Today’s Plan:
- Discuss the Rubric
- Cicero’s Anatomy of an Argument
- Peer Review
Transitions into Evidence
Discuss the Rubric
Today I want to share with you the rubric I will use to evaluate the published versions of your four medium.com articles. When I score medium.com articles, I often won’t provide much in the way of written feedback. I provide extensive feedback on drafts–when I know you will revise. But grading is simply a matter of a score. Let’s take a look at the framework I will be using to determine that score.
There’s a few things on that rubric that we haven’t covered yet and I don’t expect you to know. We’ll be covering those things in coming weeks.
What the Heck is an Article? What the Heck is an Argument?
So, what is an article? What are its parts? If I use the word “genre,” what are its conventions?
Let me back up a few thousand years. Ancient Greece is considered the birth place for Western thought. Two competing traditions battled over how to think and communicate thought–Plato and the philosophers and Gorgias and the rhetoricians. Somewhere between these two schools lies Aristotle, a philosopher who wrote a treatise on rhetoric titled On Rhetoric. In the treatise, Aristotle argues that there are five dimensions to composing a speech: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. These are called the five canons of rhetoric. When I ask you about genre conventions, I am asking a question about “arrangement”: what is the order of material?
I now want to ask you folks a question about how you were taught to organize your writing.
I am anticipating an answer, and we’ll see if I get what I expect.
So we’ve probably just talked about the five-paragraph essay. I hope to show that there is an underlying logic to the five paragraph essay. It gets taught because training wheels or something.
Let me provide another kind of training wheels–the rhetorician Cicero’s 6 parts of a speech:
- Exordium (Introduction, the hook– something engaging to get the audience’s attention, something that sets a tone or a mood for the discussion, something that acknowledges what they might already believe and opens the space for believing something different)
- Narratio (Narration, background information–who believes what, what aren’t we debating, what do we know, what are the facts)
- Partitio (Partition, division–where the speaker lays out in advance the parts of her argument, gives a “roadmap” of what the listener can expect)
- Confirmatio (Confirmation, evidence–where the speaker walks the listener through her argument step-by-step, providing and explaining evidence)
- Refutatio (Refutation, counter-arguments–where the speaker directly addresses an opponent’s counter-arguments and anticipates other objections the audience might have)
- Peroratio (Peroration, conclusion–where the speaker reviews her case and makes a suggestion for what the audience should do as a result of believing her, either in thought or action. What are the consequences?)
Now, no writer does these things in a straight order. Don’t think of them as a chronological list. Rather, these are ingredients. They have to be spread throughout the recipe. As a writer, it is your job to know when to do what. Our rubric is based on these classical expectations.
Homework
Please submit a Google Doc link of your draft to Canvas “Grade Post One Draft” by Sunday at 11:59am so I can provide feedback.
