George Hillocks (1934–2014)

Why is it that so many of these kinds of books devolve into irrelevance? I'm interested in developing a unit on argumentation for high school students. This book looked like a promising companion to Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkentstein's "They Say/I Say": The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing, so I bought it immediately. Indeed, the book begins with a helpful but far too brief exposition of Stephen E. Toulmin's logic of argumentation (which Professor Toulmin explains in his book The Uses of Argumentation), but then quickly goes downhill.

In the end, fully one-third of this book consists of transcripts of student conversations, presumably, but not particularly demonstratively, meant to show how classroom discussions lead to postulating arguments.

Alas, nothing of the sort occurs, and the reader is left with a mish-mash of ideas, none of which cohere to each other. My advice? If you want to learn something about argumentation, or the teaching of it, leave this waste of paper and time of a book alone, and go straight to Stephen E. Toulmin or Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein,… (mais)