viz.

Image Credit: Rhetological Fallacies

As an instructor teaching an introductory rhetoric course, I sympathize with my students, I truly do.  I don’t mean this in some sort of self-effacing “so sad for them, they lost the instructor lottery, I suck.”  To the contrary, when one considers the fact that I have to engage 18-year-olds at 9:30 in the morning on matters as dry as the differences between Aristotelian and Platonic notions concerning rhetoric, and/or the finer points of JSTOR navigation, I’d say that I do a halfway decent job.

For a handout, download the PDF document outlining this assignment.

Description:

The purpose of this exercise is to start on the skills set needed for Research Summaries, a mainstay of UT's RHE 306 curriculum. The goal is to break down a complicated argument into claims, reasons, and evidence. This is a good exercise for early in the semester when simply introducing arguments and argument structure.

The subject of the lesson plan is the National Geographic video presentation of Guns, Germs, and Steel. It is a 3-episode series; I use Episode One: Out of Eden for this lesson. The episode is just under 60 minutes long.
The episode is hosted by the author, Jared Diamond, and it presents his argument for the claim that geography and its effects on human development over the last 13,000 years are the basis of the economic inequalities we see in the world today.

Diamond presents a very careful argument -- pretty much a textbook example of the process of posing a research question, making a claim to answer that question, and presenting clear evidence, examples, and support for the claim. One of the especially nice aspects of the film is that Diamond makes the process of building an argument very transparent.

For this lesson, I give the class a worksheet to fill out as they watch the film. I ask them to locate and write down the basics of the argument: research question, thesis, main claims, reasons given to support those claims, evidence to support those claims, examples, type of argument being made.

I follow-up the lesson with a homework assignment: They are to take their notes home and write a summary of the argument explaining how it worked and how it was organized.

For the next class period, we use the summaries and the film as a jumping-off point to talk about the Research Summaries they will be writing in preparation for the Unit I paper.

This plan will take an entire 1 hour and 15 minute class period – It would be really tight for a shorter class.

(Image Credit: Amazon.com)

This weekend, partly out of personal interest and partly in relation to a project I'm working on for the CWRL, I saw the new documentary Food, Inc. What follows is a brief "review" of the film (in other words, my scattered response to it) and some ideas for incorporating the film in the classroom (I assume it will be released on DVD sometime in the fall). I won't be discussing the visual rhetoric of the film in depth, but will instead focus on the film as the visual presentation of an argument about food.

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The opening credits of Food, Inc. present viewers with a tour of the modern American supermarket and the cornucopia of brightly colored packages filling it. The audience is later informed by voiceover narration that this supermarket contains somewhere around 47,000 products. In one of the film's more sardonic moments, we are also informed that an astonishingly high number of these products are made with elements derived from a single ingredient: corn. This arc covered by the film, from the universal supermarket to the particular kernel, establishes its intention of uncovering the origins of the American food supply. Food, Inc. tells the story of industrial agriculture for an audience that, it presumes, is largely unfamiliar with where (or what), exactly, its next meal is coming from.