Josie and I revisited the essay that she was assigned on Monday, carefully reading on how essay's are structured and reviewing our notes from the first lesson. Josie has some trouble interpreting what is being asked from her on specific writing tasks, so we tackled first the essay topic and went over what exactly needed to be done before writing. Josie and I then discussed her stance on the topic: do white names mean more interviews and job opportunities? While Josie had some good ideas, she had trouble articulating her thoughts into a stance on the issue. To help, I re-stated the author's thesis and told Josie to provide a direct response to its ideas in a phrase. This she did with little struggle. Then, Josie was asked to explain why she disagreed with the author's position. The end result was her thesis statement. Using our brainstorming session, Josie wrote an introduction to her essay. After a brief break, we then read a short printout on paragraph organization, completing the corresponding practice exercises. After the lesson, Josie was asked to write her own topic sentence and body paragraph.

In continuation of last week's session, I introduced Josie to Rhetoric by first defining the term as the art of persuasive speaking or writing. Expanding on this idea, I told Josie that there were three major types of appeals: logos, ethos, and pathos. Logos is the appeal to logic, ethos is author creditability, and pathos is the appeal to emotion. Explaining what each might look like in turn, I gave Josie examples of each appeal and asked her to remember one of the appeals that I used when introducing myself to her last week. Josie was quick on the draw, correctly naming ethos as the rhetorical device. Josie's reply was this: "You used Ethos when you told me that you have been studying English for 7 years and teaching it for 3." After a quick discussion of how this appeal to my own creditability persuaded Josie to believe and trust my advice on reading and writing, we watched a brief video on the Art of Persuasion. Josie and I then discussed how principles like reciprocity, creditability, and pathos are used everyday to sell an idea or product. We then moved on to a discussion of the rhetorical modes: description, narration, argumentation, classification and division, definition, cause/effect, compare and contrast, and process analysis, and example. Josie was familiar with each of these modes, which puts her in great shape for emulating these types of genres in her freshman college writing course. When we finished discussing the modes, we went on to read Dan Barry's "Chronicle of an American Execution." We "previewed" the textual details by reading the accompanying author biography. In this bio, it was hinted that this essay was an objective account of a legal execution in Tennessee. Given the author's background (New York Times writer, covered stories like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, etc.), I asked Josie to consider this: can an author with these credentials write an objective account of capital punishment? In the end, Josie concluded no. To inform our reading then, Josie was asked to look for moments when the author revealed his stance on the issue of capital punishment, as well as moments the appeals logos, ethos, and pathos are used. Josie and I had a great discussion about this essay, and Josie's intellectual curiosity was at its peak during the lesson.

After a brief introduction to our course, I had Josie consider the following statement: "Everything is an argument." After elaborating on this for a bit, I told Josie that this would be the mantra of our time together and the slogan underlying every piece of written work we come across. Because good readers are good writers and vice versa, I told Josie that our course would be centered around the study of argumentative/persuasive writing (as this is the most complex of writing forms which Josie will contact in college) in the hopes of bettering our critical reading and comprehension skills. Josie seemed to agree with this progression of the course, and we spent the first 30 minutes of our class reviewing introductions, thesis statements, body paragraphs, topic sentences, evidence/support, commentary, and conclusions. Josie was very attentive and asked questions on how support and commentary work within a body paragraph. We used hypothetical topics like Obesity to construct a dialogue between evidence and what that evidence reveals about the argument (commentary). Using this structural knowledge to guide our reading of Cody Delistray's "The Name Game," we previewed the text to find out these key elements: audience, political lean, author creditability, medium, and source. Previewing essentially calls for one to gather as many clues about a text before he/she actually reads the essay's content. Preliminary research like this helps to guide the actual reading of the text, as the student will be forced, in a sense, to attempt to verify his/her assumptions as they are reading. Josie had some very astute opinions about the source, medium, audience, and author creditability-all of which were verified as we read through the text. After the first preliminary reading, I sought to strengthen Josie's reading comprehension skills by having her create an Organizational Map or outline of Delistray's argument. There was some friction in Josie's identification of the author's main argumentative points (as is expected, as students are not usually taught to track the point-by-point structure of what they read). With guidance, Josie was able to discern the difference between transition sentences, topic sentences, evidence, and commentary. She very intelligently pointed out that one of the author's key points had little to no evidence to support its premise. After we were more than half way through our outline, Josie asked why such an outline would be useful in college. This was a very good question that allowed us to delve into some hypothetical situations where professor's assign a critique of an article or ask that students come to class prepared to discuss a previous reading. Creating an organizational map forces the student to become an active reader and reflect on the author's ideas, leading to retainment and engagement with the material. Passive reading creates an inefficient student who has to re-read and re-learn material. At the end of the lesson, Josie was assigned an essay. Great session. We will unpack a lot of what we learned today in our future meetings.