Pedagogy Lesson Plans
Dying Speeches & Bloody Murders: Exploring 18th-19th Century Crime Broadsides Online
In his book On the Contrary, rhetoric scholar Thomas Sloane writes, ”Rhetorical thought is—let us admit it—highly perverse and lawyerly in nature.” In this statement, Sloane not only alludes to the closely intertwined history of rhetoric and law from the earliest days of Western thought to the modern era, but highlights their shared promotion of an agonistic “art of controversy” which seeks to facilitate controversy through the practice of arguing both sides of a case, a practice classical rhetoricians called in utramque partem (“on either side”). The principal theorists of classical Greek and Roman rhetoric promoted agonistic contests in which speakers argued opposite sides of disputed issues, often with specifically judicial contexts in mind, and the American legal system’s adversarial system of justice is founded on a contest of accusation and defense between parties in which each seeks to persuade a judge or jury of disputed issues of fact and law on opposite sides of a case.
Despite the close relationship between rhetoric and law, however, and the fact that the lawyer remains, in the words of legal scholar James Boyd White, “the modern rhetorician in its purest form,” the modern professionalization of law has frequently attempted to deny or repress the rhetorical aspects of legal discourse and the agonistic conflict on which the adversarial system of justice is founded. Instead, modern law has promoted a view of legal discourse as a value-neutral “science” based on logical deduction and immune to social and political influence. This paradoxical relationship between law and rhetoric in modern legal discourse has produced a recent revival of questions about modern law’s denial of rhetoric, including important questions about the role of character and emotion in legal argument, the role of narrative in the analysis of legal evidence, the effect of the adversarial system of justice on social cohesion and division, and the relationship of legal rhetoric to democracy, coercion, and violence.
In this course, we will study these questions by first examining the forms of argument used in the legal profession today, focusing on arguments regarding the interpretation of circumstantial evidence in legal cases and the analogical, or case-based, form of legal argument known as “legal reasoning” which is used to argue for or against the application of judicial precedent to new cases. Specifically, we will study arguments regarding the evidence in controversial trials such as the 1935 Richard Hauptmann (“Lindbergh Kidnapping”) trial, the 1982 Lindy Chamberlain (“Dingo”) trial, and the 1992 Randy Weaver (“Ruby Ridge”) trial, as well as arguments and judicial opinions in U.S. Supreme Court cases regarding the minimum standards of effective legal advocacy found in the Sixth Amendment’s right to assistance of counsel. After examining the forms and purposes of legal rhetoric as it is actually employed in the legal profession, we will then consider contemporary critiques of the adversary system and the agonistic rhetoric on which it depends, including critiques implicit in public perceptions of the legal system and cultural representations of lawyers.
In this conclusion to an online research workshop, students explore the rhetoric of 18th-19th century crime broadsides from the Harvard Law School Library's online collection of crime broadsides at http://broadsides.law.harvard.edu/.
In-class computers with internet access and a course blog.
Previous discussion of legal rhetoric should have covered the symbolic aspects of legal rhetoric, or how legal rhetoric operates not only to decide the outcomes of legal cases but to shape communal values and norms.
To begin the assignment, introduce students to the Harvard Law School Library's online collection of crime broadsides at http://broadsides.law.harvard.edu/. With students at their computers, demonstrate the site's search features and discuss a couple of sample broadsides as a tutorial of the site.
Inform students that their task is isolate and analyze the ways in which norms and identity are rhetorically constructed in one of the broadsides from the site. (Alternatively, students could be instructed to isolate multiple broadsides to compare and contrast.) The remainder of the class is devoted to students conducting their own research and posting their broadsides along with a brief rhetorical analysis to the course blog. The blog posts may then be discussed collectively as a class with or without requesting individual students to present on their broadsides and analysis. The assignment may be completed in a single class period or span two class periods, depending on the details of the assignment.
In furtherance of our discussion of the symbolic aspects of legal rhetoric, or how legal rhetoric operates not only to decide the outcomes of legal cases but to shape communal values and norms, you will isolate and analyze the ways in which norms and identity are rhetorically constructed in one [or more] of the crime broadsides from the Harvard Law School Library's online collection of crime broadsides at http://broadsides.law.harvard.edu/. Your task is to identify a broadside that reflects a particularly interesting example of a rhetoric of identity and post the broadside with a brief rhetorical analysis to the course blog. At the conclusion of the assignment, we will discuss your collective findings and analyses.
I've used this lesson plan with two classes and both found the broadsides and their rhetoric fascinating and enjoyed the assignment. Their contributions were often very engaged and insightful.
I have not graded the assignment.
How to advocate a course of action
RHE 306 – Rhetoric and Writing is a course in argumentation that situates rhetoric as an art of civic discourse. It is designed to enhance a student's ability to analyze the various positions held in any public debate and to advocate his or her position effectively. Work in this course will help the student advance the critical writing and reading skills he or she will need to succeed in courses for the university degree.
To advocate a position within a controversy with recognition of strongest arguments against it; to understand difference between advocating opinion and advocating policy; to craft a policy proposal that considers questions of feasibility and implementation; to answer or appeal to skeptics and opponents by means of anticipating, refuting or conceding to their claims; to understand important organizational, rhetorical and logical features of a policy proposal or statement; to gain awareness of ethical considerations inherent in policy advocacy.
Students will use a combination of rhetorical analysis and Microsoft Excel formatting to brainstorm and write a two-page policy proposal that advocates a particular course of action. Students will watch and discuss a presidential speech and read a short literary essay to generate ideas, and use Microsoft Excel to draft an outline for their own policy proposal before writing it.
Three 50-minute class periods.
Computer work stations with Microsoft Office and an Internet connection. Optional: access to Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), an electronic database.
On Day One, students will come to class already having written papers both summarizing and analyzing different arguments in a particular controversy in an impartial manner, and aware that they will now need to choose a side of the debate and advocate it. I familiarized them with the concept of rhetorical stasis, and basic questions arising from stasis such as conjecture, definition, quality, and especially policy. But even if an instructor has not spent time teaching rhetorical theory, the students should come to class already having formulated their own opinion about the controversy they are investigating and having decided their answer to the question “What is to be done?”
On Day Two students should come to class having read Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." On Day Three students should come with a typed draft of their own two-page proposal.
Day One:
The class begins with a video clip showing a rhetorical moment devoted to advocating a policy: President Barack Obama’s speech requesting Congress to vote for his proposed jobs act. The video is located here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30SELbKTfOU&feature=relmfu . Students watched a brief introduction to the speech (3:08-3:35) and then a section covering education (7:35-9:45), since education is the broad theme of the course to which all students’ writing topics relate.
After the video, we held a discussion. I asked students what policy or course of action the president proposed, and what he proposed in particular for education? Then they discussed a series of general questions that I raised. I made it clear that they should ask these questions when analyzing any policy:
- Is the proposal desirable? Is it possible? Is it feasible?
- What are the pros and cons of the proposal?
- Would the proposal require formal (official) or informal (unofficial) action?
- Would the proposal reinforce the status quo or change it?
- Qui bono? Who would benefit (or suffer) from the proposal’s adoption?
Following discussion, I asked students to go to their work stations and begin writing a draft of their own policy proposal by applying these questions to their stance. I instructed students to put emphasis especially on (1) making sure that their proposal addresses the strongest arguments against their own position and (2) ways in which their proposal demonstrates compromise with at least one major objection. I also told them to recognize obstacles to implementation, whether economic, political, ethical, or otherwise.
I asked students to come to class on on Day Two having read Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," showing them how to access it through ECCO's facsimile or (in modern type) Project Gutenburg's version. I warned students that although the essay is short, the slightly archaic language and drawn-out sentence structure can make it a challenge to read, and I made it clear that nevertheless they were responsible for reading it closely and preparing to discuss it.
Day Two:
Day Two was devoted to making use of the reading assignment, Swift's essay. The purpose of this session was to discuss the logical, rhetorical and organizational aspects of policy proposals by showing the greatest parody of one. My goal was to teach the lessons of Swift's satirical policy proposal in an accessible way, so I started the class by clarifying problems with comprehension. We then discussed students' general responses to the essay, and I guided discussion to make sure that we adequately addressed the essay's demonstration that there are ethical implications for every political or economic policy, and also that intentions (however "good") do not ensure ethical or effectual policy.
One of the indispensable mechanisms of the satire is Swift's successful appropriation of the organization of a genuine policy proposal. Working through the text section by section, I asked students to identify the purpose of each section, and we arrived at the following outline:
- Identify main problem and need for solution
- Define scope of problem and group of people to be most affected by proposed solution
- List minor problems to be solved or averted by upcoming proposal
- Present policy proposal itself, explaining how it solves main problem directly
- List additional benefits of proposal
- Consider anticipated objections, refute them
- Explain willingness to consider other proposals, but insist that they address root of problem
- Disavow any conflict of interest on part of author
Finally, I asked students to identify the use of logical and rhetorical figures in the essay. Some examples included the three chief rhetorical modes, the lesser of evils, the law of unintended consequences, Ockham's razor, reductio ad absurdum, etc.
After discussing the essay's organization, and logical and rhetorical methods, I encouraged students to review genuine policy proposals (from think tanks, corporations, NGOs, and other organizations) to think about they could utilize these methods in their proposals for non-satiric purposes.
Day Three:
Students arrived at class with the draft of their policy proposals. I had them pair up and conduct a peer review of each other's proposals, with the specific purpose of probing the series of questions outlined on Day One, identifying objections to the policy or difficulties in feasibility that the writer had not considered, and analyzing the organization and rhetorical style of their argument, as discussed on Day Two.
In order to solidify these lessons, I asked students to create a short (one page) spreadsheet on Microsoft Excel that contained three columns (see image below). First, in the left column, students named the organizational components of their partner's essay, section by section, so that the entire structure would appear in sequence in that column. Second, in the middle column, students paraphrased each section of their partner's text, being careful to cover the key arguments or rhetorical figures. Third, in the right column, students explained their response to the section, for instance by stating an objection or qualification to the argument or evaluating the success of a particular rhetorical figure. After completing the Excel sheet, each student emailed it as an attachment to each partner, so that the partner could use it to help revise the draft.
Students responded variously to each component of the assignment. Day One was easy and trouble free. Day Two was more difficult because it focused on Swift's essay, which (as expected) was a challenge for student's reading comprehension abilities. However, students responded enthusiastically to having a prototypical structure to use for their own policy statement. Day Three was successful: students did not generally have trouble using Excel and could assist each other as needed, and the process of laying out each paper in the three-part format (organization-argument-objection) seemed helpful in visualizing it and preparing for revision.
Clearly my decision to use Swift led to complications that some instructors might wish to avoid. Another way to execute this lesson plan would be to draw the reading assignment from a sincere policy proposal published by credible think tanks, institutes, corporations, NGOs, or other organizations. My reason for avoiding sincere proposals is that I think parodies of policy proposals make for better and more enjoyable reading, which is helpful when talking about organizational and stylistic principles and makes the lesson more memorable. If an instructor wanted to use a parodic form without bothering with Swift's slightly archaic diction and numerous subordinate clauses, he or she would find ample material from the Onion, or even the local satirical paper (UT has the Texas Travesty, which, for instance, recently featured an article entitled, "Congress Discussing Failure as an Option.")
The best way to evaluate the assignment is to compare the students' first draft of their policy proposal with the revised draft. Excel sheets are sometimes cumbersome to print off, although in this particular case it is feasible since they are short (see image below). But the important evaluation is whether the assignment was helpful in giving each student a clearer mental picture of the organization of their paper in a way that will help them anticipate objections to their argument or to their rhetorical techniques in specific sections. The only way to evaluate that is to compare the revised draft.
EEBO Show and Tell
Hamlet is one of the most recognizable texts in literary history. In this class, we will use Shakespeare's
remarkable tale of violence, madness, and revenge as the framework in which students will be introduced to the various principles and methodologies of literary and textual studies. The course helps
students prepare for upper-division English classes by focusing on close reading and critical writing, and by introducing formal, historical, and cultural approaches to literary texts.
contextual analysis
In this two-period assignment, students explore the context of Shakespeare's life and works, by using the EEBO digital archive to investigate an early modern document in its original form.
in-class computers; access to Early English Books Online (electronic database)
Previous discussion of Shakespeare's works should have situated the plays within the early modern cultural moment.
To begin the assignment, put students in small groups, and ask them to brainstorm issues of cultural and political relevance to the play currently under discussion. (In my class on Hamlet, this included concepts like ghosts, revenge, suicide, marriage, etc.) After reconvening and compiling a class list, inform students that their task is locate and interrogate a document from early modern England that addresses one such idea.
With students at their computers, offer a tutorial of how to use Early English Books Online (EEBO). One of the most important (and widely used) electronic resources for scholars and teachers of the early modern period, EEBO hosts complete digital reproductions of over 125,000 works printed in England between 1450-1700. (Many include a corresponding searchable text transcript.) Because the powerful interface can be complex for new users, it is especially helpful to give students hands-on instruction in using the site.
After some introductory exploration, ask students to seek out a contemporary document in EEBO that speaks to one of the issues previously brainstormed – in the next class period, they will present their findings to their peers. The remainder of the class is devoted to finding a document through keyword and subject searches; if available, show students how to access EEBO remotely, so they can continue their search at home.
In period two of this exercise, each student gives a brief presentation on their document, introducing its broad features and discussing its potential relevance to the play in question. To make the assignment more formal, ask students to prepare a piece of writing on their document.
[As verbal or written instructions.] For next class, please locate a document from EEBO that helps us think about the early modern context of Hamlet. You will present this document to your peers: be ready to explain what it is, how you found it, and why it can inform our understanding of Shakespeare's play. You are not required to read the entire document—some works, you will find, are hundreds of pages long—but you should investigate it as thoroughly as possible. At the very least, print out the cover/title page of your document; you will show this as part of your presentation. Feel free, however, to share whatever other parts of the document will help us best understand it.
Students ultimately enjoyed (and seemed to appreciate) the opportunity to investigate the unedited texts. This exercise was very successful in my class; I intend to repeat it in the future.
This exercise was not graded -- though it could be, of course.
Mapping an argument with Novamind
This composition course provides instruction in the gathering and evaluation of information and its presentation in well-organized expository prose. Students ordinarily write and revise four papers. The course includes instruction in invention, arrangement, logic, style, revision, and strategies of research. Instructors use textbooks chosen from a list approved by the Department of Rhetoric and Writing faculty, including a handbook provided for supplementary instruction in grammar and mechanics.
Computer-Assisted Sections:
Students taking computer-assisted sections of RHE 306 will be writing papers, evaluating others' papers, and communicating with their instructor and other students by means of networked personal computers. These special classrooms are part of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing's Digital Writing and Research Lab (DWRL).
After choosing a controversy and reading the first text (usually newspaper editorial) about it, students apply basic terms (stakeholder, context) to their controversy and put them together in a mind map. This will help them understand the terms and will get them thinking about issues they will need to address in paper 1.
Novamind (could also be done by hand), Critical Situations textbook.
Students should have read chapter 1 and 2 of Critical Situations at home and bring the book to class. They need to familiarize themselves with Novamind which should not take longer than 5 minutes.
Students fill out the Critical Situations worksheet first, writing down definitions of the terms they will use in their mind maps. We talk about them briefly. Then they start working on the computers, following the instructions in the Novamind worksheet.
NB: The instructions attached work for the Mac version of NM, the Windows looks very different. I just tell my students to boot the computers as Macs.
They seemed to like it. Some students will be done before others, but most of them got creative and changed background pictures, fonts etc in their mind map.
No
I made them email their mind maps to me and I just looked at them and made comments if there were mistakes. No grade.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Critical Situations Worksheet.docx | 10.19 KB |
| Novamind Worksheet.docx | 487.31 KB |
Criteria List Blog Post Assignment (suburbsandslumsblog.png)
This image was uploaded with the post Criteria List Blog Post Assignment. Criteria List Blog Post Assignment
Depending on who you ask, London can be a cultural mecca or a den of vice, Los Angeles can be a palm tree paradise or a polluted suburb, and Lagos can be a dangerous slum or an exciting place where residents reclaim space for their own uses. In this course, we will identify and analyze the discrepant ways that we think and feel about cities (and their respective suburbs and slums) around the world. We’ll begin our exploration by looking at explicit arguments made about (sub-)urban places by urban planners, architects, and citizens. With a firm grasp of the various arguments made about these places, we’ll then move into uncovering implied arguments made about cities, suburbs, and slums by artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers. We’ll end our journey through these locales with you and your peers adding to the conversation. For better or for worse, with the rapid urbanization of our planet, cities, suburbs, and slums are here to stay. What we say about the nature, value, and future of these places is just as important.
Peer Review
This assignment asks students to start working on their evaluation paper by writing a blog post describing the criteria they will use to evaluate a text in a specific category. Once every student has posted their criteria list on our class blog, students will comment on at least two of their peers' posts. Essentially, this assignment is a mini peer review assignment using our class blog.
Computers with internet access.
Students should be familiar with blogging before starting this assignment. To make sure all students are familiar with blogging, I suggest having students compose and publish an introductory blog post before assigning a criteria list blog post.
Students should also be very familiar with the concepts of criteria, category, and evaluation before turning in this assignment. I spent two weeks of class time describing these concepts in detail before students turned in this assignment.
Instructions about the actual blog post:
Write a blog post of at least 500 words discussing the category you will use to evaluate your text. Make sure to:
- Introduce your text and the category (the genre) that you’ll use to evaluate your text. So, if you’re writing on Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind,” are you looking at Jay-Z’s video as a rap video, or as a video made by Jay-Z? Write a sentence like “I’m going to evaluate Jay-Z’s ‘Empire State of Mind’ as a rap video. Some criteria that I might use to evaluate his video are A, B, C, D, and E.”
- Come up with a list of at least five different criteria that you deem important to your text’s category. The following are some examples of general criteria to consider:
- Rhetorical Appeals (pathos, logos, ethos?)
- Visual Elements
- Style (how do they construct their story? Is the text richly detailed, flowing, barely controlled, sparse, or minimalist?)
- Tone (what attitude does the story create toward its subject matter? Does the text take a humorous, serious, academic, artistic view on the matter?)
- Narrative/Descriptive Elements (what’s the point of view? Do they switch between views?)
- Plot/Argument Progression
- Argument Type (does it get us to think, feel, or do?)
- Diction (word choice)
- Next, add adjectives and descriptive verbs to specify what criteria you will be using to evaluate your text. What makes this category different from other categories? What is special to this category? Then, order your criteria from most to least important.
- Once you’ve come up with an order, describe each criterion. What makes you think that this particular criterion is important to the purpose or function of the category of your text? Why is this criterion more or less important than the others? Will your audience of classmates agree with your criteria? Defend your criteria as necessary.
- And lastly, for each criterion, preview whether or not your text meets or falls short of your stated criteria. A sentence or two should do.
Instructions about commenting on their peers' posts (given to them the day that their blog post was due):
Write at least 6 sentences in response to the blog posts above and below your own post. Consider these aspects of your peer's post:
- Is the criteria specific to the category? What can they do to tailor the criteria to their specific category?
- Is the criteria justified as necessary? What can they add to adequately justify their criteria?
- Is the criteria list in the order you think works best? Would you change the order? How?
- Can you think of anything that your peer might have overlooked? What criterion is missing, if any?
- Where do you foresee problems in your peer's evaluation?
My students loved this assignment. They worked on commenting on their peers' posts for about an hour during one class period. We spent the rest of the class period talking about their experience reading the criteria lists. This assignment was definitely successful because my students ended up notifying their peers of potential setbacks before they began drafting their evaluation papers. They also learned from each other.
Both Everything's an Argument and Writing Arguments informed this criteria list assignment. I used the textbooks to come up with my requirements for the evaluation paper to follow this assignment.
I did not assign a grade, since I use the Learning Record to assess student performance in my course. For those who assign grades for each assignment, I can see this assignment taking the place of a Research Summary in a later unit.
Distributed Peer Review
Are you well? Are you healthy? The answers to these questions reveal much about your sense of self and your experience of the world. But this class argues that the answers reveal much also about the rhetoric of health in the world around you. Doctors aren't the only ones who decide what mental, physical, and sexual health mean; TV commercials, internet ads, e-mail spam, drug companies, and public officials do too (or try to) through persuasive arguments about health. In this course we will examine those arguments with the goal of learning both about rhetoric and about health in our society and history. One major premise of this class is that arguments made by medical texts throughout history have not shared a common definition of health and that the definition of health remains a site of controversy. Another major premise is that even non-medical texts often make implicit arguments about this controversial concept. Therefore we will work with texts as varied as ads for Zoloft and Viagra, news on Obama-care and H1N1, and works by Freud, Hippocrates, and Pasteur.
Peer Review
This assignment is a typical rhetorical analysis. The innovation is that everyone's analysis is due on different days, and everyone's analysis is public writing—on our class blog. When students can review their peers' attempts at an assignment before it's time for their own attempt, they inevitably critique other students' work and incorporate the best writing strategies into their own.
Class blog in which each student is a contributor.
This assignment works best once a blog has been established, that is, once students have become familiar with it by writing required posts and comments for at least one class unit. In preparation for the rhetorical analysis post, students were given a detailed assignment prompt, and the freedom to choose their own rhetorical document (an advertisement) to analyze.
The rhetorical analyses were posted over the course of 5 class meetings, with 4-5 students posting each day. Posts were due by midnight before our class meeting, and students who did not post that week were required to leave a comment on one post per week in the morning before our 12:30pm class. This ensured that students who were not writing that week were reading—at the very least, one post by another student.
(500-900 words) due by midnight the night before class.
Write a summary and analysis of an advertisement you found in your research that makes an argument about health. Your blog post should include an image of the whole or part of the advertisement and should also explain the context of the ad and its audience. In this post you will analyze how the ad makes its argument (its rhetorical strategies including logos, ethos and pathos) and why it makes the argument in this way. Basically, you must describe how the advertisement makes its argument, and you must explain why the advertisement is persuasive (or not) for its particular audience.
To be successful, your post must include basic elements including:
- a clear and brief summary of the ad's argument
- enough description of the ad so that your reader can follow your analysis
- a discussion of the ad's intended audience
- a discussion of the venue or location in which the ad originally appeared
- your explanation of how the ad uses specific logical appeals to lead its audience to specific conclusions
- your explanation of how the ad uses specific pathetic appeals to evoke specific values or emotions from the audience
- your explanation of how the ad uses specific ethical appeals in order to appear credible to its specific audience
- your argument about the ad's effectiveness for its specific audience
What to Find
Many advertisements make arguments about health, not just ads for prescription drugs. Of course, an ad for a prescription drug to treat depression, sexual disfunction, or some other disease or disorder would work for this assignment, but you can think more broadly than that. You could choose an ad that
- makes an argument about health in order to sell a medical product (drug, supplement, treatment)
- makes an argument about health in order to sell a non-medical product (deodorant, a car, food, anything)
- uses health or illness as a metaphor to sell anything
- makes an argument about health to convince its audience to do, believe, or feel something.
Where to Find it
Look around you: in magazines and on TV, on billboards or on the web. If you find a print ad, scan it; a poster or billboard, take a picture of it; an online ad, take a screenshot. If your ad is a video, you need to find the video online so you can watch it as many times as you need. Search YouTube using keywords including the product name.
From the first batch of blog posts, the writing was at a surprsingly high level. Each student had already posted a summary on our blog of one required text. Now they had the chance to write a post about a text of their choice, on a blog that already had an archive and a following. From there, things only got better. The blog took on a life of its own, outside the classroom, and it not only sparked intellectual conversations, it also became an unexpected writing resource.
My class uses the Learning Record for student evaluation. For the rhetorical analysis blog post, students were given aproximately one page of written instructor feedback within a week after posting. They also received comments from their peers on the blog which responded to their ideas rather than reviewed their analysis.
Analyzing Logos: Enthymemes and Missing Premises in "Lean on Me"
RHE 306 – Rhetoric & Writing is a course in argumentation that situates rhetoric as an art of civic discourse. It is designed to enhance students' abilities to analyze the various positions held in any public debate and to teach them how to advocate their own position effectively. Their work in this course advances the critical writing and reading skills they will need to succeed in courses for their major and university degree.
This class activity continues our work with rhetorical analysis--focusing on how to analyze logos by mapping the elements of logos. After mapping the elements that form an enthymematic chain and answering questions about enthymemes and unstated premises, I modeled the ways to outline logos in a clip from the film, Lean on Me. This modeling work was facilitated by questions that I asked the students about the argument in the clip. We also discussed what questions we should ask when taking apart a complicated argument--or one in which the claims are not always overt.
In our last class meeting, we focused on analyzing situated and invented ethos, and we began analyzing logos by looking for the missing premises/unstated commonplaces in a paragraph from Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Because we were analyzing the logos in a paragraph that primarily establishes credibility, my aim was to show that the rhetorical elements of logos and pathos operate even in those sections that most apparently rely on ethos. We ended that class with the definition of an enthymeme, or “the sequence of premises by means of which you engage audiences; enthymemes appeal to both reason and to shared belief” (Crowley and Stancliff 104).
In analyzing the logos/determining the unstated commonplaces, we were beginning to analyze the enthymeme of Ravitch’s paragraph. As enthymemes appeal to both reason and shared belief, they often operate on these commonplaces/shared beliefs, so I explained that this was one place to start analyzing the logos of a rhetorical argument.
I also explained that it is helpful to determine the main premise/argument and then to distinguish this main premise from the supporting premises and the conclusions that one can derive from these premises. I reminded the students that conclusions could also be left unstated, so enthymemes, or the sequence of premises, may often rely on the involved audience to draw their own conclusion. We also discussed how their knowledge of various viewpoints should help them analyze how diverse audience members (who hold contrasting positions) may or may not be convinced by certain arguments and how leaving the conclusion unstated may lead the diverse audience to different conclusions.
So, in a prior class, we hit the goals of 1) analyzing the credibility of a source with relation to the ethos within a rhetorical argument; 2) distinguishing situated from invented ethos; and 3) analyzing logos by examining enthymematic premises (whether they are overt or implied--relying on "missing" commonplaces).
In this assignment's continuation of our discussion of rhetorical analysis and logos, we shifted our focus from analyzing logos in a print text to that of a film clip (in which several premises are unstated). We watched this clip with three goals in mind: 1) Analyze logos by identifying the main premise of an argument, the supporting premises, and devices such as analogies and rhetorical examples; 2) Distinguish deductive from inductive enthymematic lines of reasoning; and more practice with 3) Analyzing logos by examining enthymematic premises (whether they are overt or implied--relying on "missing" commonplaces).
Before we watched the clip, we revisited Chapter Seven, "Reasoning with Audiences: Logic on the Ground of a Critical Situation," in Critical Situations to answer some of the questions in students' tweets. We focused particularly on reviewing the explanation of enthymemes and their logical function (Crowley and Stancliff 106) and pages 120-121 (in the same text) for the discussion on unstated/"missing" commonplaces.
Following our general discussion, we viewed the clip and began outlining its logos with the opening questions, "What is one rhetorical argument this clip makes? What is at stake? What is the controversy?"
Internet connection; sound system; projector; LCD screen; computer; Lean on Me clip; transcript of the clip (attached); Critical Situations: A Rhetoric for Writing in Communities with Additional Material by Sharon Crowley and Michael Stancliff; white board/chalk board
Before class, students need to read "Reasoning with Audiences: Logic on the Ground of a Critical Situation," in Sharon Crowley and Michael Stancliff's Critical Situations, or a chapter like it so they have an introduction to the rhetorical terms used to analyze logos.
The instructor should also prepare an analysis of the clip chosen for class--whether it is the clip I used from Lean on Me--or another film better suited to your class. This preparation should give the instructor a better idea of the level of complexity of the argument(s) and help with determining the time allotments needed for in-class analysis of the logic.
Here are my notes on the three arguments in the clip (two from the parents and one from Mr. Clark, the school principal).
Look for:
1) The main premise of an argument & 2) the supporting premises and conclusions:
A. Parents/Ms. Barrett:
1) The kids that were thrown out deserve a chance at a future (which education provides); they should be allowed to attend school.
Premises that support argument one:
a. (unstated) Only criminals should be on the street.
b. A “disruptive”/“bad” student is not a criminal.
c. Students are disruptive when they become discouraged.
d. The environment that the students live in is discouraging.
e. These disruptive students do not think they have much of a future, which is discouraging them.
f. If students are thrown out of school, they will have no chance at a job.
Conclusions:
1. Throwing kids out of school is wrong; they belong in school, not on the street.
2. Children who are discouraged will have no chance at a future.
3. The students should not be thrown out.
2) Clark does not listen to others; he’s a “fascist.”
Premises that support argument 2:
a. Clark’s reform methodology is outrageous.
b. Clark doesn’t care about the futures of the kids he threw out because they are not his kids.
c. Clark is against his own people because he threw out the disruptive students and “insulted the black football coach” and because he talks down to the parents when he addresses their SES.
d. Unstated: Clark is not one of us (he can’t be because he’s “against” us). He has money (image) & insults the families on welfare.
e. Clark is sidestepping the issue with his religious rhetoric.
Conclusions:
1. Clark is a bad principal and does not deserve what he’s paid for.
2. (unstated) Dictatorial principals will not address the issues that parents are concerned about.
3. (unstated) Dictatorial principals know how to sidestep an issue in order to further their agenda.
B. Clark’s argument:
1) (unstated) The “tough love” approach (from both administrators and parents) is the best way to reform education/help students.
Premises that support Clark’s argument:
a. We can help these students who need to pass the test by throwing out the “bad apples.”
b. Parents can do more to help.
c. Parents can help by making their kids study.
d. (unstated) Families who are on welfare will have kids who do not succeed in school.
e. (unstated) Children who come from poor families are discouraged because they are embarrassed; they have no pride.
f. Parents who want to help their kids should get their families off of welfare.
g. Parents who get their families off welfare will see their kids’ self-esteem increase; their kids will have pride.
h. Parents need to straighten out their kids’ priorities.
i. (unstated) Priorities must be in order before students can do well in school.
j. We cannot help kids by being polite.
k. (unstated) Parents who do not discipline their kids or help out or get their families off welfare are doing a disservice not only to their child, but to the school because “one bad apple spoils the bunch.”
Conclusions:
1. Disruptive students detract from the education of those who want to learn—those who want to try to pass the standardized test and improve themselves.
2. To improve the school, we must throw out those students who do not care.
3) Devices such as analogies and rhetorical examples:
rhetorical example: 2,700 students do not have the basic skills to pass the state test.
analogy: one bad apple spoils the bunch. 300 bad apples rot the bunch.
4) Determine whether the rhetor presents deductive or inductive enthymematic lines of reasoning.
Parents: (inductive) for both arguments. 1) specific premise: “this morning: an outrage” 2) specific: Clark is a “fascist” leading to 1) general conclusion: children who are discouraged will have no chance at a future & 2) general conclusion: (unstated) Dictatorial principals know how to sidestep an issue in order to further their agenda.
Clark: deductive (general to specific)—from the general apple analogy as a starting premise to the specific conclusion: To improve the school, we must throw out those students who do not care.
5) What stasis points do the two primary speakers agree and differ on?
Agree: The motivation of the kids is affected by their poor socioeconomic status and their discouraging neighborhood/future prospects.
Disagree:
1. What should be done to help the students (let them stay in school/throw them out vs. give them a taste of “tough love”).
2. What is important to the school (football & ALL the kids vs. tests & the students who are not disruptive).
6) What fallacies of argument are present (if any)?
Sentimental fallacy: “The arguer manipulatively overuses strong emotions to persuade an audience of a claim that is otherwise unsupported” (Crowley and Stancliff 123). (both sides do this—Clark perhaps more so with his religious rhetoric)
Ad Hominem: “The arguer attacks the opponent’s character rather than his or her opinions” (Crowley and Stancliff 123). (both sides do this—the parents perhaps more so—at least more overtly.. Clark’s attack is implied).
Argumentum ad personam (appeal to personal interest): “The arguer appeals to the audience’s personal preferences and prejudices in order to persuade” (Crowley and Stancliff 123). (both sides do this—“fascist/war” & w/ religious rhetoric)
False authority: “The argument is based solely on the arguer’s or another party’s authority” (Crowley and Stancliff 123-124). (Clark: his position as principal is exploited as is his message from God who apparently gives him this authority to “do whatever he has to.”)
Begging the Question: “The arguer uses implicit, unproven assumptions within the argument to validate the argument. Begging the question is a kind of circular argument” (Crowley and Stancliff 124). (Clark: apple analogy), which is also a
Faulty analogy: “The arguer uses a misleading or inappropriate comparison” (Crowley and Stancliff 125).
Red Herring: “The arguer diverts attention to another topic to avoid addressing the issues at stake in the argument” (Crowley and Stancliff 125). (Clark: instead of addressing the criticism or issues of children who are thrown out of school & what to do with them, Clark diverts attention to the state test and how students need to master basic skills for the test. He also diverts attention to the message from God & to his authority as the one chosen both by Dr. Napier & God). (Ms. Barrett also throws in a red herring with her complaint about Clark’s insult to the football coach, which diverts attention from her own argument, so it hurts her more than it hurts Clark—although here she’s also falling back on the Argumentum ad personam, or appeal to personal interest).
In analyzing a film, we need to remember that both the filmmakers and the actors are using ethos, pathos, and logos to persuade the audience of which attitudes are correct and incorrect. We need to distinguish between how the filmmaker/screenwriter/actual rhetor participates in the rhetorical argument and how the speaker/actor works to persuade the audience. To make these distinctions, we need to analyze how the film creates logos, pathos, and ethos. Today, we will focus our analysis on outlining the clip's logos.
To analyze logos, you should:
1) Look for the main premise of an argument (whether stated or implied)
2) Look for the supporting premises and conclusions (whether stated or unstated)
3) Look for devices such as analogies and rhetorical examples
4) Determine whether the rhetor presents deductive or inductive enthymematic lines of reasoning
5) Determine what stasis points the two primary speakers agree and differ on
6) Determine what fallacies of argument are present (if any)
Students were engaged when it came to determining the premises, but I had to help them determine whether a premise was stated/unstated and to provide prompts/cues to help them find the missing premises. They also had trouble recalling all the logic from the clip, which is where the transcript of the clip came in handy. It provided static print text, which was easier to engage with in the time allotted. The ball started rolling more quickly once students proposed an argument. From there, we worked to determine all the supporting premises.
However, students seemed to forget the main premise/argument once they were absorbed in figuring out all the unstated premises, so I had to guide them back to the main argument and to have them question whether that was the main premise. As it turned out, the proposed main premise/argument was really a conclusion that the film wants to lead you to, which proved to be confusing for the students.
Next time, I would spend more time on helping students find the actual main premise, but, at the same time, I wanted to make it clear that as they outlined the logic of an argument, they may find that what they thought was the central premise may actually be a supporting premise, or even a conclusion--which our work showed. Perhaps, next time, I would warn them of this caveat--that outlining the logic of an argument cannot always start from a main premise because as they go along, they may realize that the "minor" premises do not all support what they thought was the main premise.
We only had time to analyze Clark's argument, so we did not even begin to discuss the parents' arguments. Students also seem surprised/overwhelmed at the number of fallacies in the clip. Next time, I would want to plan another class session so that students could find the fallacies themselves. Since I ran out of time for modeling/guiding students along the analysis of logos, I ended up telling them what all the possible fallacies were.
The upside of the "overwhelmed"/"amazed" student is (I hope) that she is better able to see how close analysis works: a short clip is able to produce so many premises and fallacies upon critical thinking and analytical work.
Another clip that would be fun to analyze: (from Freedom Writers). The transcript to this film is also attached.
I informally evaluated student understanding by the level of participation and questions asked during class discussion, but the more formal evaluation of student understanding of rhetorical analysis will occur when I read and assess their Rhetorical Analysis Essay.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Transcriptions of film clips.docx | 81.84 KB |
Approaches to Analyzing Poetry (images.jpg)
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“Introduction to Reading Poetry” provides a general overview of British and American poetry, and focuses more broadly on the analysis and appreciation of “poetic form.” The current assignment occurs in the context of a sub-unit on British Romanticism. These lessons belong to a larger unit on neoclassical and romantic poetics. The assignment pertains to a three-class cycle on the “Lake Poets,” William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The lesson described below occurred on a Friday preceding a close reading assignment due on Monday. This assignment will be extended into an essay with the help of research tools. The purpose of this lesson below is to begin introducing students to the use of research databases and tools, but also to demonstrate the relationship between several approaches to analyzing and researching poetry.
The lesson plan aims to incorporate and reinforce a range of analytical, technological, and participatory skills. It also achieves a specific purpose of introducing students to methods of research and analysis needed for upcoming writing assignments. Finally, it strives to engage the students in an interactive project, which pools our technological and human resources. Through a division of labor, this lesson aims for a multi-level analysis in a relatively brief period of time.
Relevant Technological Skills/Tools:
Prezi: Only a week ago, the students delivered group projects in class, which made use of this dynamic presentation interface. Several of the students set up accounts and gained basic proficiency in the construction of presentations, which incorporate text, image, and video.
Wordle: I introduced the class to this tool of quantitative analysis in a previous lesson comparing Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man and The Dunciad. In that class, we discussed how quantitative word clouds to bring out patterns of repetition and emphasis (especially in lengthier strings of text). We also considered pitfalls of using this tool to replace expertise or qualitative analysis.
Oxford English Dictionary: This resource is at the core of introductory pedagogy in the Department of English. Having previously introduced this resource to the class as a whole, I wanted them to experiment with its several unique features.
Library Databases Online: In my experience, students need considerable guidance with academic databases. One excellent way to facilitate experiment with the UT’s databases is to introduce students to the “Search by Subject” function. There is no replacement for practice, however. In this case, I guided the students to a group of sites and helped them as they searched.
Syllabus-Related Design:
Close Reading/Paper Two: Over the weekend, students will be composing close readings, which will be expanded into research papers over the next two weeks. On one hand, this lesson introduces some of the tools needed for effective research. On another, the lesson highlights opportunities and limitations for specific quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis, and it also shows how each of these approaches to interpretation yield slightly different results.
Reinforcement of Prezi Skills: Since students recently worked together on group presentations using the internet site Prezi.com, several were familiar with the tool. This lesson reinforced such technology-related skills in an interactive setting, but also ensured each student’s direct participation in the creation of the Prezi.
The lesson plan breaks students into three research groups, each of which pursues a unique approach to comparing the two poems. The groups are responsible for translating their research findings onto the skeleton of my Prezi, which contains a transcription of William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (1798) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” (1798).
Group 1 collaborated together on a close reading and comparison of the two poems. I encouraged this group to emphasize the role and significance of poetic form. I asked them to be precise about their interpretations. For example, if they notice that a poem does not involve a clear rhyme scheme, they ought to describe the scheme as “unrhymed verse” (as opposed to “there is none”). Based on this recognition, they might ask questions such as: why would the poet make this formal choice? How does this choice help the poem achieve a desired effect or objective? This group focuses entirely on concerns that are “intrinsic” to the text itself.
Group 2 was also asked to perform a close reading and comparison of the two poems, but their interpretation was supposed to target the most notable words in two separate word clouds generated on wordle.net. I asked this group to make use of the Oxford English Dictionary (on the University’s library databases) in order to isolate important historical developments and variations in the meaning of particular words. I urged this group to also think about how the words repeated most often in these poems might provide a lens into important conceptual elements of the poems. This group’s reading of the poems was thus sparked by a quantitative “heat map,” “tag cloud,” or “word cloud.”
Group 3 undertook to round up and summarize as much secondary criticism and primary source material as possible by consulting a range of scholarly databases (see below). This being the largest group, I instructed them to devote several members to secondary research on MLA International Bibliography, JSTOR, and Project Muse, to leave one member to research biographical data and portraits on the Dictionary of National Biography and to employ another in detailed research of primary archives on Eighteen-Century Collections Online. I also urged them to leave two members to the task of synthesizing research and constructing the Prezi. This group was focused on how others have read the poems, and how these readings contribute to or suggest a broader series of conversations.
The final segment of the exercise brings all of the groups together in three brief presentations of their research and analysis. One leader in each group was responsible for editing the skeleton Prezi I emailed the night before. This Prezi contained four separate sub-units: two for each poem, one for a comparative summary (an empty frame), and one for hints to classmates on successes/failures/opportunities/difficulties. I asked students to add their own contributions to the prezi on a separate “path” (a series of slides linked with scrolling capabilities) and with arrows connecting the slides they added to specific lines of the poems. Do this by going to the “Insert” /”shapes” in the upper left, and the arrow function will appear). The lesson ends with three three-minute presentations and we a six-minute discussion comparing the findings of each group.
Computers with Internet Access
Text
I sent the students an email outlining the assignment in brief. The practical purpose of this email was to find out who had opened accounts with Prezi. I divided the groups such that at least one person in each could access and operate Prezi.
Shortly afterwards, I sent a second email outlining the assignment in depth. This email laid out the expectations for each group’s method of analysis and a (tentative) set of members.
Since the exercise involved several complex components and a relatively unconventional design, I briefly described to them the basic motives and rationale for the project. I coupled this second email with a lengthier explanation of our upcoming transition from close-reading two to paper two. By placing “Paper #2” first in the email heading but last in the body of the email, I compelled students to read in detail my opening explanation of the in-class assignment. In the email’s description of paper two, I included a brief review of the relevant databases for the assignment/upcoming paper. First, I reminded them how to access databases online. Then I gave a list of possible databases. Here is a transcription of the list as it appeared in the email:
17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers: Useful if your argument is time-specific & extremely focused, since this source contains original newspapers & a searchable database.
C19 Index: This one may seem relevant, but it’s very specific & involves dealing with & archives. Keep this one in mind for future research projects!
Dictionary of Literary Biography/ Dictionary of National Biography: Each of these sites are excellent for bios of famous authors & people. They will be indispensible for your upcoming essay.
Eighteenth-Century Collections Online/Sabin Americana: These are two of my favorite databases. Both of them contain fully word-searchable eighteenth-century British/early American texts, and they also allow you to view the images of the original documents. Have fun with these and choose your word searches thoughtfully.
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism: Not only is this site entertaining to browse for its general summaries of major thinkers, but it will help out if you read a secondary essay that focuses on a critical theorist you’ve never read.
JSTOR/MLA International Bibliography/Project Muse: All your secondary criticism needs can be found here. These are your best resources for the upcoming research paper.
Oxford English Dictionary: Not only the gold standard of academic dictionaries, the OED contains helpful information pertaining to word usage, etymology, and variation (both in terms of multiple definitions and in terms of historical development).
Web of Science: You’ll find a very cranky site/clunky interface design, but the WoS may possibly be helpful if you want to take the time to figure out who/how many essays and books have cited/responded to a given scholar/argument. Go to “Cited Reference Search” and follow the specific instructions as to how to search a given scholar’s name/work(s).
Finally, I explained which of these databases would be useful to each of the groups and asked students to email me if they had any questions or confusions about the in-class assignment.
When students arrived in class, we immediately logged into our computer accounts and broke into groups. There were five members of group one, three members of group two, and eight members of group three. As students worked on the assignment, I floated from group to group, addressing questions and guiding students to appropriate resources.
Friday’s assignment follows as such. We’re going to break up into three groups. Group one does a thorough close reading and comparison of “Frost at Midnight” and “Tintern Abbey.” Group two does a close reading/comparison of tintern abbey vs. frost at midnight that employs the OED to bring out a word cloud of the two poems. Group three does a close reading/ comparison with the help of the library’s online databases. Within each of these groups, one person is going to make the prezi that their group will present at the end of class. This prezi is going to be an edit of one I’ll send out, but you will modify it to explain your group’s specific points. The assignment should give us a comparative sense of the limits and opportunities for analysis as we head into our second papers.
Paper Two is going to be based on your close reading, but it will involve a research component. What I want you to do is to begin looking for relevant articles about the author you’re writing on. Consult the university’s academic databases: these can be accessed on the UT Library webpage by going to “Research Tools” in the menu bar and clicking “Find Articles Using Databases.” When you get to the “Databases” page, you can either select “Subject” on the left hand bar (and then navigate to “English Literature”) or you can search by individual databases (by the first letter on their title). [The rest of the email is cited above in the databases list].
Overall, the students’ feedback was positive. While one student in the Databases group seemed unsatisfied at the end of the exercise, this response seemed more germane to her difficulty navigating than to the lesson itself. The students next to her may also have impacted this affect, because these two were enthusiastic. One of them especially liked the link to the National Portrait Gallery, which can be found on individual pages in the Dictionary of National Biography. Another student was amazed that Eighteenth-Century Collections Online has been so successful at making images of texts word-searchable. I helped him through advanced search techniques and also explained the uses of a “fuzzy search.” The Wordle group seemed to have a great time mixing the word cloud and the OED search, and the close reading group didn’t speak much because they were listening intently to the poetry audio.
Prior to the in-class exercise, I targeted aspects of the design worthy of attention and concern:
1. To what extent would we be able to complete the task in the allotted time?
2. Would the Databases & Research group feel overwhelmed?
3. Would the students succeed in integrating multiple technologies in the exercise?
4. How well would the students incorporate the poems in the skeleton Prezi with their own research?
5. Would the students enjoy this activity?
6. Will I be surprised by anything that happens as the lesson unfolds?
Time Frame
- If I were attempting this lesson plan again, I would get rid of the comparative component, or I would devote two separate class periods to the exercise.
- Prezi allows students to save their additions and return to them later, but it also allows them to access the slides outside of class. Instead of requiring in-class presentations, one might think about requiring the students to review their classmates’ presentations outside of class. This level of engagement might allow for a more individualized approach to integrating styles of research (as opposed to the planned group discussion. In my class, we did not get to the group discussion in time, because the groups hit a stride around the time of transition. I decided to begin next Monday’s class with the planned summaries/group discussion.
Databases & Research
- Here I was pleasantly surprised. Not only did the members work extremely well together, but they communicated well and seemed excited about the project. One member expressed her frustration with the databases at the end of class, which goes to show the degree of oversight and affective management necessary for this group.
Integration:
- The database and Wordle groups did a great job with their primary technology, but the communication of this analysis into a Prezi proved more difficult. On one hand, the design may have addressed this concern. On another, this integration has proven an ongoing challenge and is not necessarily a failure in this specific lesson model. As a note, I’d recommend identifying who are the Prezi-makers in advance to give more specific instructions on how best to use their time.
- The close reading group benefitted from my inclusion of audio readings into the skeleton Prezi, so they could continuously hear the poems being read that they were in the process of analyzing. These readings played in the background while the students worked. This not only allowed them to listen while they worked, but it also provided a constructive/appealing background ambience.
Incorporation of research and Prezi:
- This portion was particularly weak, possibly due to the time crunch and possibly due to the fact that the students did not make effective use of the arrow function. Therefore, the final product consisted of chunks of interpretation without specific attribution of points to lines of the poem. One challenge for this particular lesson is that students need to simultaneously pursue individual research and also communicate together for the purpose of a coherent analysis. Conversation online might facilitate this difficulty, but it would add yet another technological component to an exercise that already is overloaded with technology.
Enjoyment:
- The students seemed to have a good time. The conversation in the Wordle group was active and involved, and it gained in intensity as they became more adept at navigating the OED. The Wordle/OED combination opened up surprising connections. For example, in “Tintern Abbey,” the word “pastoral” is vivid on the heat map/word cloud. In “Frost at Midnight,” the word “ministry” is prominent. By consulting the OED, students realized that “pastoral” doesn’t only describe an aesthetic genre, but it carries a moral significance akin to that of “ministry.” The Databases group realized a several isolated moments of recognition and/or enthusiasm, as students individually realized the potential research opportunities. The close reading group seemed comfortable with their task, both because we’ve been practicing close readings all semester and because they each had already expressed a particular enthusiasm for romantic poetry in the previous class.
An Unexpected Surprise:
- The most interesting unexpected surprise involves a Prezi function of which I was previously unaware. When several groups simultaneously edit the same Prezi, each one appears as an individual character that floats across the screen in relation to task currently being performing. What this means is that each group was simultaneously personified as individual characters on the same Prezi. This struck me as an interesting prospect for possible course designs involving collaboration.
Final Self-Assessment: The design of this course was too complex for the amount of text the students were asked to analyze. As a rule of thumb, I would either encourage one poem per class period or break the lesson into a two-class project. Another strategy might be to ask students to perform their task prior to arriving in class so that the period could be devoted to discussion and collaboration on the Prezi. I have opted to extend the lesson into the first half of our next class, since the students seemed to become more immersed in the project as the period progressed. After the class ended, there were more students than usual who wanted to carry on the conversations that had developed during class. On one hand, I attribute this to their experiments with new research tools. On another, I think it helped that the students were pursuing their own line of research and that I was able to discuss this with them as I was moderating the exercise. To sum up: a narrower set of expectations and a more thorough preparation of the Prezi operators would have made this a very successful class. This preparation, moreover, might take advantage of the collaborative function on Prezi in order to address the segmentation of individual groups (the Database group), or possibly to unite the three separate units into more of a team.
Introducing Analysis with "Texts From Last Night"
The broad goals of this course will be to introduce students to the basic tools of literary analysis and to develop students’ own critical writing.
To introduce students to textual analysis - either close reading or rhetorical analysis - using a very small piece of text.
Using samples pulled from the popular website, Texts From Last Night, this exercise introduces students to textual analysis in a fun and (most likely) funny way. Students are asked how much and what kinds of information they can glean from a very small piece of text.
No hardware required - could be completed with handouts.
Ideally, lesson would take place using a media console.
If you aren't familiar with the website, Texts From Last Night, it's a blog dedicated to public submissions of funny, lewd, or ridiculous text messages received "last night." The site has both a twitter presence and a facebook following, so many students will already be familiar with it. Those that are familiar with it will probably be a bit surprised to see it turn up in a classroom, as most of the messages tend to include either drinking references or discussions of sexual escapades. So, the material is often a bit scandalous - which is why the instructor should be certain to pre-select material for analysis. It's probably a very bad idea to actually pull the website up in class. Set aside about 20 minutes to half an hour the night before class to troll the site for material. You can take screen shots of the texts you'd like to look at and then post them to your class blog, wiki, site, etc. or simply copy them onto a handout.
One of the goals of this course is to teach you the practice of close reading, or a very detailed analysis of language. You might be surprised just how much information can be gleaned from a very small piece of text - but you'll also need to practice separating your assumptions from evidence-based analysis.
As a class, we'll take a look at some sample texts pulled from the website, Texts From Last Night. These sample text messages are very short (originating from real text messages), but they can contain a wealth of information - about the sender, their relationship to the recipient, the reason for sending the text, the sender's current or previous location... any number of important clues for deciphering the meaning of the text. (i.e. the relationships in the rhetorical triangle).
First, what can you tell about either the sender or the recipient of the text? What is their relationship? How do you know?
What is the text message saying? What is the content of the message/the reason for sendign it? Is it just to be funny? Does the sender want to persuade the recipient of something? Is the sender making a request?
Where is the sender now? Is the recipient somewhere else (as in far away)?
What does the message indicate in terms of time or chronology? What is the kairotic moment in which the text was sent?
I used this exercise on the very first day of class, and my students loved it. They were both surprised and delighted by the use of a seemingly trivial pop culture phenomena, and (of course) a bit titilated by the content. Since I try to cultivate an open and fun environment in my classroom, this set the tone well for my semi-informal ethos.
It was also a great way to start reigning in their conjectures. While many students wanted to make broad or sweeping claims about the messages and their senders, this was a great way to point out the difference between assumptions and evidence-based analysis. I asked them to stick very closely to the text itself and show me where they were getting their ideas.
This was an in-class discussion assignment, so no evaluation was necessary.
Revising/Drafting/Editing With Wikis
RHE 306 – Rhetoric & Writing is a course in argumentation that situates rhetoric as an art of civic discourse. It is designed to enhance your ability to analyze the various positions held in any public debate and to advocate your own position effectively. Your work in this course will help you advance the critical writing and reading skills you will need to succeed in courses for your major and university degree. My particular course is a 50-minute MWF course in Parlin 104.
Helping students distinguish between drafting, revising, and editing, as well as considering the rhetorical aspects of composing summaries by engaging with peers' summaries.
For my RHE 306 course, I created a course wiki to which students posted numerous in-class activities and homework assignments. I find wiki particularly advantageous for group activities, as students can create pages that all group members can edit/revise/view/etc. (which GoogleDocs can also allow, but in a different manner). A wiki can thus be a useful space for foregrounding the collaborative nature of writing. Also worth noting is the “page history” feature of PBWorks, the wiki platform I use, which can allow both students and you, the instructor, to see how a particular page developed.
This lesson plan provides a way for students to think carefully about the rhetorical choices they make when summarizing a text by collaborating on the creation of a trio of wiki pages. The lesson plan is also designed to help students learn the difference between drafting, revising, and editing—three stages of the writing process we have already discussed as this lesson plan unfolds.
Computers with internet access, preferably one per student; a course wiki (as mentioned above, I use PBWorks).
At this point in the semester, my students are already familiar with the wiki and the process for creating wiki pages. We have also discussed the differences between drafting, revising, and editing, which I roughly define as the following:
- Drafting: The creation of new written material—getting words on the page for the first time, similar to invention.
- Revising: Working with the words you’ve already composed (moving paragraphs or sentences around, rewriting phrases for clarity, deleting extraneous sentences/paragraphs/pages), which can include some new writing (scrapping and recomposing your introduction, or adding a new sentence at the end of a paragraph to better establish that paragraph’s purpose).
- Editing: Cleaning up/polishing your grammar, spelling, citation, etc. (removing commas, adding in-text citations, changing “th” to “the”).
We will have also already covered methods of forwarding a source’s argument, particularly the relative merits of summary, paraphrase, and direct quotation.
I divide students into groups of 3.* Each group is assigned one chapter from the RHE 306 first-year forum book, and each member of that group is responsible for composing a “research summary” (RS) of their assigned chapter. (RSs are one-page summaries of a source’s argument, and are ideally free from the summarizer’s opinion about that argument.) I have students compose their RSs as Word documents, then copy and paste them into the body of a wiki page. I also ask them to choose a distinct color for their wiki-page summaries. Below is a screenshot of a student’s RS. The student has turned it blue using the bottom-left button in the formatting toolbars above the text window.
*If the total number of students in the class isn't divisible by three, I'll create groups of four, but each group member will only engage with two other group members' summaries as revisor/editor.
Once each student's research summary (RS) is drafted and uploaded, I assign her/his RS to another group member to revise—for instance, if Jaime, Harold, and Terry are a group, Jaime is assigned to revise Terry’s RS, Harold is to revise Jaime’s, and Terry to revise Harold’s. I ask each student to make her/his revisions in a different color than the original draft of the RS. A revised RS might look like this:
Finally, I reassign the revised RS to the third group member, who is charged with editing (i.e., Terry drafts, Jaime revises Terry’s draft, and Harold edits the revised draft).
Since deletions obviously don’t have a color, I also have students record any removed phrases, words, punctuation, etc., at the bottom of the page:
The timing on this whole process can differ—you can assign it as homework and have each stage due on a different day, or you can have the revision and editing stages take place during a class meeting.
After the editing work is done, I have the original drafter look at her/his revised and edited RS. I then let the groups have internal discussions about how they made the choices they did at each stage: Why did Harold choose to quote different lines than Jaime during his drafting process? What led Terry to cut the first line of Harold’s second paragraph? If you want something tangible, you can have students write out their reflections: Where did their group members original drafts differ? What rhetorical choices did their group members make that led to these differences? What differences in opinion were revealed in what group members chose to revise about each other’s RSs, and did any revisions seem especially effective? Etc. Broadly speaking, I like these questions to get students thinking about writing—even summary—as a rhetorical process rather than a fill-in-the-blanks sort of task.
Students do occasionally find the process tedious, especially by the editing stage. As an alternative, the original drafts could be shorter. Really, one paragraph of drafted material could be enough given how extensive this activity can become.
I generally grade this assignment on a pass/fail basis—as long as the student completed all three stages, they get credit.
Using Google Images to Track Cultural Change
“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
--Oscar Wilde
Behind the paradoxical wit of Wilde’s epigram lies a serious truth: ideas can be dangerous! Yet we remain fascinated by those “dangerous ideas” in the political, social, and cultural arenas. This class is designed to introduce us to some books whose ideas were deemed so dangerous that they were censored. While the history of banned books is itself long and storied, in this class we’ll focus on ideas of gender and sexuality that have drawn particular censorship. As we read about families haunted by slavery in the heartland, rebellious artists in turn of the century New Orleans, teenagers fighting in the Vietnam war, and a cross-country road trip featuring decadent Europeans, crazy playwrights, and American nymphets, we’ll ask questions about cultural constructions of femininity and masculinity: what does it mean to offer “dangerous ideas” about being a man or a woman? What things can or can’t we say about gender and sexuality?
As we learn to probe the artistic and ethical dimensions of these questions, we’ll focus on the skills of literary analysis and scholarly research—skills that will be of benefit throughout a collegiate career. In particular, we’ll pay close attention to how the language of the texts shapes our understanding of the narrative and calls attention to the ways in which the ideas unfold. We’ll also work to contextualize these stories and novels, both historically and generically, to further our understanding of the choices each author makes, as well as to help us understand the controversies the texts generate. These skills will help us generate our own insightful, well-informed opinions about the ethical and aesthetic questions these texts raise.
Throughout the semester, students should expect to write two formal peer-reviewed papers, ranging from 5-7 pages, several less formal short analysis assignments of 1-2 pages, and engage in thought-provoking conversations about the texts being discussed.
Visual Analysis
Students are often presented with paratextual apparati that contributes to determining their response to a work of literature. Images on book covers, blurbs or reviews on dust jackets, and publishers’ summaries all provide constructed argumentation about the text within that is designed to provoke an emotional and analytic response. This lesson plan is designed to get students thinking about the ways in which cover images provide valuable evidence in the way in which a text (in this case, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita) is marketed and interpreted over time. I found that this in turn could contribute to a discussion of a text as a historical document.
I created this lesson for a networked classroom where each student could have internet access, though a classroom without could request that students print out their images the night before, or profitably use a projector as the groups present.
- Before this class I had given a brief lecture on the history of the composition and publication of Lolita, and we looked at and analyzed the original French cover together, asking questions that were quite similar to the ones in the student prompt.
- I had my students log into their computers and head to Google Images. I broke my students up into two- or three-person teams as I have 22 students in this class, but this is of course optional. (NB: Depending on the text, you may wish to enable the “safe search” function on your computers—searching Lolita brought up some occasionally questionable material.)
- I handed out prompts to each group (see below in student instructions).
- After 20-25 minutes, we came back together and we took a tour through the classroom, where each group gave a brief presentation based on their prompt for the rest of the class.
- I did this in one 45-minute class, but the assignment could easily be expanded or transformed into a take-home exercise as needed. In the future I think I will try to make this a two-day exercise. I’d like to have the students upload their images to a class wiki, so that we could easily put them into chronological order, which would allow us to clearly and easily see how the images change (or remain static) over time.
Your goal in this exercise is to think about how a cover image for the novel Lolita constructs a reader's response to the novel. What kinds of things does this image make us think? What does it say about the novel at that historical moment? To do so, you will use Google Images to find a striking cover image for the novel and analyze the image.
- Once you’ve logged into your computers, head to Google Images: http://www.google.com/imghp
- When you’ve arrived at Google Images you and your partner should search for some cover images used on the novel Lolita. Try some different searches—adding different key words (cover vs book) or countries (America vs Australia) will often provide you with different content.
- Discover when and where your image was created—is it a Turkish edition from 1959? A Russian edition from the 1990’s? An American edition from the 2000’s? What type of image is it—a photograph? A drawing? A painting? Is it an identifiable piece of art (a famous painting or photograph) or does it look like it was commissioned for that edition?
- With your partner, think about and brainstorm some answers to the following questions: What are the first words that come into your mind when you see this image? What does it make you think of? If you hadn’t read any of the novel, what would this image make you think the book was about? Now that you’ve read (some of ) the novel, what kind of relationship(s) does this image have to the text? Who seems to be portrayed? From whose viewpoint are we looking? Does this image spark any ideas about the cultural construction of the book? What kinds of people would make this book, and what kinds of people would read it? These questions are only a starting place. Please feel free to explore and think about more issues raised by your image.
Be prepared to enlighten the rest of the class about the image you’ve chosen (when and where it’s from, and a brief summary of your thinking about part 4) for about 3-5 minutes.
This was an easy and even fun way to get a conversation started about how paratexts can affect the ways that we read, and also helped us to talk about how different cultural and historical moments look at texts differently. Students who are sometimes reluctant to traditionally close-read in class can often surprise themselves with a sophisticated reading of a visual text, and keeping the exercise group-oriented and low stakes allows them to demonstrate their skills with little pressure.
I did not formally evaluate this assignment except as part of daily class participation
How to Write Prose That People Might Actually Want to Read
RHE 306 is the first year rhetoric and writing class. My class meets in a computer-mediated classroom two days a week (75-minute meetings, but this activity need not take up a whole class / could easily fit into 50 minutes, too).
Students will practice revising at the sentence level using a specific method, and will discuss the rhetorical effects in different versions of a sentence. Then, they will revise a passage from their own work.
My students used pages in their personal folders on the class wiki to draft their own revisions and post them instantly. The activity could also take place in a blackboard discussion forum thread.
This activity is ideal for a day that students bring hard copies of their own writing, e.g. if they are turning in a paper or research summary that they can use for practicing revision. (If they are getting papers back, they might not care as much about making useful changes. If they are turning papers in, having them mark up their own work before they submit it to you can teach them that even their final draft is a work in progress.)
1. Begin by handing out copies of Dr. Crowley's "How to Write Prose That People Might Actually Want to Read," which draws on Richard Lanham's Revising Prose and his so-called "Paramedic Method."
2. The first part of the activity is a self-diagnosis of a student's writing. Read the directions aloud, then allow students several minutes to complete the exercise. Ask for students' to raise their hands if their preposition or being-verb quotients are higher than 2 and 1, respectively.
-- If you have a document camera, you can demonstrate this exercise for students with another piece of writing. Students might be delighted if you diagnose your own writing as in need of revision for clarity.
3. Explain and discuss the handout's method of revising for clarity. Lanham uses goofy (but effective) terminology to describe subjects, verbs, and objects: "kicker," "kicking," and "kickee." You can tell students to think of each sentence as a story: it has characters, action, and things. The goal is to get the sentence (grammatically) to line up with the story, so that the subject is the kicker, the verb is the kicking, and objects are kickees. Review the sample sentences and sample revisions to illustrate.
4. More strategies for achieving clarity: You can ask students to read these aloud and discuss them in class, but for our purposes you may want to encourage students to come back to them later on their own time. Students will probably be wrestling with the subject/verb stuff, let alone the preposition/being-verb stuff.
5. Practice revising. Select some (or all) of the samples to edit and ask to students to write down two or three originals they would like to revise. After they replicate the original, ask them to do several revisions--at least three--and allow time. You can do your own revisions during this time, or you can use my sample revisions of sentence #1 below:
1. Reading through the appealing brochures and pamphlets offered by the University to attract students, an emerging theme regarding the demeanor of Arizona State was how the students here come first, and all feasible steps to ensure their enjoyment of the University would be taken.
- Reading through the University’s student brochures, a theme emerged: at Arizona State, students come first, and the University will do everything to ensure their enjoyment.
- A theme emerged in the University’s brochures: students come first, and Arizona state will take all possible steps to ensure they have a good time.
- At Arizona State, students come first, and all steps to ensure their enjoyment will be taken, said the University’s brochures and pamphlets designed to attract students.
6. Discuss revisions. Begin with your own (or mine). Ask for a volunteer to read the first revision aloud. Ask students if they prefer the revision to the original, and if so (or if not)--why? What is different? What is the rhetorical effect it has on the meaning of the sentence? For example:
- In the first revision, have students identify the subject and verb (Original: "theme" and "was." Revision: "theme" and "emerged").
- Ask students if they prefer the first revision, and to explain why or why not.
- Most will since the revision maintains much of the sense of the original, but concentrates the "story" of the sentence in "a theme emerged." Having the kicker and the kickee right next to each other makes the sentence easier to follow.
- Even though the clauses on either side of "a theme emerged" are lengthy, they can add balance to the sentence by being on both sides.
- The revision also eliminates redundancies ("appealing brochures and pamphlets" becomes "brochures") and confusing prepositional phrases ("by the University to attract students" becomes "University's student" brochures).
Then ask students for volunteers to share their own revisions. Look at several for each sentence. If you ask students which they prefer, original or revision, or one revision over another, invite the writer of the sentence in question to vote, too--they don't have to like their own revision best.
7. Finally, allow students to revise their own paragraphs that they diagnosed at the beginning of class. 10-15 minutes is probably plenty to get them started, and therefore used to revising at the sentence level with clarity and coherence in mind.
Handout attached.
Students seem to enjoy this kind of practice, especially if they are not experienced writers.
They may have mistaken ideas in introductory writing classes about what revision is: just fixing errors in spelling and grammar. This exercise gives students a chance to see that grammar is a matter of choice and of rhetorical style, not immutable rules.
Comparing revisions and originals in discussion seems daunting at first, but students learn to talk about why some writing is better than other writing, and they learn a method for producing better writing themselves. It also gets them thinking about clarity and style in relation to their audience (especially you!).
Other resources:
Richard Lanham's Revising Prose
Martha Kolln's Rhetorical Grammar
OWL at Purdue's Paramedic Method page http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/635/01/
DWRL Blogging Pedagogy post on Parademic Method http://pedagogy.dwrl.utexas.edu/node/7
UWC handouts, especially Eliminating Wordiness and Passive Voice http://www.uwc.utexas.edu/handouts
Discussion: after practice revising, call on students to discuss the grammatical and rhetorical differences between an original sentence and several revisions.
- Do students put subject and verb next to each other near the beginning of their sentence revisions?
- Are students able to judge which revision is the most clear? the most formal? closest to the original meaning?
- Can students explain why they prefer one revision over another?
| Attachment | Size |
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| How to Write Prose That People Might Actually Want to Read.doc | 37.5 KB |
Speed-Reviewing
Our purpose is to prepare undergraduates for upper-division English courses by focusing on close reading and critical writing. To that end, we will consider historical, formal, and cultural approaches to issues of censorship in twentieth-century fiction, and we will practice using the Oxford English Dictionary, research databases, and other tools germane to the process of reading and interpreting literary texts. Throughout the semester, we will often return to the commentary in Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel and use it as a starting point for discussions related to agency, desire, memory, truth, culture, political ideology, and how authors choose to position individuals in relation to a larger society. In addition to our focus on these issues, as we read through each text, we will also discuss basic elements of fiction (plot, characterization, point of view, narrative structure, setting, description, dialogue, conflict, symbolism, etc.) and the ways in which particular authors utilize these elements to challenge standard narrative expectations about both literature and life.
This method of peer review is intended for any writing assignment that deals with a short amount of text, but I have found that it is especially useful for generating feedback that addresses opening paragraphs.
Multiple 5-minute review sessions during one class period.
Gmail account; Google docs
Students need a Gmail account and access to each other’s Google docs. It is also helpful to provide students with a class roster so that they know the alphabetical order of the class list.
You should have access to your peers' papers via Google docs (note: if for some reason you do not have access, ask your peer to invite you as a reviewer). The idea behind this peer review session is to look at as many of your peers' opening paragraphs as possible during the class period. You will have exactly 5 minutes to read through each opening paragraph and to provide marginal comments that address the questions in the peer-review guidelines. When your 5 minutes are up, open the next document that occurs alphabetically in the class roster, and repeat the process.
Students seem to find this activity especially helpful when they are having trouble narrowing (or expanding) the focus of their opening paragraphs. Typically, when one reviewer targets a potential misfire (perhaps in the thesis, the progression of ideas, the transitions, etc…), several other reviewers will naturally catch the same issue, and the writer will become acutely aware that something about the opening is causing it to misfire. Conversely, if only one reviewer notes a particular issue, and the writer finds the comment to be at odds with the general sentiments of the other reviewers, the writer may have an easier time rejecting the suggestion as an outlier.
If the students are reviewing longer sections of text (several pages), I will occasionally consider the thoughtfulness of their marginal comments relative to the specified criteria and give them a grade; however, in an assignment such as this, where time for extended commentary is relatively short, I typically offer a completion grade for showing up and participating.
