Good Reasons: Designing And Writing Effective Arguments

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 audience, this rhetoric avoids complicated schemes and terminology in favor of providing students with the practical means to find "good reasons" for the positions they want to advocate to their audiences. Good Reasons helps students write and understand various types of arguments, including visual as well as verbal arguments. Supporting the authors' instruction are numerous readings by professional and student writers and over 50 photographs. Good Reasons is distinctive in providing the most thorough coverage of rhetorical analysis and visual analysis. It has a new emphasis on visual argument throughout that responds to the need for greater visual literacy in a media-saturated culture. Good Reasons is also distinctive in beginning with why people write arguments.

When Lester Faigley started college, he thought he was going to become an architect. Instead, he wound up majoring in English and teaching middle school English and history. Three years after he received a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1976, he joined the faculty of the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he now holds the Robert Adger Law and Thos. H. Law Professorship in Humanities. He has also been a visiting professor at several universities in the United States and abroad, and he is past chair of College Composition and Communication. Faigley served as the founding Director of both the Division of Rhetoric and Composition and the concentration in Technology, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Texas. He teaches undergraduate writing courses on writing and technology and graduate courses on rhetorical theory, discourse analysis, and issues of literacy and technology. He and his wife Linda have been married for more than three decades, and they have two grown sons. His sports passion is kayaking — both in rivers and on the ocean.