Kantz's Article: Rhetorical Reading Strategies, And The Construction Of Women

Kantz conducted the research for this article as a graduate student. Her professor was Linda Flower and one of her classmates was Christina Haas. This is significant because Haas and Flower have a piece in the same book. This tells the reader that Kantz knows what she is talking about because of her credibility. This piece was written in 1990 and is from the text “Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively.” This article was written after Haas and Flower’s article that was written in 1988 to an audience that was just emerging. This is another example to the credibility of Kantz since her piece was written afterwards.
Margaret Kantz’s article is about how to make a new text from an existing one. Specifically, Kantz explains how …show more content…
She is a part of the discussion of rhetorical situations, and the article written by Haas and Flower “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning.” Kantz uses rhetorical situations in her article to explain that it is a helpful tool to read sources and comprise a paper. She quotes Haas and Flower’s text saying that “readers who used rhetorical strategies to “account for author’s purpose, context, and effect on the audience” helped students learn the information more quickly and thoroughly than students who focused on just content.” She then explained that if Shirley would have read her sources by reading rhetorically she would have understood her sources audiences were different, and might have had something to say. Even though reading rhetorically is a useful technique, Kantz said “Even when students read their stories rhetorically, they tend to merely report the results of this analysis.” To move past this she continued the conversation of rhetorical situations by discussing Kinneavy’s triangle. The three points of the triangle represent the rhetor, decoder, and encoder. The triangle served the purpose to show her students that there are gaps in texts, and by recognizing these gaps can make it easier to think of things to say. Kantz then included an excerpt of something a student wrote to demonstrate how the student was able to discover a gap between her topic and research. By discussing rhetorical …show more content…
“Students need to read source texts as arguments and to think about the rhetorical contexts in which they were written rather than to read them merely as a set of facts to be learned.”(Kantz 433.) Kantz argument is that using rhetorical reading techniques is a useful tool in recognizing the difference between facts and claims to write an original argument. Support for this claim includes her credibility, and personal experiences she had as a