David Zarefsky – författare

Illustrates the interweaving of rhetorical and historical forces in shaping public policy In January 1964, in his first State of the Union address, President Lyndon Johnson announced a declaration of “unconditional war” on poverty. By the end of the year the Economic Opportunity Act became law.

The War on Poverty illustrates the interweaving of rhetorical and historical forces in shaping public policy. Zarefsky suggest that an important problem in the War on Poverty lay in its discourse. He assumes that language plays a central role in the formulation of social policy by shaping the context within which people view the social world. By terming the anti-poverty effort a war, President Johnson imparted significant symbolism to the effort: it called for total victory and gave confidence that the “war” was winnable. It influenced the definition of the enemy as an intergenerational cycle of poverty, rather than the shortcomings of the individual; and it led to the choice of community action, manpower programs, and prudent management as weapons and tactics. Each of these implications involves a choice of language and symbols, a decision about how to characterize and discuss the world. Zarefsky contends that each of these rhetorical choices was helpful to the Johnson administration in obtaining passage of the Economic Opportunity Ac of 1964, but that each choice invited redefinition or reinterpretation of a symbol in a way that threatened the program.

Written in an accessible style, this textbook introduces undergraduate students to the theoretical and practical aspects of debate and outlines the fundamental skills of analysis and advocacy.

Debate teaches students how to solve the problems that we face in everyday and public situations. This book allows readers to face such problems head on by equipping them with the knowledge and skills to analyze a situation, propose solutions, and present debates and arguments in a persuasive manner. Organized into two parts, the book begins by laying the theoretical foundations and offering a step-by-step guide to debate. Students are shown how to compare pros and cons, test evidence and reasoning, and defend and develop their own positions. Each chapter in part two explores key sample constructive, rebuttal, and summary debate speeches and includes exercises and assignments to allow students to actively engage with the material and experience debate in the classroom.

Providing students with the tools to become responsible members of a democratic society, Learning to Debate: An Introduction to Analysis and Advocacy is an ideal textbook for undergraduate Argumentation and Debate and Speech Communication courses.

Material for instructors, including PowerPoint slides and an instructor’s manual, is available at https://routledge.com/9781032671390.

Written in an accessible style, this textbook introduces undergraduate students to the theoretical and practical aspects of debate and outlines the fundamental skills of analysis and advocacy.

Debate teaches students how to solve the problems that we face in everyday and public situations. This book allows readers to face such problems head on by equipping them with the knowledge and skills to analyze a situation, propose solutions, and present debates and arguments in a persuasive manner. Organized into two parts, the book begins by laying the theoretical foundations and offering a step-by-step guide to debate. Students are shown how to compare pros and cons, test evidence and reasoning, and defend and develop their own positions. Each chapter in part two explores key sample constructive, rebuttal, and summary debate speeches and includes exercises and assignments to allow students to actively engage with the material and experience debate in the classroom.

Providing students with the tools to become responsible members of a democratic society, Learning to Debate: An Introduction to Analysis and Advocacy is an ideal textbook for undergraduate Argumentation and Debate and Speech Communication courses.

Material for instructors, including PowerPoint slides and an instructor’s manual, is available at https://routledge.com/9781032671390.

This book contains 20 essays tracing the work of David Zarefsky, a leading North American scholar of argumentation from a rhetorical perspective. The essays cohere around 4 general themes: objectives for studying argumentation rhetorically, approaches to rhetorical study of argumentation, patterns and schemes of rhetorical argumentation, and case studies illustrating the potential of studying argumentation rhetorically. These articles are drawn from across Zarefsky’s 45-year career. Many of these articles originally appeared in publications that are difficult to access today, and this collection brings the reader up to date on the topic.

Zarefsky’s scholarship focuses on the role of language in political argumentation, the ways in which argumentation creates public knowledge and belief, the influence of framing and context on what is said and understood, the deployment of particular patterns and schemes of argumentation in public reasoning, and the influence of debate on politics and governance. All these topics are addressed in this book.

Each of the conceptual essays includes brief application to specific cases, and five extended case studies are also presented in this volume. The case studies cover different themes: two explore famous political debates, the third focuses on presidential rhetoric across the course of United States history, the fourth on the arguments for liberalism at a time of political polarization, and the fifth on the contemporary effort to engage the United States with the Muslim world.

This book is of interest to scholars in the fields of philosophy, logic, law, philosophy of law, and legal history. The range of topics and concepts addressed, the interplay of concepts and cases and the unifying perspective of rhetorical argumentation make this book a valuable read for students of argumentative practice, whether rhetorically or otherwise.