This course is grounded in the rhetorical analysis of “controversies,” broadly defined. “Controversies,” for our purposes, need neither be huge nor particularly public: whether or not to put a family pet to sleep could work as well as whether or not same-sex partners should get insurance benefits in Texas—though the former would require a different approach to research.

Instructors will select a controversy from this year’s First Year Forum book, The Devil’s Highway, to use as a model for class discussion and informal assignments, supplementing the text with essays or articles that expose the various “sides” of the controversy in question (and there are always more than two sides). To get you started, a handful of current articles on controversies raised in The Devil’s Highway will be collected ahead of time and provided for you online at the CWRL site—you’ll receive information on this over the summer. This pre-selected controversy, however, will serve as a model only: students must locate a controversy of their own to adopt for the semester. It may be tempting to allow students to select any controversy whatsoever, but there are good reasons for offering students an array of pre-approved controversies from which to choose; that approach, while not required, is strongly encouraged. Topics must be substantial, not trivial.

The course is divided into three units, each one requiring some sort of outside research. The first two units are devoted to rhetorical analysis and so are mostly descriptive analyses. In these units, the students’ own positions are beside the point, and that will be a difficult concept for some students to grasp—they’ll feel compelled to argue rather than analyze, or to argue while they analyze. So instructors should be prepared to discuss, frequently, the differences between analysis and argument. The third unit is devoted to advocacy and so requires, for the first time, that students take a position within the controversy and produce an informed argument for that position.