Joseph Bizup - National Council of Teachers of English - Homepage

W1 CCC 61:1 / SEPTEMBER 2009 Joseph Bizup The Uses of Toulmin in Composition Studies In 1958, Stephen Toulmin published The Uses of Argument, the third chapter of which presents a “layout” or model of argument that has exerted enormous inﬂuence on argument theory and on the teaching of argument for half a century. One of the book’s guiding premises is that we can best apprehend the meaning or force of words and propositions by looking at how people actu- ally use them in various contexts (65). Proceeding in this spirit, I want to take the ﬁftieth anniversary of the book’s publication as an occasion to examine the uses to which Toulmin himself has been put in the scholarly discourse of composition studies. The picture is a mixed one. On the one hand, the Toulmin model and its pedagogical applications are longstanding topics of discussion and inquiry in composition studies, and Toulmin’s theoretical formulations have been invoked by participants in some of the discipline’s major debates. 1 On the other hand, composition scholars have historically attended to only a few of Toulmin’s works beyond The Uses of Argument, and citations of even This article examines the various uses to which Stephen Toulmin has been put in composition studies. It presents data on citations of Toulmin in nine journals, consid- ers appeals to Toulmin in several strains of composition scholarship, and argues that composition scholars ought to attend more carefully to Toulmin’s later works.

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Joseph Bizup - National Council of Teachers of English - Homepage