The Craft of Argument
From UVA Writing Center
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The main text used by the Writing Center and the Writing Program in general (including the ENWR courses) is The Craft of Argument, by Joseph M. Williams (University of Chicago) and Gregory C. Colomb (University of Virginia), published by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.
The text incorporates the work of Greg Columb (University of Virginia), Joseph Williams, Frank Kinahan, and Larry McEnerney (all University of Chicago) and the Little Red Schoolhouse approach to argument and composition.
From the Introduction:
- Our aim in The Craft of Argument is to help students integrate the skills of writing, thinking, and arguing so that they can write arguments that are clear, sound, and persuasive. To that end, we discuss argument in ways that are rooted in the rhetorical tradition that began even before Aristotle's Rhetoric, but are different enough from most current texts on argument to deserve some explanation.
What Distinguishes Craft from Other Books on Argument
- We emphasize that writers make arguments not just to gain their readers' agreement but to enlist them in solving problems.
- We show students the differences between the kind of problem most familiar to them, pragmatic problems, and the kind of problem that may be less familiar to them, conceptual problems.
- We steadily emphasize ethos.
- We devote considerable attention to informal reasoning and integrate sound critical thinking into our discussion of argument and writing in every chapter.
- We have included a "writing process" section in every chapter.
- We have tried to synthesize two aspects of argument that most books on argument keep distinct: dialectic and rhetoric.
