Speech / Debate Curriculum

"A Workbook for Arguments" builds on Anthony Weston's "Rulebook for Arguments" to provide a complete textbook for a course in critical thinking or informal logic. "Workbook" includes:

The entire text of "Rulebook," supplemented with extensive further explanations and exercises.

Homework exercises adapted from a wide range of arguments from newspapers, philosophical texts, literature, movies, videos, and other sources.

Practical advice to help students succeed when applying the "Rulebook's" rules to the examples in the homework exercises.

Suggestions for further practice, outlining activities that students can do by themselves or with classmates to improve their skills.

Detailed instructions for in-class activities and take-home assignments designed to engage students.

An appendix on mapping arguments, giving students a solid introduction to this vital skill in constructing complex and multi-step arguments and evaluating them.

Model answers to odd-numbered problems, including commentaries on the strengths and weaknesses of selected sample answers and further discussion of some of the substantive intellectual, philosophical, or ethical issues they raise.

The definitive compendium of classic and modern oratory expanded―with a new preface on what makes a speech "great."

An instant classic when it was first published a decade ago and now enriched by seventeen new speeches, Lend Me Your Ears contains more than two hundred outstanding moments of oratory. It is selected, arranged, and introduced by William Safire, who honed his skills as a presidential speechwriter. He is considered by many to be America's most influential political columnist and most elegant explicator of our language. Covering speeches from Demosthenes to George W. Bush, this latest edition includes the words of Cromwell to the "Rump Parliament," Orson Welles eulogizing Darryl F. Zanuck, General George Patton exhorting his troops before D-Day, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaking on Bush v. Gore. A new section incorporates speeches that were never delivered: what Kennedy was scheduled to say in Dallas; what Safire wrote for Nixon if the first moon landing met with disaster; and what Clinton originally planned to say after his grand jury testimony but swapped for a much fiercer speech.