Grade 11 · printable course

American Voices, American Arguments: Literature and Rhetoric in Context (Part 1)

Grade 11, Units 1-4 · 342 pages · 37 lessons · PDF, print at home

A year-long American literature and rhetoric course that traces how writers from the Puritans to the present have argued about identity, power, and the meaning of "American." Students read foundational and contemporary texts closely, analyze rhetoric in historical and literary nonfiction alongside fiction and poetry, and write extended arguments and syntheses grounded in textual evidence. The course builds toward independent literary-rhetorical analysis and a substantial research-based argument. CCSS-aligned, on grade level. This volume holds units 1 to 4: Origins: Puritan Rhetoric and the American Errand; Founding Arguments: Revolution and the Rhetoric of Independence; Contested Selves: Individualism, Slavery, and the Unreliable Narrator; Reading Argument Closely: Rhetorical Analysis of Nonfiction.

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Every unit and lesson in this book, in order. The same lessons are taught online at lettersanddevotion.com, so a family can move between paper and screen.

American Voices, American Arguments: Literature and Rhetoric in Context

37 lessons · try a lesson online free

Unit 1: Origins: Puritan Rhetoric and the American Errand8 lessons
  1. 1.Archaic and theological vocabulary in 'A Model of Christian Charity'
  2. 2.The three-part structure of the jeremiad form
  3. 3.The argumentative function of the 'city upon a hill' metaphor in 'A Model of Christian Charity'
  4. 4.The relationship between plain style and Puritan theological belief about ornamentation and truth
  5. 5.The jeremiad form applied to a non-Puritan, contemporary rhetorical text
  6. 6.The relationship between a specific rhetorical structure and the persuasive purpose it serves for a named historical audience
  7. 7.The reuse and transformation of the 'city on a hill' / 'errand into the wilderness' metaphor beyond its original Puritan argumentative context
  8. 8.The distinction between content summary and rhetorical purpose
Unit 2: Founding Arguments: Revolution and the Rhetoric of Independence8 lessons
  1. 9.Ethos, pathos, and logos as categories of rhetorical appeal
  2. 10.The Declaration of Independence's construction of shared ethos with its intended 18th-century audience
  3. 11.The logos structure of the Declaration of Independence's list of grievances
  4. 12.Concession-and-rebuttal structure in Paine's Common Sense
  5. 13.The relationship between intended audience and the balance of rhetorical appeals across two Revolutionary texts
  6. 14.Rhetorical appeals and concession-rebuttal structure in an unfamiliar Revolutionary-era primary source
  7. 15.Repurposing of Puritan covenant language and typology for political argument in Revolutionary-era rhetoric
  8. 16.The general principle that appeal selection is a function of audience persuadability across historical contexts
Unit 3: Contested Selves: Individualism, Slavery, and the Unreliable Narrator10 lessons
  1. 17.Emerson's central claim in 'Self-Reliance' about individual authority versus social conformity
  2. 18.Ethos/pathos/logos as applied to short excerpts of Douglass's Narrative
  3. 19.The difference between testimonial ethos (Douglass) and assertive/philosophical ethos (Emerson)
  4. 20.Jacobs's rhetorical purpose and audience-specific disclosure choices in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
  5. 21.Constrained narration as evidence of the narrator's social/legal situation, using slave narrative conventions
  6. 22.Points of convergence and divergence between Emerson's and Thoreau's arguments about self-reliance and social withdrawal
  7. 23.Inferring unstated meaning from a constrained narrator's silences in a genuinely new text
  8. 24.The interdependence of self-reliant authority and enslaved/constrained labor across two independently-argued texts
  9. 25.Essay planning: evidence selection and organization for a comparative authority-construction argument
  10. 26.Evidence-claim alignment in a comparative rhetorical-analysis paragraph
Unit 4: Reading Argument Closely: Rhetorical Analysis of Nonfiction11 lessons
  1. 27.Audience, purpose, and context as analytic categories applied to a nonfiction passage
  2. 28.The claim-evidence-warrant relationship, using a provided sentence frame on a previously modeled passage
  3. 29.The functional effect of a rhetorical appeal on a specified audience
  4. 30.Rhetorical arrangement as a structural choice with argumentative consequences
  5. 31.Diction and syntax as argumentative choices, not decoration
  6. 32.The distinction between claim, evidence, and warrant
  7. 33.Comparison of warrants across two texts addressing the same issue
  8. 34.Integrated rhetorical analysis of a nonfiction passage
  9. 35.Independent rhetorical analysis of an unseen nonfiction text
  10. 36.The soundness of a warrant, independent of whether the procedure for locating a warrant was executed correctly
  11. 37.The relationship between rhetorical skill and factual soundness of a claim

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