"Teaching nonfiction through rhetorical reading"

Lamb, M. R. (2010). Teaching nonfiction through rhetorical reading. The English Journal, 99(4), 43-49.

In this, Lamb advocates for the effectivity of what she calls rhetorical reading responses, which is a riff off of Margaret Woodworth's précits assignment:




She justifies this pedagogical paper by arguing how students are having an increasingly hard time working with and talking intelligently about non-fictions texts. While she doesn't go into how or why literature is taught in high school, I assume her to mean that students encountered stories on two fronts: One the one hand, they hear it on T.V.:

... news and political media, both digital and print, have taken a turn toward the narrative, "human interest" approach, and first-person ac counts are often the sole evidence provided for claims. As Naomi Wolf argues, "'Soft media' such as call-in radio shows and talk shows [have] super seded establishment forums as the source from which people get their politics" (88). Television, ac cording to Barry Brummett, is "highly concerned with that which is small, personal, and person-ori ented" (142). Issues on television are all portrayed in personal terms rather than abstract, analytical terms (143). Add to this phenomenon blogs, Face book, YouTube, and the multitude of Internet genres in which everyone posts a "story" for others to read. (Lamb, 2010, p. 43)

I was going to say, on the other hand, they hear it in school à la the literature curriculum, but that's not what she says: "I'm always struck by their fictionalization of all writing, especially since many people complain that students no longer read literature" (Lamb, 2010, p. 43). Do teenagers not read literature anymore? According to this quick Google search, one third of teenagers haven't read a book for pleasure in at least a year. Or do they read the books they are assigned to read in school? I couldn't find anything to indicate whether kids really read the books they're assigned, but it's likely that not many do.

In sum, for Lamb, students are wont to reduce any genre of reading to a story. What's more, they have trouble telling the difference between fact and faction, let alone op-eds, which, as she says, is a curious mixture of both. She thinks having students write rhetorical reading responses will help with this, since they guide students to see texts as constructed (see Bruce Pirie).

While this makes sense, she feels she has to justify this turn to rhetorical reading because some teachers might accuse her of propagating the intentional fallacy. 

As a kind of aside, the tendancy for students to reduce all genres of reading to a story reminded me of Ray and Barton's insight that basic writers mimic the authority of those before them (teachers, parents, etc.). For them, this mimicry tends to take the form of advice.