Working with Oral Rhetoric
A lesson for the Wallenberg Classroom
(contributor: Christine Alfano)
Here’s an exercise sequence that I do in Wallenberg to start the students thinking about oral rhetoric. Much of it can be done in a non-Wallenberg classroom as well, but it’s fun to do with the smart panels and the Websters at your disposal. Usually, this exercise stretches over two or three class periods, so you may want to abridge it to meet your own needs.
1. Set up terms for evaluating and producing oral arguments. Usually after the students have done some reading on spoken argument (in the past I’ve had them read Andrea’s chapter on “Spoken Arguments” from Everything’s an Argument, and now I’m supplementing that with sections from chapter 7 of Envision as well), I start the class by talking about criteria for an effective oral arguments.
Working on the actual whiteboard or on the Webster whiteboard, as a class, we list criteria for evaluation, including structure, style, audience, purpose, etc… Then I remind them about how to think about oral arguments in terms of the 5 Canons of Rhetoric (innovation, style, arrangement, memory, and delivery), and then I prompt them to consider how rhetorical appeals (pathos, ethos, logos, nomos) and kairos might factor into oral arguments. Once we have this vocabulary listed on the board and defined, I tell them that I’m going to show them a clip of an oral argument that I want to evaluate as a class.
2. Show film clip. I usually show the 3 minute clip of Cher’s oral presentation from Clueless (you’ll need your own tape for this). At first they laugh, but then I ask them to series consider this as a deliberately crafted piece of oral rhetoric – whether or not they feel that it’s argument is convincing. First we identify its purpose and its argument. Then, we then analyze it as a whole together, pointing out elements such as
· How she establishes ethos
· Her selection of example
· Her appeal to pathos at the end
· Her signposting
· Her transitions
· How she pulls the different elements together in her conclusion
· Her embodied rhetoric (think about what she does with her gum)
3. Look at another oral argument example. Then, I tell them I want to look at another example. I pull up the transcript of a speech from Return of the King from the American Rhetoric site (this speech can be found at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechreturnoftheking.html). BEFORE I play it for them, we look at the written transcript as an oral argument and do a rhetorical analysis. First I ask them to identify its argument and its purpose (i.e., to instruct, inform, call to action, etc.) The I use the stylus to write directly on the speech itself to show the movement of the argument, the deliberate repetitions, the reliance of nomos, etc. Then, once we have marked up the whole speech, I finally play it for them (the site has an audio file attached), making sure that they can look at the transcript as they listen. After they have listened to it, we talk about what voice intonation, dramatic pauses, and verbal emphatics add to the delivery of the oral argument that we just analyzed. (I suppose that you could show the clip from the movie, but I’ve always been concerned that the visuals in this particular case might be distracting)
4. Start working with more current, real-world examples. Having done two movie speeches, I now access the C-Span public speeches website to work with real-world examples (http://www.c-span.org/classroom/lang/speeches.asp). There are incredible resources here – most of which are video clips. You can spend time selecting the clips that work the best for you. Recently, I used clips from rallies during the 2004 presidential campaign. I actually would just focus on the introductions to the candidates rather than the candidate’s speeches themselves, simply because the introductions tend to be around 3-5 minutes long and you can work with a few of them, beginning to end, for comparison, while the candidate speeches are much longer than that.
· Play your clip once. Then ask them to identify the purpose and the argument.
· Play it again. This time, as it plays, on the whiteboard or on the Webster next to the video, create your own phrase outline of the speech.
· Now do a rhetorical analysis of the argument. Working with the outline you created, get the students to comment on the rhetorical features of the speech, including places where the speaker deliberately uses rhetorical appeals; what the structure or movement of the argument is; any indications of repetition, parallelism, or dramatic escalation; how the speaker opens and closes his remarks; what persona s/he establishes for him/herself and the candidate; the kairos of the remarks; use of voice, gesture, or backdrop deliberately or emphatically; etc. I often also (especially if the class is quiet) ask them to think about alternative strategies that the speaker could have employed and how those would have changed the oral argument. Make sure that you write these comments on the whiteboard (Webster or physical) on top of the original outline in a different color.
· Usually I repeat this exercise with a second clip to serve as a basis for comparison.
5. Initiate a critique of PowerPoint. If I’m going to move the class in the days following to a discussion of PowerPoint, what I do at this point is divide the class into four groups and have each group move to a plasma screen. I then introduce the following scenario:
Pretend we live in a world where it is customary for speakers who introduce candidates at political rallies to use PowerPoint to do so.
The groups are then told to pretend they are the design team producing the PowerPoint for one of the introductory speeches we just listened to. Using the actual introduction delivered as their model, they have to create a PowerPoint presentation to accompany it. The groups (two groups working independently on each speaker if we’ve looked at two clips) then spend class time creating these PowerPoints collaboratively on the plasma screens (using laptops to write collaboratively). When they’re done, we move them into the everyone folder, and then we play the clips again on the Webster, this time accompanied by the group’s PowerPoint on the other Webster. That initiates a discussion on appropriate uses of PowerPoint in terms of design and argument.