Class Discussion

First Day Introduction to Rhetoric Prezi

This lesson uses the popular sitcom Friends and the classic public debate of "Faith Vs. Reason" to create a fun, accessible way of understanding the relationship between claims, reasons, and evidence.

The aim of this lesson is to provide students with an accessible and engaging introduction to rhetorical analysis. Students will view four brief texts—three thirty-second videos and one print advertisement—and try to identify the audience, the speaker, and the argument contained in each.

Introducing the concept of credibility by analyzing tweets.

This assignment introduces annotated bibliographies to the students as preparation for a longer homework assignment, and their first paper. In using a public forum, students will see that even annotated bibliographies containing the same sources are flexible products influenced by individual projects.

This in-class activity uses the popular HSBC ad campaign (a tryptich of the same image with different value labels) to introduce students to visual rhetoric and ideology. After discussing the ads, students create their own version.

Students come to class having read read an analysis focused upon the importance of the seemingly minor distinctions between "icons" and "symbols" in the context of Texas v Johnson, the definitive Supreme Court case regarding the extent to which an American flag and/or the burning thereof is “speech,” and therefore protected by the First Amendment.

A remix of a previous lesson plan, this exercise asks students to analyze the ethos of an online dating profile and then pair it with an appropriate image - drawing on the relationship between written and visual rhetoric.

Students work on argumentation techniques, rhetorical fallacies, and other concepts via reading a heavily-biased article from the New York Post discussing the relatively new but quickly growing phenomenon known as "sugar dating," which consists of web sites that pair older men (sugar daddies) who are willin

Students will look at a series of popular, “sad” advertisements and discuss the ways in which certain commercials have successfully tapped into elements of rhetoric specific to viral videos.

This assignment asks students to watch a debate and evaluate the participants' use of ethos, pathos and logos given their goals and their audience.

Using various records of the Hindenburg disaster, this assignment encourages students to engage with medium over content, especially in terms of literary studies.  

In this lesson, students in my visual rhetoric class, "The Rhetoric of Photography," look at internet memes in multiple contexts as part of our unit on kairos. 

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

This close reading assignment uses “Rap Genius”, an Internet annotation website, to connect each student with multiple audiences while also creating a forum where the entire class can pool their knowledge together in order to better analyze and understand the work of a specific author.

This peer learning assignment and lesson plan series gives students the opportunity to explore digital composition.

In the course of discussing David Foster Wallace’s essay “Tense Present,” I asked my students to compare and contrast the en

Images on book covers, blurbs or reviews on dust jackets, and publishers’ summaries all provide constructed argumentation about the text within that is designed to provoke an emotional and analytic response.

This assignment was designed to get students to practice their close reading skills in a short, condensed format of a blog post.  Students sign up to blog for a given class day, chosing a short passage from the assigned reading for that day.