Introductory Writing Course

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

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

This activity introduces students to iMovie software and reveals the range of rhetorical possibilities and effects that the program provides.

Students pair up to practice rebuttal. Partners present their position on their chosen controversy and have to fend off arguments for other positions that their partner comes up with. Partners change frequently and in quick succession.

This lesson is best used in conjunction with “Using Mass Effect 1 to teach critical situations," which can be found under that title on this site.

This lesson plan uses the interactive video game Mass Effect 1 (BioWare, 2007 for XBOX 360) to teach students about making situated speech acts that effectively address a certain audience in a particular rhetorical situation.

Incorporating TV Tropes (a wiki that catalogues narrative devices used across a variety of media) into your discussion of literary devices and encouraging students to talk about how narrative techniques across different genres and forms of media can assist in making these concepts intelligible and "real" to them. 

Students use an online resource to learn some common ways that writers use a few "hard words". Then, with the children's game Madlibs serving as a model, students generate a template for a game in which they learn new words and collocations from their partners.

Using GoogleDocs, students create a group bibliography page to practice summarizing and evaluating a source. They then engage in an informal presentation of their source to the class.

Using the extremely user-friendly online video creation tool, Animoto, students create short commercials pitching (potentially) odd combinations of products to target audiences (pianos to businessmen, running shoes to retirees, etc.)

Through this assignment, students learn to close-read (critique) monuments on campus and consider the rhetorical nature of memory.

In this assignment, students learn about the importance of protecting their information and image online, and in turn, take measures to delete themselves from the myraid places where they are visible/vulnerable.

This assignment is purposefully simple because its serves as a diagnostic for students' levels of functional digital literacy in programs like Photoshop and Jing. It also serves to familiarize some students with these programs, and with the processes necessary for maintaining their class blogs.

This is a short assignment using the free text visualization software, Wordle, to help students find keywords for researching their chosen topics.

Using procedural, verbal, visual and aural rhetoric, students work in teams on a multimedia presentation that outlines a video game prototype and the ways it makes arguments.

In this assignment, students use the free online program Storify to track the life of a meme by combining elements pulled from social and news media sources. 

Students engage with and revise each other's texts using a wiki platform. Allows students to consider the various ways of composing a summary of a single text.

Students consider an ostentacious example of political rhetoric, then consider the other side's analysis of said rhetoric.