Most graduate students and professors are so accustomed to the conventions of persuasive writing that they rarely have to think about them as they read and write.  The moves made in an argument come naturally to them, and it’s easy to forget that this is a consequence of years of reading and writing in this particular style.  Undergraduate students sometimes complain that they don’t understand what exactly it is that their professors want from them and that the rules of academic writing just aren’t clear to them.  Rhetoric is often the ONLY time in their college career that an instructor will focus on teaching the structure of an argument and the conventions of academic writing, rather than assuming the students have already mastered them.  Rhetoric, in other words, is an opportunity for students to learn the rules of the academic game

There’s not a lot of time, in one semester, to teach students all they need to know about writing persuasively.  But they should be able to learn recognize some of the major moves they need to make when constructing an argument. 

Recognizing the moves

• At the beginning of the semester give students a handout describing some of the key moves in an argument (see example, "Six Important Features," in sidebar).
• For every reading assignment ask students to make two sets of notes in the margins of each paragraph or section. The first documents what the author is saying - a summary. The second records what he/she is doing in terms of the argument structure - sketching the context, making a claim...etc. The second set of notes, in other words, can be brought together to creat a map of the structure of the essay. Model how to do this on the board the first couple of times.
• The class can break into groups and practice doing this together.  Each group reports their summary of what the author is saying and doing back to the class, they can all be put on the board and the students can discuss which is best and why.
• Throughout the semester the students can continue to annotate each reading in this way.  They can compare readings to each other, looking at different approaches to writing an introduction or staking a claim or dealing with objections.  Instructors can give frequent, short informal assignments asking them to do this in writing, in class or for homework.

Learning the moves

• Break down the writing process into discrete tasks -writing the intro, writing a thesis etc. (We'll focus here on writing a thesis, but you can do the same thing for any one of these writing tasks)
• Have the students read and compare several examples of thesis statements from their assigned readings and discuss the advantages of each.
• Provide the students with examples of "poor, better and best" thesis statements (see links below). Compare and discuss what makes one better than another.
• Provide students with examples of introductions and/or thesis statements from previous (annonymous) student papers. Model how you would rewrite one of these. Then break the students into groups and ask them to rewrite the others. The groups can all rewrite the same one, you can put the new versions on the board and have a discussion about which is the best and why. Or each group can do a different one and then present the original and rewrite to the rest of the class for comments and suggestions.
  

(Grammatical errors and sentence-level difficulties are also problems in some student writing. Rather than devoting a lot of time to grammar in class, it's usually better to do the occasional mini-lesson covering the most common mistakes and /or refer individual students to grammar handbooks)