Ethos

This exercise asks students to work in groups to move past a working summary of a text's rhetoric to consider the goals of an author and their strategic approach to audiences. It uses PBworks' collaborative potentials to bridge the gap between two connected class discussions.

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.  

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.

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 uses Photoshop to manipulate creative commons images found on the Internet into an avatar which represents the persona or ethos from which the student will write on a course blog.

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.

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 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.

The infosphere assignment calls on students to identify online sources of information they regularly take in and to create a representative structure for this information. Students must build their own unique infospheres and organize them as they see fit.

In this group project, students design a commenting system or other forum/method for conversation within a website, matching the system to the particular rhetorical goals of the site.  Groups present their systems in a presentation and are required to turn in two documents: a visual representation of the conversatio

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.