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Distributed Peer Review
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"Tin Foil Hat" by James Provost vis Flickr
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. For a typical rhetorical analysis assignment, everyone's analysis is public writing—on a class blog, and everyone's analysis is due on different days.
Rhetorical Analysis
Revision
Organization/Arrangement
Class blog in which each student is a contributor.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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