pronoun use, active or passive verb constructions, and
sentence patterns – represent relations between
writers and the world they live in.”
How does rhetorical grammar help
students?
Rhetorical grammar instruction
“encourages students to experiment with
language and then to reflect on the
interaction between content and
grammatical form”
 Students learn the rules of the
grammatical concepts, but through
analysis and imitation of written material,
students learn how a given grammatical
concept creates and/or alters meaning.

HOW TO USE THIS IN THE
CLASSROOM
Micciche’s application:
1. Throughout the semester, students record passages
of their own choosing from fiction, but also from any
non-fiction source – collection letters, websites,
computer manuals, textbooks, etc.
2. For each passage, student analyzes “how grammar
and content work together to convey meaning.”
Students analyze how the grammar in the passage
affects their intellectual and emotional understanding
of the piece.
3. Student thinks up other situations in which this type of
construction might be used effectively.
4. Student then creates a new passage,
using the copied passage as a
syntactical template. The student creates
new content, depending on the new
situation they’d use it for.
Mimic the writer’s syntax, in order to
mimic the writer’s rhetorical impact on
the reader.
PURPOSE
Gets students to stick to a text in order to
“reveal the technical processes that
make it work.”
 Gets students to “dig around in the
writing of others and really think about
what makes it tick.”
 Encourages students to see that “writing
is made and that grammar has a role in
that production.”

Suggested Application in English
90
1.Initially, the instructor provides passages
from fiction and non-fiction. These
passages include sentences written
using the grammatical construction we
are teaching at that time (noun phrase
appositives, sentence combining
showing comparison).
In other words, we provide meaningful
models of published work that uses the
grammar we are asking them to
incorporate.

The challenge here will be finding
interesting writing passages that include
grammatical concepts we’re teaching.
2. For each passage, student analyzes
“how grammar and content work
together to convey meaning.” Students
analyze how the grammar in the
passage affects their intellectual and
emotional understanding of the piece.
3. Student thinks up other situations in
which this type of construction might be
used effectively.
4. Student then creates a new passage,
using the copied passage as a
syntactical template. The student creates
new content, depending on the new
situation they’d use it for.
Mimic the writer’s syntax, in order to
mimic the writer’s rhetorical impact on
the reader.
5. As an extension of this practice,
students THEN find their own passages
that use grammatical concepts they are
learning (perhaps in an independent
journal for the class?), and repeat the
same process.