Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy: The Critical Citizen's Guide to Argumentative Rhetoric, Brief Edition (Cultural Politics and the Promise of Democracy)

This new edition is substantially updated for a new era of rising populism, renewed racial tensions, new social movement forms, and one of the most rhetorical presidential campaigns in memory. Moreover, the prose has been significantly streamlined for fluid student comprehension. Added are new readings from such authors as Michelle Alexander, Paul Krugman, Republican pollster Frank Luntz, and libertarian Leonard Peikoff.

This authored textbook-reader addresses the need for college students to develop critical reading, writing, and thinking skills for self-defense in the contentious arena of American civic rhetoric. Designed for first-year or more advanced composition and critical thinking courses, its wealth of techniques train students to "read" the bias of media and to locate, in their prose and that of others, logical fallacies and other rhetorical markers. Exercises also help students understand the ideological positions and rhetorical patterns that underlie opposing views. Widely debated issues of whether objectivity is possible and whether there is a liberal or conservative bias in news and entertainment media, as well as in education itself, are foregrounded as topics for rhetorical analysis.