Jennifer Fletcher–Teacher, Author, and Speaker
Two plus decades as a teacher and I’m still trying to figure things out. This blog is about helping students figure things out for themselves, too. Things like how to make their own choices as readers and writers. Or how to adapt and apply their learning in new situations. Rhetorical thinking is the key.
Latest from the Blog
Making the Most of the Opportune Moment
By Jennifer Fletcher In the novel The Hundred Secret Senses (1996), Amy Tan describes the sense of truth as a tingling along the back of the neck. I think of kairos the same way—a felt sense of truth to the moment. It’s that heightened awareness that helps us say the things that need to be…
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Paraphrase and Summary: Getting the “They Say” Right
By Jennifer Fletcher In other posts (see here and here), I’ve written about the value of dialogic argumentation as a mainstay of intellectual work. This is the “they say, I say” approach to source-based writing described by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein in their popular little book by the same name. Understanding and responding to…
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Making Someone Wrong
By Jennifer Fletcher Pick a side and prove the other side wrong. In a nutshell, this is what many argument prompts tell students to do. But “making someone wrong”—that is, accusing, shaming, or blaming someone else instead of seeking a win-win solution—rarely serves our best interests in personal relationships or in academic and professional settings. …
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Rhetorical Thinking 