Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy

The Critical Citizen's Guide to Argumentative Rhetoric, Brief Edition

Donald Lazere, Anne-Marie Womack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351689021
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This rhetoric-and-reader textbook teaches college students to develop critical reading, writing, and thinking skills for self-defense in the contentious arena of American civic rhetoric. This edition is substantially updated for an era of renewed tensions over race, gender, and economic inequality—all compounded by the escalating decibel level and polarization of public rhetoric.

Readings include civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander on "the new Jim Crow, " recent reconsiderations of socialism versus capitalism, Naomi Wolf's and Christine Hoff Sommers' opposing views on "the beauty myth, " a section on the rhetoric of war, and debates on identity politics, abortion, and student debt.

Designed for first-year or more advanced composition and critical thinking courses, the book trains students in a wealth of techniques to locate fallacies and other weaknesses in argumentation in their prose and the writings of others. Exercises also help students understand the ideological positions and rhetorical patterns that underlie opposing views, from Ann Coulter to Bernie Sanders. Widely debated issues of whether objectivity is possible and whether there is a liberal or conservative bias in news and entertainment media, as well as in education itself, are foregrounded as topics for rhetorical analysis.

Part I

Introduction

1

An Appeal to Students

Resolved that the National Council of Teachers of English

• promote pedagogy and scholarly curricula in English and related subjects that instruct students in civic and critical literacy, going beyond basic reading comprehension to the thinking skills that enable students to analyze and evaluate sophisticated persuasive techniques in all texts, genres, and types of media, current and yet to be imagined;

• support classroom practices that examine and question uses of language in order to discern inhumane, misinformative, or dishonest discourse and arguments.

—Resolution on English Education for Critical Literacy in Politics and Media, March 6, 2019

I believe in the development of a critical, skeptical, humorous habit of mind—in the development of a liberally educated consciousness, a sensitivity to nuances and unstated implications, an ability to read between the lines and to hear undertones and overtones—both for the sake of political and social enlightenment and for the sake of our personal enlightenment and pleasure as individuals… . I believe that the more sensitively we perceive things the more fully we can live and the less likely we are to be imposed on by advertisers, politicians and other Saviors.

—J. Mitchell Morse, The Irrelevant English Teacher

ENGLISH AS A SURVIVAL SKILL

This is a textbook emphasizing argumentative rhetoric and writing from sources. It is also a self-defense guide against manipulation by politicians, the media, teachers, and assorted propagandists. Though the media is filled every day with ads for toning our bodies, there are not many ads for toning our mental muscles or defending ourselves in argumentation. Isn’t it equally important to be able to fight back against those trying to take verbal and intellectual advantage of us?

In the twenty-first century, a bizarre feature of American public discourse has been a parade of best-selling nonfiction books with lurid titles like

• Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh),

• Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (Ann Coulter),

• How to Debate Liberals and Destroy Them (Ben Shapiro),

• Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth (Joe Conason),

• Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (Al Franken).

In such books as well as popular media, liberals and conservatives shrilly accuse the other side of diabolically deceptive, monopolistic control of American politics, media, culture, and education, while portraying their own side as powerless, persecuted, and wholly virtuous. What are we to make of this dizzying, vicious circle of accusation? How can we possibly tell who in fact is telling the truth and who is lying?

Among the aims of this book is to approach these questions through the systematic application of principles of critical thinking and argumentative rhetoric (defined as the study of elements and patterns of persuasion—both scrupulous and unscrupulous ones). Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy concentrates on rhetorical approaches to some of our most pressing political and social controversies—especially issues related to the widening wealth gap in America and the financial pressures it puts on most citizens, including college students. We emphasize critical analysis in reading and writing about these issues in extended lines of argument, which we demonstrate in extended study of these particular issues cumulatively throughout the book.

Educators and students at every level and in every pertinent discipline face a vital challenge to reorient our schools toward creating informed and active citizens. But what distinctive role can composition courses play in achieving this goal? English studies can apply

• basic reading and research skills for locating and evaluating information on public affairs in periodicals, books, and reports,

• analytic tools of logic,

• principles of argumentative rhetoric,

• the philosophy of general semantics applied to education for critical citizenship,

• the critical insights of literature and literary theory,

Students can learn in argumentative writing classes to develop a more complex and comprehensive rhetorical understanding of political events and ideologies than that provided by politicians and mass media—or, for that matter, by most social science courses, which usually emphasize factual exposition or theory at the expense of rhetorical analysis.

Politics is Interested in You

You may not think you are interested in politics; however, politics is interested in you. “Politics” doesn’t just refer to dry matters of the branches of government and electoral processes. Many Americans believe their life and work are wholly personal matters under their own control, and thus they can ignore what happens in the public sphere; to the extent that they are aware of larger national or international forces, they believe that those forces are beyond their control, hence not worth thinking about.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Americans were shocked by the events of September 11, 2001, because many had little or no knowledge of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, the location of Afghanistan and Iraq where we were soon plunged into war, or the long-term political conflicts in the Middle East and Central Asia. Among the reactions to the attacks was a widespread recognition that this was a wake-up call for Americans to educate themselves about historical and current events throughout the world. Terrorist threats, America’s military involvement in the Middle East, and the influx of refugees from war zones into American communities, are continuing political issues that can change the course of your life at any moment.

Politics further includes controversies about money, a subject that interests everyone. You are certainly concerned about the quality of your education; the increasingly high cost of college tuition, and how much financial aid is available to you. The issues affect not only your immediate financial situation but also your occupational prospects after you graduate. (On this topic, see the section in Chapter 11 on college costs.)

We live today in a political economy in which personal concerns like the cost of living, availability of jobs, and tax policy are determined by national and international forces that we cannot afford to ignore. A crash in the stock market could wipe out the savings of you and your family, wholly beyond your control. Your ability to find a job in the location of your choice, and at the salary of your choice, may be determined by corporate mergers, downsizing, automation, or movement of industries globally into cheap labor markets. Your family business or farm may be affected by fluctuations in international markets, competition from companies that have moved to developing nations with lower operating costs, or other forces in the global economy. As a character in the film Network (excerpted in Chapter 8) puts it, “We are no longer an industrialized society; we aren’t even a post-industrial or technological society. We are now a corporate society, a corporate world, a corporate universe.”

Critical Thinking About Politics

How are public policies on all these matters determined, and by whom? Not by impersonal, uncontrollable forces. They are mostly controlled by human agents, by struggles for dominance between opposing political parties and ideologies (an ideology is a system of beliefs, often of political concepts such as liberalism and conservatism, or of economic concepts like capitalism and socialism). They are affected by competing interests

• between corporate management versus employees,

• between the public sector (government employees, schools and colleges, and other nonprofit organizations) and the private, for-profit sector (corporations and small businesses, professions like law and medicine),

• between supporters of a planned economy and of the free market, and so on.

You have the choice either to become aware of the workings of these forces and to attempt actively to influence them, or to go through a life controlled by them.

In the first edition of this book, a model student research paper was written at the University of Tennessee. The student took on the state’s 2002 financial crisis, in which the budget debate remained deadlocked beyond the deadline for the coming fiscal year. The state government was shut down for part of a week, half the state employees were temporarily “furloughed” (a euphemism for laid off), the university’s summer term was curtailed (leaving some students unable to graduate), campus staff and services were reduced, and yet another tuition increase was implemented. These events woke students up to the political forces controlling their education and motivated many of them to join lobbying efforts on behalf of the university in opposition to well-financed anti-tax lobbies that had prevailed in the legislature for years. In this lobbying campaign students found a meaningful real-life application of rhetorical skills acquired in academic study.

The author of this paper became further interested in researching the ideological views underlying the debates over flat-rate sales taxes versus progressive income taxes, a subject that has been a major source of controversy between conservatives and liberals from the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The student found that debates over the success or failure of “Reaganomics” in the 1980s were directly pertinent to the present state of the economy. Beyond controversies over political economy, other issues like environmentalism, feminism, racism, affirmative action, and gun control, all involve a dimension of partisan politics, along liberal versus conservative or left versus right ideological lines, though not always Democratic versus Republican party lines. Indeed, a predictable pattern of political rhetoric is for those arguing about such issues to conceal the partisan nature of their arguments under a guise of nonpartisanship. Of course, not all public arguments fall into left versus right oppositions—but a lot do, and the failure of many citizens to perceive the nature of these oppositions can leave them without adequate understanding of the issues.

Who Makes the Rules?

The Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, was set off in part by students’ frustration that college education had become a process just to turn them into cogs in the machinery of business, professions, or government. The movement’s most eloquent leader, twenty-two-year-old Mario Savio, asserted that many of his fellow students were dreading life after college

in a game in which all of the rules have been made up—rules which we can not really amend… . The “futures” and “careers” for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers’ paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. (See Savio’s speech, “An End to History,” later in this chapter.)

Do you too perhaps have the feeling that you are being educated to play a game in which someone else has made all the rules? This textbook presents a beginning toward the kind of critical skills you need, first, to learn the language of those who make the rules and, ultimately, to become an active participant in making them.

This kind of knowledge begins with opening your mind and broadening your perspective. Look at any belief that you are convinced is true, and ask yourself how you came to believe it is true. In other words, what is your viewpoint, and how did you acquire that viewpoint? From what sources did you get the belief—your family, teachers, peers, church, political leaders, media? Where did those sources get their beliefs? What might be the limitations or biases in your sources and in your knowledge? Those sources’ views are often colored by conscious or unconscious ethnocentrism, self-interest, and ideological biases, to say nothing of outright hype, propaganda, and deception. So we need to develop a critical perspective on them to evaluate their reliability.

Some people will react against this orientation by complaining that it is too “negative,” with all the emphasis on detecting and defending against deceptive arguments. We believe, though, that this “negative” approach is realistic in relation to American public discourse. And we’ve seen how it enables students to be more critical and active participants in that discourse. An article titled “You’re on Your Own,” by Daniel Kadlec, which appeared in Time in 2002 prese...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Brief Contents
• Preface to Students and Teachers
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Attaining an Open Mind: Overcoming Psychological Obstacles to Critical Thinking
• Part III Elements of Argumentative Rhetoric
• Part IV Thinking Critically about Politics and Media
• Index