Advancing Rhetoric

by Jennifer Cognard-Black and Anne Cognard

Kendall Hunt, 2006

Co-authored by an honors English professor and an award-winning high-school AP teacher, Advancing Rhetoric: Critical Thinking and Writing for the Advanced Student, by Dr. Jennifer Cognard-Black and Dr. Anne M. Cognard, is a composition textbook geared for high-ability learners in both college-level honors and advanced high-school classes, such as Advanced Placement (AP) classes in both Language and Literature.

Advancing Rhetoric offers an innovative and challenging pedagogy for writing and critical thinking that motivates high-ability students to invent new forms and to choose writing tasks depending on the subject matter, audience, and rhetorical context of the writing. Students do not drill critical thinking skills:  they become their own critical thinkers.

To challenge and appeal to high-ability learners, Advancing Rhetoric offers three distinctive features:

• provocative readings that bring together classical with modern texts (e.g., Plato with Toni Morrison) as well as adaptable writing assignments that challenge and excite high-ability students (e.g., writing a Socratic Dialogue between Plato and Morrison);

• an interdisciplinary, multicultural, and multimedia pedagogy thoroughly informed by classical rhetorical principles;

• methods by which students learn how to develop their own evaluative rubrics for assessing all kinds of writing.

Comprehensive Teacher's Book

Advancing Rhetoric comes with a unique Teacher's Book designed exclusively for both AP Literature and AP Language teachers. This book also recognizes the specific need of AP teachers whose classes are daily and last for a full year. Therefore, the book includes lessons to expand Advancing Rhetoric into year-long AP classes and offers resources for assisting students with the national AP exams.