Rhetoric and Composition

Rhetoric composition is a course designed to familiarize the students with various types of writings. This course inculcates in the students some critical and creative writing strategies by enhancing their writing skills. It also helps them see vividly different ways of writing in which authorial voices and organizational patterns undergo changes depending on subject matter and audience. Introducing the students with basic research methodologies, this course also encourages them to use writing for research purposes.

Rhetoric/composition as such opens up avenues for students to learn creatively and reading well as writing processes, inspiring them to explore their potential to produce the writing of their own. For this it offers the reading materials like Motives for Writhing, The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing and MLA Hand Book for Research Papers, which together lead the students into actual reading and writing materials.

Motives for Writing as its title suggests, introduces the students with ten different purposes of writing. This book is a key to unlock the major writing strategies in literature. It is equipped with various types of writing ranging from expressive, explanatory, narrative, and descriptive to persuade. The selected samples of writing in this book don’t only familiarize the students with the nature of the communication process, but also tickle them to produce the writing of their own based on the similar topics as dealt with by the writers. The students should read those texts to evaluate the ideas of other, to form judgments and to develop their original point of view. Reading these literary texts, they should develop new ideas and new ways of thinking about familiar concepts and apply such ideas in their own individual writing.

Taking into account the fact that critical reading is a prerequisite to good writing, Motives for Writing also sheds light upon the critical reading practices along with writing processes. Such reading practices help the students identify basic rhetorical strategies used by the writers to express their ideas coherently and consistently in their texts. Moreover, identification of rhetorical strategies may ease the students' effort to understand what they read, enable them to form opinion exchanges their ideas with others in conversations, ask and answer the questions and develop ideas that can be further explored in writing. The writing exercises adjacent to each text to help the students further serve this purpose.

Another remarkable aspect of this book is to lead the students into the variety of writing letting them see some interesting similarities and differences in the writings within the discourse community and outside the discourse community sometimes. For example the rhetorical patterns used by a writer in his writing to amuse others may vary from that of another writer writing for the same motive. Further, the kind of diction and style used by a writer in writing to amuse others may be completely different from that used by a writer in writing to move others. This is because writers tend to choose appropriate ways of writing to suit their purpose. Thus, arousing the students' interests in such vital reading and writing strategies, this book gives an insight into the problem of critical reading and creative writing and paving way for their successful understanding of rhetoric and composition courses.

Likewise, The St. Martin's Guide to writing lends credence to the interpretive strategies of the text by deeply engaging the students into the reading materials. Going through the commentaries and examples of interpretation along with the stories and essays in this book they can easily form their own opinions on writing strategies. Moreover, they’re also taught the skills of argumentation with a clear insight into a reasoned argument. The students can understand how the act of giving reasons or making reasoned arguments on controversial issues is different from raising voices. It will also enable them to think critically about their own as well as others arguments honing their thinking and arguing skills. This book has also some practical advantages for the students as they’re often judged by their ability to write convincingly defending their controversial positions. These are the special kinds of academic writings, which help the students write successful interpretive and analytical essays based on their reading materials.

MLA Handbook for writers of research papers, similarly, teaches the students some basic research skills to use their writing for research purposes. It is also equally related to the mechanics of writing. Simple methods are ladled out in the book to know how to document the sources from other critics and writers while preparing any research paper, and how to produce academic writing based on research methodologies. This book renders skills among the students making them accessible to the technical aspects of writing.