Multiple Genres, Multiple Voices: Teaching Argument in Composition and Literature (Crosscurrents)

The assignment: Teaching the dreaded college research paper.
The challenge: Motivating students to take risks and think critically and imaginatively, while teaching them to infuse their argumentative essays with research.
The solution: Introducing the multi-voiced argument (MVA) into your syllabus.

The MVA explores the many perspectives of an argument by using multiple genres written from different points of view. As Cheryl Johnson and Jayne Moneysmith explain, the MVA is the instructor's answer to dullness, predictability, and disengagement-it invigorates teaching and energizes student writers by engaging them in informed role-playing, rigorous research, and sophisticated analysis.

Practical and teacher-centered, Multiple Genres, Multiple Voices presents a step-by-step approach to teaching the MVA in order to deepen student's critical thinking and sharpen their creative expression, all while meeting your college or university's core writing goals. It includes practical features such as:

• classroom-tested exercises and assignments
• strategies for responding and evaluation
• two complete student examples that demonstrate how to develop a multivoiced project
• additional student examples of creative MVA projects on the book's accompanying website
• approaches for both composition and literature classrooms.

A companion website has been developed as an integral component to support the use of this text. It provides an extensive collection of materials designed to enhance teaching MVAs, including suggestions for preliminary assignments that set up capstone MVAs, more activities to use in class, shorter capstone projects, assignment sheets, and class handouts.

Stimulate research and genuine intellectual conversation by using the MVA in your teaching of argument. Read Multiple Voices, Multiple Genres and find out why many voices are better than one.