Controversies is based on a critical proposition: that students can develop vital skills when they engage in long-term projects that require repeated application of new knowledge and aptitudes. This book asks students to invest in understanding a current issue and offers a guide for developing their ability to participate in its discourse across a semester.

Intro + Overview: The opening chapter provides explanation of core concepts students and instructors will use throughout the semester to choose, understand, analyze, and develop arguments for their chosen controversy. It offers guidelines for choosing an issue and key considerations for asking questions about complex conversations.

Sources + Research: Chapters 1-3 teach students how to conduct research and evaluate types of sources. Students are taught to: identify credibility and bias in 21st century sources; fairly summarize and represent author intention and argument; and determine how a source is useful for their project. At the end of this unit, students are expected to produce writing that provides an overview of their chosen controversy, synthesizing its history, its current complexities, and its range of viewpoints.

Rhetoric + Analysis: Chapters 4-7 explain how to analyze speakers’ arguments and persuasive strategies by understanding texts’ rhetorical situation, argumentative claims and evidence, and rhetorical appeals to audiences’ sense of trust, belief, and emotion. Throughout these chapters, students will prepare ad produce a rhetorical analysis of a specific argumentative text that participates in their chosen controversy’s discourse.

Discourse + Argument: Chapters 8-10 introduce students to argumentative strategies they can use to produce their own propositions, including methods for responding to counterarguments and structural frameworks for arranging the many pieces of an argument. At the end of this textbook, students are asked to produce a persuasive essay that makes a claim about or proposes a solution for their chosen controversy, leveraging the skills and knowledges they have developed throughout the semester to persuade a specific audience to do a specific thing.