Andy Crockett’s piece—“Rhetorical Analysis: Terms of Contention”—in Strategies for Teaching First Year Composition offers an assignment to help students understand the “flexible and contextual nature of words” (146). Inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin’s claim that human speech is simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal, Crockett seeks to help students perceive how words gain meaning in relation to a whole web of other words, which in turn derive meaning from other words, and so on. One aspect of Crockett’s assignment that I think is useful is an in-depth study of a key term, such as “impeach” or “monopoly,” selected from a specific reading. Students use a dictionary to define their chosen term and find synonyms using a thesaurus. Then, students establish a cluster of words related to their key term. With this new sense of their key term’s location among other words, students create a taxonomy to illustrate the relationships among their cluster of terms. I think it would be interesting for students to perform this kind of analysis on more than one key term in a given piece, ultimately creating a taxonomy showing the connections among the words most important to the argument.
