How To Train Your Dragon #1 February 2010 On Sale: February 1, 2010 Featuring: Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III 240 pages ISBN: 0316085278 EAN: 9780316085274 Paperback (reprint) $5.99 Add to Wish List Childrens Buy at Amazon.com There are big expectations if you’re the son of the viking king How To Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell Now a major motion picture Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III was an awesome sword-fighter, a dragon-whisperer and the greatest Viking Hero who ever lived. But it wasn’t always like that. In fact, in the beginning, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III was the most put upon Viking you’d ever seen. Not loud enough to make himself heard at dinner with his father, Stoick the Vast; not hard enough to beat his chief rival, Snotlout, at Bashyball, the number one school sport and CERTAINLY not stupid enough to go into a cave full of dragons to find a pet… It’s time for Hiccup to learn how to be a Hero. Excerpt 1. FIRST CATCH YOUR DRAGON Long ago, on the wild and windy isle of Berk, a smallish Viking with a longish name stood up to his ankles in snow. Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, the Hope and Heir…

Ask ten different scholars of rhetoric to define the word, and you’ll get ten different answers. Dictionary definitions usually say something along the lines of “the skill or study of using language as persuasion” (the one I give to my students gets even more specific: The art and skill of using language to communicate and/or persuade”). I suppose the key words in these definitions are “language” and “persuade”. Analyze any piece of writing—be it fiction or non-fiction, a bumper sticker or a political speech, a text message or a tweet, a lab report or a love letter—and you’ll find that each one is designed to move the reader in some way: to thought, to action, to response. The language may make an emotional appeal, a logical appeal, or an ethical appeal. What’s more, each one of these aforementioned texts tends to be in response to something else and is part of an ongoing conversation. Moreover, when we write, be it a novel or a blog post or a marketing analysis or a resume, we write with purpose and an audience in mind—even if we keep a private diary, we write “Dear Diary,” implying an intended reader, even if that reader…