(Part 3) Best rhetoric books according to redditors

seems like you could use it

a little over budget tho

I was also looking for such resource. I believe KLEAR made one nice book, organised with ready expressions.


https://www.amazon.com/Korean-Composition-KLEAR-Textbooks-Language/dp/0824824776

Try out cleanth brook's book on writing and rhetoric. Also Jaques' Barzun's Simple and Direct. I assume your problem is expressing yourself clearly and effectively. Since you are a grad student, had you had problems with basic logic you would not have arrived where you are already.

EDIT: On the level of organizing thinking, these books will also help:

1. George Polya, How to Solve it Although it is about mathematics, I would recommend this book to anyone studying in university. It's a book about "thinking outside the box" if understood properly.
   
2. David Hackett Fischer, Historian's Fallacies. Studying the types of mistakes in informal reasoning is always instructive. This book is a good study of such errors in the field of history. I would also suggest checking out the various lists of argumentative/logical fallacies that can be found on the internet (I recommend the book because it is good).

The only potential problem is it is hard to argue that a single person's work constitutes a genre as there is also usually an assumption of a community that follows the rules as opposed to an individual. But if Jenkin, Sex_Cactus, and you go out and start doing that, then sure. Steampink is a legitimate new genre.

It isn't my fault if you haven't study genre theory. Here is one book, I can suggest a few more (or some academic papers) that discuss it further.

http://www.amazon.com/Rhetoric-Critical-Perspectives-Literacy-Education/dp/074840256X

I'm stuck in the same boat as you.
SJSU reccomends Baron's CSU Writing Proficiency Exams. For $10 I bought the book and have been using it to study for both the written and multiple choice sections. It has a few sample tests in it, along with English review (including a ESL review portion). You can also try some general English review, which you can get from places like Purdue OWL.

You'd probably be interested in a book called Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured by Susan Jarratt. There's also an article "Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric" by John Poulakos you may want to check out.

This should be your best friend. It's not as dry as reading the actual law book the state issues. Good luck.

The best book I've ever read and has influenced how I view writing as a whole is The Craft of Revision by Donald Murray. I recommend it to anyone and everyone serious about being a writer.

I recently read a book on composition pedagogy that asserted a point that was something like, "if you impose too many rules regarding word choice and style on your students' writing, the quality of their content will suffer."

The rationale behind this sentiment was that the most important aspect of learning how to compose is how to put thoughts together. Their research found that if students worry too much about the way they have to say things, they rely more on "standard responses," or, "school answers" when composing. They also found that when students are allowed to express ideas without the dread of impending red marks about their grammar and style, they take more ownership of their ideas, which leads to a natural desire to want to better articulate these ideas. Ideas first; semantics later.

When I read the wiki article, my first thought was, "damn, this is a lot of shit to remember." Ultimately, E-Prime is a new way to use language. So is school-English. So you've got all these kids, who are used to home-English (or social-English or oral-English, whatever you want to call it). They've been to school where they are expected to learn school-English, which is a hard mode to think in because it's new. And now they've got e-prime-English on their plate as well.

I'm not trying to shit all over this idea. It's got a lot of potential to be awesome and you've chosen it for a lot of good reasons (like trying to focus their perspective on their personal reactions to the material instead of "correct answers"). I just wanted to bring up some counterpoints. I believe this could work if you focus on how the content of their writing could be different, and not how their words will be different. For instance, don't give them a list of words to avoid; instead, explain to them how avoiding ambiguity makes for more effective communication (like how the wiki article explains that "the film was good" could translate into E-Prime as "I liked the film" or as "the film made me laugh" to avoid the ambiguity about whether or not the student is asserting an opinion or an objective statement).

Take my opinions with a grain of salt, though. I'm in teacher training and haven't actually been in a classroom yet. This is the book I referenced.

Okay, a couple of suggestions:

• Grab a copy of First Time Up used (it's like 1/5 the price of new). It's enormously useful for first-time comp teachers, and will help you feel safer and more secure up front.
  
• Ask your chair for some sample syllabi and steal from them ruthlessly. Heck, if you find a syllabus you like the look of, just replace the name and contact information with yours and use it. You have three preps to get ready for and only a couple of weeks, with no prior college teaching experience. If you try to reinvent the wheel, you're gonna drown.
  
• Make sure you have at LEAST one conference week, where you sit down and do a one-on-one with each and every student and talk about their writing. The 15 minutes you spend with each student will be the most productive 15 minutes of the semester, guaranteed. Some folks prefer draft conferences. I like midterm or second-paper conferences. Your call.
  
• Remember that these folks are Freshmen. They're very well-intentioned, eager, wonderful, delightful idiots. You'll be astonished at the basic writing mistakes they'll make, but that's because you're used to looking at your own writing. Cut them slack. They'll learn pretty quick.
  
• Only half of your job is teaching writing. The other half is teaching these folks how to Adult. Office hours can be... interesting. I've counseled people on abortions, miscarriages, being the target of a failed mass shooting, blatant racism and sexism from members of the school, and more profound loneliness and depression than I can even describe. I've had students living out of their car and off of the street. I've read personal narratives about the time a student was almost murdered twice in one day. Be ready.
  
• Get the contact information for your school's equivalent of Disability Services and introduce yourself. You will have students who need support from them.
  
• A 5/5 is a very full load. Stagger your assignments, and aim for high-density, but not high-volume, writing assignments or you'll end up grading for grammar instead of content. This is actually an observed effect in the literature; you're not going to escape it. I'm a biiiiig fan of the three-assignment semester, with a very minimal amount of submitted daily work.
  
• Stake out some time for yourself, like you did in grad school. This job can be all-consuming. Don't let it.
  
• Thank You For Smoking, the movie, is a fabulous resource. There are several scenes you can mine for entire days' worth of content.
  
• Thank You For Arguing, the book, is a great resource, cheap, and students actually read it. I use it as the main text for my Comp 2 courses.
  
• Have fun. If you let it, Comp 1 can be an enormously silly, fun, pop-culture-y romp through whatever nonsense you enjoy. I've used Avatar: the Last Airbender, Marvel movies, Terry Pratchett books, and a bunch of other stuff as resources. One of my colleagues' final Comp 1 pasper is actually a video, and she gives feedback to her students by audio recording. Do you.
  
• Most importantly of all, none of your students will ever know if you're backfilling, fillibustering, or out-and-out bullshitting. Try not to do it, but they will never, ever call you on it. Be confident in your expertise.
  
  Have fun, and hold on to your seat. The first semester is a bit of a ride.

I did not attend a religious private school (although my brother now does, after I checked that they taught evolution (accurately) and didn't try to convert him constantly), but every year from 7th-12th iirc, this book, Crafting Expository Argument, was a mandatory item. They just required one edition of any kind because it was/is a great help to creating solid essays for middle and highschool as well as a great basis for AP tests and college basics.

The author, Michael Degen, also teaches at Jesuit, a catholic high school in the area. From what I've heard, he's openly gay and they take no issue with that. Plenty of religious schools are great institutions with better than average teachers.

You might want to look at something like the books used by college-level writing teachers, such as this one (which I have, among many others): A Writer's Reference (https://www.amazon.com/Writers-Reference-2016-MLA-Update/dp/1319083536) or the Bedford guide (https://www.amazon.com/Bedford-College-Writers-Research-Handbook/dp/1319042112/)

These, and others like them, are aimed at native or near-native speakers of English and address the most common 'errors' they make and are likely to make in writing.

It's a decent start.

Hey! I'm sittin around at my school waiting for work, taking a study break myself! I just took one of my last spanish tests, so I feel for you in the finals boat. [This book] (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0874216427/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1397488628&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40) has a lot of cool revision techniques, I bought the kindle edition for one of my classes (if you have a kindle you could totslly borrow my copy) and it's been interesting.

But really, who needs revision?!

https://www.amazon.com/Martins-Guide-Writing-2016-Update/dp/131908771X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538461666&sr=8-1&keywords=The+St.+Martin%E2%80%99s+Guide+to+Writing+%2811th+edition+with+MLA+Update%29

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offer- 5 usd.

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It's also just as easy to pick up poor habits even in conditions where perfect guidance is being given. This person in question probably draws his attitude about learning, not from some unidentifiable source, but instead coincidentally learned it.

"Bare reference to the imitativeness of human nature is enough to suggest how profoundly the mental habits of others effect the attitude of the one being trained. Example is more potent than precept... " How we think - John Dewey.

And it's easy for someone to simply accept ignorance as a strength, a sort of appeal to ignorance turned inward. Of course that's just a loose example. Confirmation bias is more powerful. If there is even the most flimsy evidence that something is working the mind can immediately block out 'expert opinion'. I'm sure it isn't news to you.

So learning, ultimately, is a choice made outside any specific framework. One chooses to learn and disregard habit as a blockade to new information. To learn, you have to be ready to be wrong. And often.

I just feel like this guy would benefit more from being allowed his ignorance and provided options, rather than 'schooled'.

As far as the books go, I'll look into them but I tend to shy away from books that are formatted like "winning decisions" and "getting to yes" because I can already hear a watered down version of game theory and logic. I recommend Behavioural Game Theory and Logic and contemporary Rhetoric I have the tenth edition but I'm confident it hasn't changed a whole lot.

Writing in the Works by Susan Blau, Third Edition is the required reading for a first year communications class that basically covers everything you need to know about writing anything. It's loaded with tons of examples and guides and case studies that you can apply to any discipline.

Could it be Plato, Derrida, and Writing by Jasper Neel?

Assuming for a moment I do have lots of time and not enough friends... what does that have to do with anything I've said? Does it make anything less true? Maybe you should read a book. :P