Co-authored by an honors English professor and an award-winning high-school AP teacher, Advancing Rhetoric: Critical Thinking and Writing for the Advanced Student, by Dr Jennifer Cognard-Black and Dr Anne M Cognard, is a composition textbook geared for high-ability learners in both college-level honors and advanced high-school classes, such as Advanced Placement (AP) classes in both Language and Literature. Advancing Rhetoric offers an innovative and challenging pedagogy for writing and critical thinking that motivates high-ability students to invent new forms and to choose writing tasks depending on the subject matter, audience, and rhetorical context of the writing. Students do not drill critical thinking skills they become their own critical thinkers.

To challenge and appeal to high-ability learners, Advancing Rhetoric offers three distinctive features: provocative readings that bring together classical with modern texts (eg, Plato with Toni Morrison) as well as adaptable writing assignments that challenge and excite high-ability students (eg, writing a Socratic Dialogue between Plato and Morrison); an interdisciplinary, multicultural, and multimedia pedagogy thoroughly informed by classical rhetorical principles; and, methods by which students learn how to develop their own evaluative rubrics for assessing all kinds of writing.