Writing & Rhetoric Book Book 9 Student: Description & Impersonation Program

Program Overview:  The Writing & Rhetoric series emphasizes fluent reading, careful listening, models for imitation, and progressive steps. It assumes that students learn best by reading excellent, whole-story examples of literature and by growing their skills through imitation. Each exercise is intended to impart a skill (or tool) that can be employed in all kinds of writing and speaking. The exercises are arranged from simple to more complex. What’s more, the exercises are cumulative, meaning that later exercises incorporate the skills acquired in preceding exercises. This series is a step-by-step apprenticeship in the art of writing and rhetoric.  The full series is 12 books that will train students over 6 years, starting in grades 3 or 4.

Book 9: Description & Impersonation is a one-semester course for grades 7 or 8.  Students will be writing well-crafted descriptive and expository compositions. The first part, description, emphasizes the use of vivid language to describe people, nature, and processes. The second part, impersonation, introduces the modes of persuasion as a means of imitating the writing style and outlook of four famous individuals: journalist Nellie Bly, writer Henry Williamson, athlete Jesse Owens, and statesman Winston Churchill. In these compositions, students will be making use of a range of writing skills, including the ability to inform, to describe, to narrate, and to analyze. In this one-semester book, students will learn to:

• • favor vivid words that appeal to the senses in fiction and nonfiction
  • use topic sentences for organizing paragraphs and information
  • appeal to readers through modes of persuasion: emotion (pathos), credibility (ethos), and logic (logos)
  • employ rhetorical devices that show clarity of thought: aetiologia, anthypophora, expeditio, and syllogismus
  • incorporate supportive facts and details
  • annotate and narrate texts with a variety of strategies: oral narration, summary, outline, and modes of persuasion
  • craft an effective plot using conflict and character
  • build copiousness through sentence variety and rhetorical devices, including alliteration, simile, metaphor, hyperbole, epistrophe, and anaphora
  • work on delivery in public speaking—volume, pacing, and inflection
  • engage in group discussions that foster critical thinking
  • improve essays using oration as an aid to revision

The student edition is a consumable book.  Answer key not included.

If you are not teaching multiple students, we suggest you purchase Book Set 9. It includes one student book along with the teacher’s edition (answer key, teacher notes, and explanations), and Mp3 audio files (to help engage their sense of hearing and listening).

Placement: In Writing & Rhetoric, placement is based on the student’s current experience in writing. The publisher first suggests looking through the table of contents included in each of the free Writing & Rhetoric samples (found on the individual product pages). Reviewing both the table of contents and the sample lessons will help you determine a good starting level for your student. They encourage parents to download and print the sample chapters of the textbooks (student book) to assist in determining placement. Other suggestions are:

• If you have a student in 4th–7th grade and are considering Writing & Rhetoric, the initial identifier of placement is to evaluate whether your student can acknowledge the 5 W’s (who, what, when, where, why) in an essay or is comfortable writing 6-paragraph essays. If not, we recommend looking at Book 3: Narrative II. Starting here will provide review from the first 2 books in the series, as well as more age-appropriate material with longer stories and more thoughtful questions in the lessons.
• If your student is confidently working through the 2 skills mentioned above, we would then suggest looking through Book 5: Refutation and Confirmation. In this book, students begin to support a cause or refute it. This is the beginning mark of persuasive writing (pre-thesis work) and helps them to begin research for an idea they will support in an essay.