WRiTing As A REAdER: ComPosing A RHEToRiCAl AnAlysis 41Council of Teachers of English. One need only look at standards in dif-
ferent subject areas in school districts across the country to realize the
extent to which there is indeed a national curriculum.
Whether the current curriculum in use in the schools across the coun-
try is adequate is of course open to debate. Creating any curriculum is by
definition a deeply political act, and is, or should be, subject to consider-
able negotiation and discussion at any level. But to act as though there is
not a de facto national curriculum is simply inaccurate. First graders in
most school districts across the country learn about the weather and the
seasons, along with more basic skills like adding and subtracting. Students
do not learn to divide before they learn how to add or multiply. Local and
state history is almost universally introduced for the first time in either
third or fourth grade. It is reintroduced in most states at the seventh or
eighth grade levels. Algebra is typically taught in the ninth grade. Tradi-
tions, developmental patterns of students, textbook content, and national
subject standards combine to create a fairly uniform national curriculum.
Hirsch’s complaint that there is no national curriculum is not
motivated by a desire to establish one but rather a desire to establish a
curriculum that reflects his cultural and ideological orientation. It is a
sophisticated assault on more inclusive and diverse models of curricu-
lum and culture — one that represents a major battle in the culture wars
of the last twenty years in the United States.67WRiting as a ReadeR:
composing a RhetoRical analysis
One of our favorite exercises is to ask students to choose a single para-
graph or a brief section from a text they have read and to write a rhetorical
analysis. We first ask our students to identify the writer’s key claims and
ideas to orient them to the main points they want to make in their analy-
sis. We then ask our students to consider such features as the situation
that calls for a response in writing and the writer’s purpose, intended audi-
ence, kinds of claims, and types of evidence. In their rhetorical analyses,
we encourage our students to analyze the ways writers develop their ideas
and the extent to which these strategies succeed. That is, we ask our stu-
dents to consider how writers express their ideas, develop their points of
view, respond to a given situation, and use evidence to persuade readers.
Once you are able to identify how writers make arguments, look critically
at what works and what doesn’t in making a persuasive argument; then
you will be able to make use of their strategies in your own writing.
For example, one of our students wrote a rhetorical analysis of an
excerpt from David Tyack’s book on education, Seeking Common Ground:
Public Schools in a Diverse Society (2004). In his book, Tyack examines the
extent to which the purpose of education in American schools has devel-
oped out of and reflected the political, economic, and moral concerns of02_GRE_5344_Ch2_029_054.indd 41 11/19/14 4:03 PM