This course is designed to offer students a space to begin considering the way writing takes shape across genres, audiences, and time periods in order to more precisely persuade their target audience. While there are many accurate definitions of rhetoric, we are going to situate rhetoric as simply and accurately as possible: the art of persuasion.
The course will consist of a short series of lectures, independent work, and group work. Students will create in groups to write a script and perform a skit that displays their initial rhetorical situation, compose a proposal in a genre of their choosing, and work to create a genre transfer in groups. Throughout the lectures, group work, and individual notetaking and journal work, students will consider the way arguments inform our everyday lives, enrich our environments, and ultimately, create and sustain power dynamics in almost every room they enter.
The course includes 3 mini projects within this summer course where each project is scaffolded so that they build on the knowledge of the one prior.
- The Rhetorical Situation: Students choose a particular situation and act out the way in which that situation would operate.
- Rhetoric in Time and Space: Students move to tier 2 thinking by creating a proposal to answer a current world problem. Their proposal can be within any genre they choose, but they must use rhetorical awareness and decorum to choose such genre.
- Rhetoric as a Force: Students move to tier 3 thinking when they are given autonomy to choose a composition out in the world (podcast episode, SNL skit, movie trailer, legal document, commercial) and transfer the information to a new genre of their choosing.