Introductory Writing Course

This assignment is designed to check student comprehension of rhetorical fallacies.  It can also be used to begin to discuss rhetorical analysis of images.

Students deliver oral presentations to the class of each others' work and offer constructive commentary on their peer's paper.

By reading and browsing Viz. posts, students learn the difference between objective analysis and value judgment. This assignment also uses Viz. to teach students that the topics and tone used for rhetorical analysis can be wide-ranging and non- “academic.”

In this assignment, students work in the visual medium to explore dimensions of associative image logic they can use in their persuasive written compositions.

This assignment asks students to map out logos with the aid of visualized arguments and, ultimately, to create and explain their own vizualization of a textual argument that helps highlight the elements of logos within that textual argument.

As part fo the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998, content service providers (such as YouTube) are given safe harbor from prosecution if they take certain steps to prevent copyright infringement. Unfortunately, this has led to a "shoot first and ask questions later" approach on YouTube's part.

This assignment is geared toward getting students to begin thinking, talking, and writing about how writing is a deeply embodied practice.  I ask students to play two games (QWOP and GIRP) that reconfigure how we engage the keyboard as a material object. 

Students practice closely describing and analyzing an image for its argument and rhetorical impact.

Rather than post an explicit lesson plan to our site, I thought I’d run through a set of practices that have been successful for me over a few courses.

This assignment encourges students to think about how they can read and piece together primary sources to create a descriptive narrative.

Using the multimedia curation program, Storify, students compose a short writing assignment analyzing an "author's" ethos based on his or her Twitter feed.  This demonstrates the ways in which ethos is cultivated over time and in a variety of different ways.

In this lesson students review the basics of argument types & rhetorical appeals.  Working in groups, they look for examples of several argument types in facebook status updates.  As a class we review the examples, evaluate their classifications, and discuss the rhetorical appeals at play.  

This lesson asks students to individually summarize a short opinion article, then post their summaries as comments on a class wiki page. The lesson can be expanded with class discussion about the strengths of students' summaries, as well as the similarities and differences.

Students analyze portions of profiles excerpted from the free online dating site, OkCupid, in order to talk about ethos, values, ideology and goodwill.  The exercise, in turn, encourages students to consider their own online presences, their values, and the ways in which rhetoric has “real world” applications.

On the first day of class, students think about the course topic and document their personal definitions of and understandings of the topic.