Rhetorical Modes

1. Rhetorical Modes Patterns of Argument (egregiously appropriated from The Princeton Review’s Cracking the AP English Language and Composition Exam)

2. Three reasons for learning and practicing rhetorical modes: • Learning rhetorical modes will give you time-tested approaches for writing essays. • The multiple choice questions on the AP exam often include rhetorical mode terminology. • Understanding of these modes will assist in analyzing the writing of others.

3. 1. Example or Illustration • Examples used to substantiate an idea must be relevant and convincing!

4. Practice Drill: Read each of the topics below, and make a list of three examples you could use to support them. Ensure that all examples are relevant and support the appropriate side of the argument. • Topic 1: High schools unwittingly encourage students to cheat. • Topic 2: Studying the humanities is important. • Topic 3: Respecting diversity reveals much about a person.

5. 2. Classification • Grouping things according to certain characteristics • Very useful for analysis and explanation

6. Practice Drill: Read each of the topics below, and think about how you would organize your essay in terms of classification. Come up with a possible thesis (central idea) and plan how you could categorize the information you have on these topics into three or four meaningful divisions. • Topic 1: television commercials • Topic 2: students • Topic 3: cars

7. 3. Comparison and Contrast • This mode can be used • to explain, i.e. when comparing something unfamiliar with something less well known. • to argue in favor of one of the two elements. • Selecting points of comparison and contrast requires first classifying them!

8. Practice Drill: Make a T-chart for each of the topics below, listing the similarities on one side and the differences on the other. Then organize these similarities and differences in a logical manner; sort them out so that you have three central ideas (which would then become three separate compare and contrast paragraphs in an essay. • Topic 1: two universities • Topic 2: two types of cuisine • Topic 3: the experience of traveling to the mountains and the experience of traveling to the ocean