Good Reasons

by Jack Selzer, Lester Faigley, Victoria Davis, et al.

Book Overview

Engaging and accessible to all students, Good Reasons is a brief, very readable introduction to argument by two of the country's foremost rhetoricians. By stressing the rhetorical situation and the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0205285864
• ISBN13: 9780205285860
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Longman Publishing Group
• Length: 334 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Good Reasons with Good Service

Excellent book condition- as promised. Competitive price and faster than estimated shipping. Highly recommended to all.

It's actually a decent textbook.

This book has been easier to understand than other English 101 books that are used in other classes. As a textbook, I give it a 4 for comprehension and ease of use.

A Decent Primer

I wanted to give this book five stars just to balance out the rather harsh review that it has recieved already. I certainly won't deny that there's something of a "leftist" ideology about the book, but I attribute that mostly to the fact that it focuses on examples of "rhetoric" involving social transformation and change. The authors focus on Rachel Carson as a starting model for two reasons, both of which seem fairly justifiable to me. First, Silent Spring was a book that made changing attitudes toward environmentalism available to the general public. Second, the authors make every effort to suggest that memorable arguments are not memorable in isolation; they emerge as a response to current events, and they take into account the fallibility of their audience. I would also like to reject the previous reviewers criticisms of the book's apparent lack of rigor or sophistication. The book is marketed, for the first part, to first-year writing classes at the university level. There, it may serve as a fairly good lever for getting students to think about their writing in terms of argument; it's about getting them to articulate their assumptions understand how rational arguments are build up. In spite of the so called "post-modern" bias of the book, I note that while Lester Faigley's Fragments of Rationality is steeped in Lyotard and Foucault, there is precious little in Good Reason's that is controversial. It may press students to think about how meaning is shaped by social contexts, it spends most of its time introducing students to the traditional bases of rhetorical analysis from Aristotle to Toulmin. True, it's a slender volume and a quick read. I certainly wouldn't make it the center of a class on rhetorical analysis. But as a text-book for first-year composition courses, I would suspect most teacher's would see a slender volume appealing. The focus of first-year writing classes, after all, are usually on students' own writing and not--say--on a partial and unbiased understanding of current environmental practice. This said, I'm not fond of the vast majority of writing textbooks which work by giving students a gloss on many different social and political issues. It seems to undermine the need for "informed arguments" which make up much of academic life. If I don't give the book an unhesitating five stars, its simply that the book encourages one to teach students to write responses to the textbook examples that they've just read about--and few people write good arguments based on subjects they've only recently glossed over. Also, the second half of the book focuses primarily on different modes of argument: definition arguments, narrative arguments, evaluative arguments, proposal arguments. On the plus side, I think this helps students to understand and isolate some of their own argumentative tactics. Being able to recognize arguments like this and put a name to it, makes them a little more conscious of what they're doing.The downside