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An instructional note on foregrounding rhetoric across the curriculum to convey the rigor of professional and technical writing and assist instructors in claiming pedagogical ethos in a course that spans many disciplines.

A brief review of composition theory shows metaphor is often underused and misrepresented in the composition classroom; in response, I suggest metaphor is foundationalto argumentation and provide a method to teach it as such.

Working with accounts of famous trials can involve students in thinking through and critiquing important techniques of argumentation.

Describes a course in the first-year college composition sequence (with substantial research and argumentation components) that is organized around a career focus on social services practice. Describes how the students learn about connections between writing, thinking, problem solving, composition class, and their chosen profession.

Describes how one teacher adapted the Toulmin argumentation model to improve discussion in introductory literature classes. Describes the method and its application to literary texts. Shows how it enables students with no particular attraction to literature to invent and respond to arguments about a text, ground those arguments in the text, and warrant them to their classmates’ satisfaction.

Makes a case for using advertising as the common subject matter in a composition course, and for analyzing advertisements as a means of teaching argumentation. Discusses seeking a social-epistemic curriculum in the heterogeneous writing class. Shows why the close analysis of print advertisements provides an ideal opportunity to discuss questions of what constitutes a good claim.

With the Toulmin analysis, determining an argument’s warrants can be especially tricky and frustrating for students. Using cartoons is an effective strategy for teaching the importance of warrants in a way that students can easily understand and enjoy.