Lunsford, a professor and director of the Writing and Critical Thinking Program at Stanford University, will spend the day working with new and experienced teaching assistants in the English department and meeting with faculty and graduate students to discuss scholarly works. She also will give a public lecture on rhetoric at 1:30 p.m. in the auditorium in Gambrell Hall; a reception will follow.

"Andrea specializes in the history of rhetoric, especially in recovering the rhetorical contributions of women throughout the centuries," said Christy Friend, an assistant professor of English and associate director of the First-Year English Program. "What’s unusual about her is that she not only has this corpus of scholarly works but also uses her expertise to write some of the most prominent textbooks for teaching undergraduates to write."

The English department has adopted Lunsford’s newest textbook, Everything’s an Argument, co-written with John Ruszkiewicz, for use in English 101. The book draws on the tradition of classical rhetoric.

"From ancient times, classical rhetoric taught students not just to write papers in school but also to think about writing and speaking as part of what they were going to do as citizens, training students in a broad range of abilities so they could speak and write clearly and persuasively not only in academic arenas but also in public arenas," Friend said.

Following that classical example, students using Everything’s an Argument might write a traditional academic research paper on free trade, for example, but also discuss how the movie, Hoop Dreams, makes a certain kind of argument and tries to persuade the audience in different ways.

"It’s a textbook that gives students the opportunity to look critically at various kinds of text and encourages them to write arguments for a variety of arenas," Friend said. "It’s a more interdisciplinary approach to speaking and writing."

New TAs in the English department will meet for three days during the workshop, listening to speakers and looking at samples of student papers. Experienced TAs will come in for meetings on the third day of the workshop, and Lunsford will address both groups as the keynote speaker that afternoon.

"We take the training of our TAs very seriously in the English department," Friend said. "To have Andrea share some of her scholarly expertise is a wonderful way to help ground our TAs and give them the theoretical, historical, and scholarly background to make choices when they start teaching 101 courses."

Bill Rivers, an associate professor of English, is director of the First-Year English Program.