A one-semester course for grades 6 or 7 and up
Think of the progymnasmata as a step-by-step apprenticeship in the art of writing and rhetoric. In the award-winning Writing & Rhetoric series, author Paul Kortepeter has recovered this proven method of teaching writing in conjunction with critical thinking and speaking. This is the eighth in a series of 12 books that will train students over 6 years.
Comparison
In Writing & Rhetoric Book 8: Comparison, students will be writing well-crafted, six-paragraph expository essays comparing two subjects. Comparisons can be made between people, historical events, ideas, inventions, animals, foods—just about anything, really. The purpose of these essays is to analyze two subjects and use this comparison to demonstrate similarities and differences between them. In these essays, 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:
- Compare subjects of American history from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression of the 1930s
- Use topic sentences for organizing paragraphs and information
- Create analogies for powerful appeals to emotion
- Incorporate supportive facts, details, and quotations
- Annotate texts and write brief narrative overviews
- Craft effective conclusions that encourage curiosity for future study
- Work on delivery in public speaking—volume, pacing, and inflection
- Build copiousness through sentence variety and rhetorical devices, including analogy, simile, metaphor, chiasma, hypophora, parallelism, and anastrophe
- Engage in group discussions that foster critical thinking
- Improve essays using oration as an aid to revision
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