Rhetorical Reading of Margaret Kantz By Donald Howell final draft

Rhetorical Reading of Margaret Kantz

By Donald Howell

Margaret Kantz being a professor has good insight on what other teachers/professors need to do to help their students get the best out of the English department. Kantz wrote this article for English teachers/professor to try and help them understand why students are not doing so well with assignment. Students are not being taught in a way to read and write rhetorically.
This article started with a girl Shirley who was a great high school student, when she did reports she reported the facts she found in books. Kantz shows us that not everything you read in a book is a fact. Shirley found this out when she was doing a report on the battle of Agincourt. Shirley did her paper and she just reported the facts, even though one book said one thing and another said something else, she still reported what she thought was facts. Shirley got a bad grade on her paper and did not know why, until her friend Alice who knew how to read rhetorically, pointed out how she could have argued about the conflicting sources. Alice showed Shirley how she could have made her own original argument. Kantz was showing the readers how students need to be taught how to read a book with more of a rhetorical analysis. Kantz ends the article that students should be taught to be more creative with their research. “Creativity is an inherently rhetorical quality”(81). “If we teach our Shirley’s to see themselves as scholars who work to find answers to problem questions, and if we teach them to think constructively, we will be doing the most exciting work that teachers can do, nurturing creativity”(81). Kantz is speaking out to all the English teachers/professor who will read her article.  She also has opened my eyes to a new way of thinking when I read.
Margaret Kantz, the author of the article Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively was published in an academic journal called College English in 1990. Kantz did her research for this article as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University.  While at the Carnegie her professor was Linda Flower and a classmate of Kantz was Christina Haas who both are cited in Kantz article.  These are just a few people who are cited in this article, which is a good indication that she did a lot of research and used good sources. Margaret Kantz wrote this article as a professor at Central Missouri State University.
The reason I believe Margaret Kantz wrote this article is to have college English teachers/professors help their students learn to read and write with more of a rhetorical analysis in mind. Right now in high school students are learning that "research meant compiling facts and transmitting them to a teacher"(67). But students in college "must now learn to use a variety of conflicting sources to make an original argument"(67). Students are just reporting the facts in books. Kantz is telling teachers/professors that students have to change "to the more sophisticated world of arguing about what the facts might be"(67). Margaret Kantz "shows readers how many new ideas are involved in that change"(67) One thing readers have to "recognize that facts aren't so much inherently true statements as they are claims"(67). The thing with a claim is that they are not always true but one sided.
For example, if you are reading a book on the battle of Agincourt written out of a French history book, you might hear that the French army was small and the British army was big. On the other hand if you read a British history book it would say that the British army was small and the French army was big. Books can be bias depending on who wrote them and what they were writing about.  Kantz tells us “what makes a statement a fact is not how true the statement is but that most people agree that it’s true and there for treat it true”(67).
In this article Kantz uses a young lady Shirley, who has had a great ability writing book reports in high school. Shirley found out that just taking the facts from sources and relaying them to the teacher will not give you a good grade in college. Shirley has to learn how to read and write more rhetorically. Shirley did a paper on the battle of Agincourt; she did not realize when she was reading the different sources that the sources said different things about the battle. One source said one thing and another source said something totally different. That’s when her friend Alice came in after she got a bad grade on her paper and showed her how she could have turned the conflicting sources in to her own original argument about why the sources did not agree.
Kantz article pointed out that teachers/professors need to teach their students to look at reading as an argument more than facts on paper. It would benefit readers and writers if they translated evidence into their writing rather than writing facts in their paper.  Kantz shows us that writing in your own words are better than writing thoughts of other people. In the end teachers/professors must change the way they are teaching to give their students the knowledge to read with more of a rhetorical analysis to complete a good report. “Most importantly, we can use the sequence of drafts to demand that our students demonstrate increasingly sophisticated kinds of analytic and rhetorical proficiency”(81). Kantz is letting teachers/professors know that there is a way to teach a student to better themselves as writers.  Make students write multiple drafts of a paper until they get it right.  “Rhetorical reading and writing heuristics can help students to represent tasks in rich and interesting ways”(81). “They can help students to set up complex goal structures (Bereiter and Scardamalia, “Conversation”) (81). “They offer students many ways to think about their reading and writing texts”(81). Kantz is telling teachers/professors that if you teach students this way of thinking then it will help them with ways to think when they are reading and writing. The article is a great example of what college English teachers/professor should be doing to help their students.