Grade 11 · printable course

American Voices, American Arguments: Literature and Rhetoric in Context (Part 2)

Grade 11, Units 5-8 · 340 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 5 to 8: Arguing With Sources: Synthesis Across Multiple Texts; Twentieth-Century Voices: Fiction, Drama, and the Argument Over Identity; Compressed Arguments: Contemporary American Poetry and Voice; The Research Argument: Building an Original Claim.

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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 5: Arguing With Sources: Synthesis Across Multiple Texts10 lessons
  1. 38.Conflicting claims about individual authority in Transcendentalist and slave-narrative texts
  2. 39.The definition of synthesis as claim-construction versus summary as sequential restatement
  3. 40.A source-conflict map showing agreement, disagreement, and talking-past among two sources, using the modeled pair and structure
  4. 41.A source-conflict map showing agreement, disagreement, and talking-past among three sources
  5. 42.The concession-without-surrender move in argumentative paragraphs
  6. 43.The evidentiary status of a chart or social-media post used within a written argument
  7. 44.An original synthesis claim built from four previously unseen but topically related sources
  8. 45.The difference between describing source conflict and resolving it into an original claim
  9. 46.Argument-based (versus source-based) organizational structure for a multi-source essay
  10. 47.Collaborative extension and challenge of peer claims about source conflicts
Unit 6: Twentieth-Century Voices: Fiction, Drama, and the Argument Over Identity8 lessons
  1. 48.The distinction between a character's/narrator's stated claim and the text's structural treatment of that claim
  2. 49.Form (narrative structure or dramatic staging) as a vehicle for an implicit argument about individual authority
  3. 50.The differential function of mythology-invocation (strengthening belonging vs. exposing exclusion) across contrasting textual moments
  4. 51.Deliberate authorial irresolution between competing narrators as a structural argument about whose authority the reader can trust
  5. 52.The terms persona, dramatic irony, and mythology revision/inversion
  6. 53.The core text's formal architecture as the vehicle for its claim about American identity
  7. 54.Transfer of the form-as-argument analytic move to unseen prose and dramatic excerpts
  8. 55.Ambiguous or mixed authorial stance toward founding mythology invocation
Unit 7: Compressed Arguments: Contemporary American Poetry and Voice8 lessons
  1. 56.Line break as a meaning-bearing choice, not a formatting artifact
  2. 57.The gap between persona voice and poet identity in dramatic monologue
  3. 58.Persona as a device that varies argumentative distance between speaker and reader
  4. 59.Omission as a rhetorical choice that implies an unstated claim
  5. 60.Allusion as a compressed argumentative borrowing of another text's authority or meaning
  6. 61.Form-to-argument connection in contemporary poetry, applied through discussion
  7. 62.Comparative argument construction across two unfamiliar contemporary poems using form-based evidence
  8. 63.Unit vocabulary: persona, dramatic monologue, cadence, enjambment
Unit 8: The Research Argument: Building an Original Claim11 lessons
  1. 64.The distinction between a fact question, a yes/no question, and an arguable research question
  2. 65.Criteria for source credibility (authorship, purpose, corroboration) as distinct from surface professionalism
  3. 66.MLA in-text citation and works-cited entry format
  4. 67.MLA citation mechanics applied to a specific source
  5. 68.Points of agreement, disagreement, and non-overlap among sources spanning different historical periods
  6. 69.A thesis statement that synthesizes rather than summarizes sourced positions
  7. 70.Organizational structure of a synthesis-based argument (claim-driven vs. source-driven organization)
  8. 71.A documented, multi-source research argument draft
  9. 72.The writer's own source-selection and counterargument reasoning
  10. 73.The multistructural-to-relational boundary in a peer's draft paragraphs (listing sources vs. synthesizing them)
  11. 74.Source-credibility and synthesis criteria transferred to a non-course topic

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