Rhetorical Fallacies

In this activity, students will use Amazon reviews of the Women's Sexy PhD Halloween costume to identify places where the authors concede, refute and rebut the idea behind the costume. They will then come up with their own Amazon reviews for a product, real or imagined, of their choice.

Students work in groups to compose persuasive, dramatic monologues from the perspectives of famous, fictional villains.

This assignment gives students a chance to make their own (very elementary) argumentative, flash game. By actively engaging in the process of game design, students will have to think through their intentions and the process of piecing together visual, aural, and verbal rhetoric.

This assignment pushes students to recognize the layers of rhetoric and propaganda embedded in something as visual and auditory as a flash game.

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

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.

Students break up into two groups to engage in agonistic debate regarding an issue in an assigned reading in the course.

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.

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.)

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.