Marie Secor Livres

The historical setting of this diary offers us a glimpse of England at war through the eyes of a person who, though affected by it, did not cultivate political consciousness. Hunt emerges from her diary as a woman caught between unreconcilable her desire for respectability and her pursuit of amorous sensation; her shrewd insight into her and Ford's character and her self-destructiveness in protracting a relationship she knows is doomed to failure; her self-dramatizing instinct, always ready to step back and watch herself in action, and her spontaneity; her pride and her abjectness; her wit and her sadness.

When it was first published in 1982, "A Rhetoric of Argument "developed a ground-breaking new approach to teaching argument. The "stasis approach" pioneered by Fahnestock and Secor distinguished among the four basic questions that arguments are written to answer: What is it? (Definition arguments)How did it get that way? (Causal arguments)Is it good or bad? (Evaluation arguments)What should we do about it? (Proposal arguments) These four questions, now standard in many argument texts, give students a constructive, engaging way to analyze readings by other writers and to construct their own arguments.