Teaching Professional Writing Rhetorically

Writing and speaking rhetorically means directing one's words to a particular audience for a particular effect; teaching rhetorically includes appealing to students' interests and experience. Writing teachers frequently use scenarios for that purpose. In this article, the author introduces the unified case method as an improvement on the traditional case method and reports on the use of this rhetorical method in a professional writing class. Specifically, the author used a single, complex scenario throughout the semester so that all the writing assignments were situated in the same fictional world. The students reacted enthusiastically to the method, and their writing was more successful.