A good genre to use to begin thinking about disposition is poetry. Something holds poems together, and that "something" is rarely the overt, syllogistic logic of a Marvell poem. Especially with modern poetry, that "something" is not always a predestined medium such as a Shakespearean sonnet. Yet all poems have some kind of internal structure or set of "girders" that hold them together.

Have students read "Buffalo Bill's" by e.e. cummings (p. 153), T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (pp. 602–604), and "To Live in the Borderlands Means You" by Gloria Anzaldúa (pp. 1088–1089). Then have students work through the following questions, which are intended to open up lines of inquiry into structural choices and their link to meaning:

• Look visually at all three poems. What do you see? How does the visual layout of the poem represent the poet's topic or subject matter?
• More precisely, why do you think that "Buffalo Bill's" is arranged like irregular stairsteps, "Prufrock" in changing stanza lengths (with certain indents), and "Borderlands" with the first line of each stanza to the left of all succeeding lines?
• Look at the words: how cummings smashes some words together on the page and leaves others all alone; how Eliot uses structural devices such as ellipses, dashes, quotation marks, and single-word sentences to highlight and separate his words; and how Anzaldúa mixes Spanish with English. How do each of these poems use words differently? Do you see similarities in how each uses words? What purpose do these words serve in terms of the overall meaning of each poem?
• Articulate an organizational pattern for each poem. What comes first? What happens in the middle? How does each poem conclude? Do these organizational patterns make "sense"? If so, how? If not, why? (Consider how cummings's poem begins with the words "Buffalo Bill's" and ends with "Mister Death," while "Prufrock" begins with a quotation from Dante's Inferno and "Borderlands" begins each stanza with a slightly different version of the poem's title.)
• Look at each title (remember that cummings's poem is actually untitled). How does the title impact the overall structure of the poem? Does the lack of a title change the structure of cummings's poem? If so, how? If not, why?
• For each poem, where does the "main idea" come within the structure? At a climax? At the end? Repeatedly throughout the whole? In the title? How does the rest of the structure support that main idea?
• How does each poem end? Does the ending "fit" the overall structure of the poem? If so, how? If not, why?

All three poems illustrate that a poem's form is integral to a poem's meaning. It is easiest to see this perhaps in the arrowhead-like look of cummings's "Buffalo Bill's" coupled with his use of both single words and run-together words, which are meant to illustrate certain aspects of both Buffalo Bill the person, as well as a certain cultural myth of American history. Meaning is impossible or at least drastically curtailed in poetry unless form follows function, unless form is created as a necessary and pointed factor for a poet's purpose.

In addition to thinking about poetic structure, through this discussion students are engaging in the acts of literary comparison and contrast defined on p. 152, which are principle elements of critical thinking about literature.

Building on the previous class's writing, have students discuss the following questions as an entire class. You may wish to have one or two students read their final revised poems aloud so that the class has a shared base to work from. As the class works through the questions, you may want students to read parts of their poems aloud as evidence for their individual responses. Refer students to p. 153 for a discussion of evidence in this context.

• Returning to the original version of Eliot's "Prufrock," look again at the poem's structure and recall how that structure is linked to the poem's meaning. How did the structure—and therefore the meaning—change when you modified the poem's movement by mixing and matching Eliot's stanzas, lines, and words?
• How did the structure and meaning change when you altered the poem by inserting lines and words from "Buffalo Bill's"?
• Eliot and cummings were contemporaries ("Buffalo Bill's" was written in 1917, and "Prufrock" was published the same year). Do you think their similar historical and cultural contexts make any difference in how their respective language and syntax fit together?
• On the other hand, when cummings wrote "Buffalo Bill's," he was living in the United States, while Eliot was living in London when he published "Prufrock." Though both men were interested in unconventional poetics, cummings took apart traditional syntax and punctuation, whereas Eliot retained certain traditional marks of poetry, including literary allusion. In this sense, their cultural contexts were not quite the same. Do you think this makes any difference in how their respective language and syntax do not fit together?
• How did the structure and meaning change when you revised the poem once again by incorporating stanzas, lines, and words from "Borderlands"? Did the insertion of Spanish make a difference? If so, how? If not, why?
• Anzaldúa published this poem in 1987, so obviously her cultural referents are much more modern than those in "Prufrock" or "Buffalo Bill's." How does this historical difference reflect what happened when you amalgamated the Eliot-cummings rendition with Anzaldúa?
• You were asked to retain Eliot's original structure as much as possible with each poetic transformation. Were you successful? Was it difficult? What strategies or tactics did you use to be true to Eliot's form? How did the poem's meaning change when you arrived at your final revision that included Eliot's, cumming's, and Anzaldúa's words together? How was that change linked to the poem's new structure?
• What does all of this transforming tell you about the relationship between a poem's meaning and how it is put together, its form?

By the end of this period, students should have a good sense of what literary disposition is and its importance to literary meaning. In addition, students will have demonstrated extended literary analysis through certain precepts of critical thinking, especially comparison, contrast, and the use of literary evidence to support one's claims.

To lead students toward recognizing disposition in longer works, have them turn to an examination of disposition in various essays. To begin, have students work on the specific parts of a single essay—Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (pp. 173–178)—before they come together to think about how those parts link together to form a certain structure.

Swift's essay follows a classical form of disposition: the Ciceronian Oration. The parts of a Ciceronian Oration are exordium, narratio, propositio, partitio, confirmatio, confutatio (or refutatio), digressio, and peroratio. Add an "n" to the ends of the words ending in "o," and, for the most part, one readily sees the English language equivalents of these terms. Structurally, the first four parts (exordium through partitio) establish authorial ethos. The confirmatio and confutatio, the sections that constitute most of the main text of an essay, are formed through logos. The digressio, also part of the main text, introduces overt pathos into the writing. Finally, the peroratio reestablishes ethos to generate audience good will.

Here is a brief description of how each part functions in terms of classical rhetoric:

Exordium: Unlike the typical modern dictum that the introduction of an essay must "grab the reader's attention," the exordium simply presents the topic as one worthy of consideration. Because most readers lose attention later on in an essay, it is not important to "grab attention" at the start; rather, a writer explains why the topic at hand is worth the reader's time and response.

Narratio: Narratio does not mean "narrative" in the modern-day sense but, instead, presents any necessary background information to the reader. The writer must provide enough information to help the reader think about the topic in an informed manner; thus, the narratio might be definitional, statistical, chronological, or historic. It might relate a quotation or a statistic, explain the various sides of a controversy, or furnish an important summary. The authors of the text talk about this same idea in explaining that a writer must summarize the significance of someone else's essay if that essay is the topic of the writer's analysis (pp. 166–170).

Propositio: The propositio (proposition) is the point at which the writer finally takes a position on his or her topic. Until this time, the writer has not divulged an opinion about the topic—no thesis has been assumed. The propositio is either syllogistic—that is, consisting of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion, or enthymemic—that is, a syllogism in which the minor premise is omitted. In other words, the propositio is a complex sentence that is positional (the writer takes a stand) and controversial (in that the writer is gutsy enough to take on a difficult topic).

Partitio: The partitio is a subcategory of the propositio and outlines the major arguments that constitute the author's approach to proving the thesis. The partitio involves the writer's lines of inquiry, or topoi.

Confirmatio: The confirmatio does what one expects, given the suggestiveness of the English word confirmation. It confirms what has been asserted in the propositio. Through various appeals to logos—patterns of reasoning—and oftentimes a display of secondary evidence or non-artistic proofs that come from outside the writer such as data, statistics, quotations, interviews, and the like, the writer confirms the truth of the thesis with various rhetorical examples.

Confutatio (or Refutatio): As is suggested by the English word refutation, the confutatio (or refutatio) preempts potential disagreements to the propositio by presupposing the main objections to the essay's thesis. The writer argues against each objection, thereby attacking, via logos, any opposition before such opposition even has a chance to voice its disagreement.

Digressio: Unlike the confirmatio and confutatio that take logos as their rhetorical strategy, the digressio engages pathos. Where some readers might be moved by examples and quotations, others will not be moved without an appeal to emotion; thus, the digressio entails a story, an anecdote, an extended metaphor, a myth, or an allegory—something that takes the more abstracted propositio and "brings it home" to the reader through narration, description, and imagery.

Peroratio: Finally, the peroratio is not merely a reiteration of the propositio. Rather, the writer answers the question, "So what?" What does this argument mean for the future? For humanity? For me, personally? Returning to the effort to build credibility through ethos in the peroratio, the writer shows his or her capacity for thinking broadly and in a visionary manner about the ways the reader and writer may, together, envision an idealized future as a direct result of the writer's argument.

Swift's essay is a good one to study to understand the parts of the Ciceronian Oration because Swift intended to exaggerate the parts, even alluding to Cicero's orational structure through his transitions ("I shall now therefore humbly propose . . . ," "I have too long digressed," "I can think of no one objection").Yet Swift's topic is ridiculous; therefore, the orational form is not appropriate for the essay's content. Because Swift knew his Cicero, he obviously intended to misuse the form in order to achieve a purpose other than the stated one of "A Modest Proposal."

For this class period, once you have explained each of the parts of a Ciceronian Oration and their rhetorical function, have students work through Swift's essay, marking the parts of an oration as they go. This may be done either in groups or as a whole class. If you use groups to begin with, make sure to confer as an entire class before the end of the period.

Today students write an in-class essay in which they create a Ciceronian Oration out of the essay from Chapter 8 that they have chosen. This assignment has a dual function. First, it necessitates that students both understand the original structure of their specific essay as well as the structure of a Ciceronian Oration, and, second, it necessitates that students take on the voice of another writer, which will ready them for discussions of style later on.

Obviously, students will have to rearrange certain parts of their essays as well as create new parts as they change them from the original structures developed by Woolf, Hughes, Bingham, or Owens into a Ciceronian Oration. Students may use or omit any part of the original essay they wish, and they may add anything they believe they need in order to make their oration convincing. They do not need to use quotation marks when they employ direct quotations because they are to act as if they are Woolf or Hughes or Bingham or Owens. Students are to mimic the author's style and tone.

At this juncture, it is not necessary to have a discussion about what aspects of writing constitute a writer's style or tone. The students' previous work with tone through ethos is sufficient for them to get a feeling for the rhetorical techniques they will have to engage to do the job. If you wish, you may touch on the short discussions of these ideas in the text's sections on the essayist's persona—another term for ethos—and the essayist's tone (pp. 162–164).

Students working with Woolf and Hughes will have to infer what the argument, or propositio, is for their oration because these two authors do not state an overt, argumentative thesis. Indeed, Woolf's essay is meditative, "chiefly concerned with exploring an idea or a feeling," whereas Hughes's essay is largely narrative, "recount[ing] some happening." Bingham's is a combination of meditative and argumentative, whereas Owens's essay is both meditative and expository. See the text, pp. 161–162, for definitions of each of these types of essays.

To give students practice in writing timed essays similar to those on the AP* exams, provide the following writing prompt and have students complete their planning and writing in 40 minutes. Students will need access to their texts in order to read the excerpt.

Have students reread all the essays they have written to date, both in-class and out-of-class, formal and informal. Have each student use the list of attributes of "good writing" that was already generated by the class to determine which pieces of his or her writing or which parts are the most effective and why.