Week 5/Day 13 – Wednesday, September 20th

Homework Due:

  • If you have not finished the “Letter WTL”, by the end of class, complete it for homework, and bring it to class on Wednesday.
  • Bring your copy of the Food Reader to class for an activity.
  • Critically read and annotate Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Trouble with Fries” in the Food Reader. As you read, fill out the document called “Reading Workshop: Pivotal Words” (available on Canvas ______(insert directions on how to access this document)______. Type your responses in the document, print it, and bring it to class with you.

Lesson Objectives

  • Practice appealing to a specific audience
  • Define “development” and understand what it means in a proposal;
  • Examine how authors use textual evidence to achieve their purposes in writing

Prep

Prepare your materials for the day’s lesson (below) and review your lesson notes. Closely read Malcolm Gladwell’s text and see which “Pivotal Words” you identified in the text.

Materials

  • Copy of the reader
  • Overhead/slides for Development Notes

Lead-In

Today’s focus is on development and connects a number of different concepts students have been working on over the past week: understanding synthesis, analyzing an audience, and developing appeals for a particular audience. To explore how authors do this in writing, at the end of class students will engage in the second Reading Workshop of the semester (which they began prepping for with the assigned homework for today).

ACTIVITIES

Attendance (1 minute)

Transition: Last class we learned about analyzing an audience so you can better appeal to them. Today, we’re going to continue this work, as well as begin to think about the way in which our audience connects to the way in which we develop our writing. Let’s begin with audience by taking some time to consider how you appealed to a specific audience in the letter that you wrote for today.

Letter Share (10 minutes)

Ask students to refer to the letter writing WTL that they finished for last night’s homework. Ask them to get with a partner (either have one they have chosen or one that you assign) and take turns reading their letters aloud to one another. Tell them to take note of the ways in which their partner is appealing to their specific audience on their paper. For instance, if their partner is appealing to a roommate, and uses a specific inside joke that they and their roommate share, then they are clearly making a specific choice in order to appeal to their specific audience.

Once students have finished reading to one another, call on a few groups to share how their partner appealed to their specific audience. (Another way that you might facilitate this activity is by calling on a few individuals to read their letters to the class. While this can work well in some cases, if you have a quiet class, it can sometimes be difficult to get students to voluntarily share so much of their writing on the spot, whereas the previous activity allows for students to share what they know about their partners writing, as a way of taking the pressure off.) As students are sharing their ideas, make sure to help the entire class see how the specific choices made in the letter are directly linked to the audience.

Transition: As we mentioned earlier in the semester, we often instinctually shape and change our message in order to appeal to a specific audience. This is exactly what you should aim to do in your proposal, which is why it will be so important that you select a specific audience. In addition to having a clear sense of your specific audience, it’s also important that we consider the way in which development and audience are linked. First, though, let’s talk about the article you read for homework, which provides a great example of intentional development. Tip: You can involve students in your class “opener” by asking someone in the class to recall what happened last time and use that to transition into the day’s lesson.

Discussion (brief) of Article (10 minutes)

Project discussion questions from the reader about the article, pulling these directly from the reader’s questions provided at the end of each reading. Add any necessary tips, etc. based on what the questions are. For instance, maybe they just focus on one question, WTL for a 5 minutes, and then talk about it as a group. Again base this discussion on what the discussion q’s are in the reader.

Introduce the Concept of “Development for Audience” (5 minutes)

Transition: There is certainly plenty more to say on the issues that come up in the article, and in A2 you’ll have more of a chance to weigh in on your own solutions for problems related to our course theme. Now, though, let’s go from thinking about the content of the article – the WHAT – to the rhetoric – the HOW – by exploring development in the article.

Ask students to look closely at the hierarchy of rhetorical concerns on the back page of the A2 assignment sheet. Draw students’ attention to “development for audience” and the questions listed there.

Explain that we’ve discussed audience, but our assignment sheet talks about “development for the audience.” Ask: does anyone want to take a stab at what the word “development” means? For instance, when a teacher tells you to “develop your ideas more,” what does that mean?

(Use whatever students say as to segue into a more formal definition of the term.) Project the following information on the board.)

  • Development= how writers choose to elaborate on their main ideas in their writing.
  • Development includes evidence and explanation of that evidence for the audience.
  • How you develop your paper depends on the rhetorical situation (i.e., the purpose of your writing, the audience you’re writing for, the context, etc.)
  • How is development linked with audience? Why is it called “development for the audience”?
  • Based on your audience’s needs, values, knowledge, etc. (that you figure out by doing an audience analysis), you provide details and explanation based on what you’re trying to do (your purpose) and shape them for your particular audience (using audience appeals.)

Reading Workshop: Pivotal Words and Development (20- 25 minutes)

Transition:

Your homework tonight will introduce some additional information about what “development” looks like in a proposal, and will ask you to consider how you will develop your own proposal. Now we’re going to look atour reading for homework, and analyze the way Malcolm Gladwell develops his evidence for his audience. For homework you read Gladwell’s article closely and identified some “pivotal words” that he uses to help the reader understand his ideas. Now we’re going to see how those “pivotal words” are related to development. For this activity, you and partner will use your homework as a starting point for analyzing the author’s development.For homework you identified some spots in the text where the author uses “pivotal words” to help the audience understand his ideas. Now you’re going to use that to explore how many of those “pivotal words” are ways of developing evidence for a reader.

Project the following directions:

Compare your homework with a partner. Choose 2-3 quotations from the text to analyze. In the “analysis” box on the sheet, answer the following questions:

  • Look back at the 2-3 quotations you’ve chosen to analyze.
  • How does the author use the “pivotal words” to help his development? In other words, what larger point is the author developing when he uses these words to help his reader understand better?
  • o Are they helping the evidence develop the key point? Are they helping a key point develop the thesis? Are they helping connect one key point to another? Are they to help the reader stay on track?
  • (NOTE: You’ll need to look at the text and ideas surrounding the quotation – both before and after – to really understand how the author uses these pivotal words to help development.)

For example:

  • In one section of the article, Gladwell uses an amplification phrase (“for example”), when talking about how French fries are cooked: “McDonald’s fries, for example, are briefly dipped in a sugar solution, which gives them their golden brown color; Burger King fries are dipped in a starch batter, which is what gives those fries their distinctive hard shell and audible crunch.”
  • Sample response: In this quotation, Gladwell is offering examples (evidence) of how McDonald’s and Burger King’s fries are made. He is using this to help develop the larger point that both companies’ fries are eventually deep-fried, which is why they’re so unhealthy.

Spend at least a few minutes doing a large-group discussion talking about the author’s use of pivotal words to help his development. Be sure to touch on the fact that the author doesn’t just include the evidence, the author introduces them for the reader and offers explanation/discussion/commentary/analysis (i.e., development) of the information to help the audience understand and know how the evidence proves what the author is trying to say.

Connect this to the students’ own writing by explaining that this, too, is what they will do to develop their ideas for their audience in their proposal. They’ll use textual evidence and at least one multimodal element to support their ideas, always keeping in mind who their audience is, what they value, etc.

Assign homework (2 minutes)

  • Watch the video entitled “Development for a Specific Audience” (available on Canvas) Jot down the main ideas in a place where you can review them. Have access to these notes on Friday. (Link:
  • Read “Science is Warning Us that a Food Crisis is Coming to South Africa. Will we stop it?” by Christopher Groskopf in your Food Reader.
  • Complete the A2 Prep & Audience Analysis sheet (available on Canvas) and bring it with you to class next time.
  • Continue reading and annotating articles from the reader and the sanctioned websites (listed on the A2 assignment sheet) about your topics for A2 (remember: you must synthesize at least 3 sources from the reader or from the sanctioned websites. One of your articles MUST be from the Reader!

Conclude Class

Today we focused on the “audience” part of our rhetorical triangle and considered how to develop our ideas for a particular audience. Next class, we’ll turn our attention to the “text/genre” portion of the triangle and learn about the genre conventions of a proposal.

Connection to Next Class

With each class students are building skills to help them better understand writing as a rhetorical practice. We started the unit with helping students understand what stakeholders are and how to identify them; we then transitioned into helping students understand how purpose shapes audience (and vice versa) and how stakeholders can become audiences for writing; we expanded on the idea of audience with helping students learn how to analyze an audience and shape appeals accordingly; and today we combined lessons about synthesis, audience analysis, and audience appeals to help students better understand development. Next class will focus on the genre of a proposal (what the features of proposals are, how they’re organized, etc.) so that students can begin putting the “pieces and parts” together to better craft A2 and be prepared for workshop in Week 6.