1-  I have created this quizlet to help my students practice some literary terms before the quiz.  Students have to understand the elements: their definition and application before they can begin to analyze an argumentative piece of writing or a speech.  Some of these are fairly easy for students to grasp (anecdote and statistic) while others like tone and allusion are more complex.

2-  Many teachers start a rhetoric unit with ethos, pathos, and logos.  I, however, prefer to do that after a broader collection of literary terms.  My students use this sketch note freebie to begin learning these three rhetorical elements.  They can take their own notes and glue the pages in their notebook to serve as a reference going forward.  I always limit any piece to only one of the three because otherwise, it becomes too routine.

3-  Stacey Lloyd has a great post with ideas on how to teach rhetoric and persuasive writing using speeches and advertisements.  She even included a link to a free lesson on teaching some of the terms, and the lesson is a great starting off point.   I was especially happy to find her link to recorded speeches to use for analysis.  Each of Stacey’s ideas is a great point of entry for students doing this type of analysis for the first time.



4-  Building Book Love created a way to visually graph the literary/rhetorical techniques used in a passage.  With a shared texts students can pick out examples of different techniques and display them on the board as visual of what is most common.  After students pull our the items, they can discuss what might be the best choices to write about in the essay.    Her example is from Animal Farm, but she also has done this with Julius Caesar.  I am going to try this activity with The Crucible.

5- Rhetorical Analysis with a PAPA Square by The  Daring English Teacher.  Her PAPA Square (purpose, argument, persona, and audience) analysis brings a more creative way to going over the basics of rhetoric.  I would love to do this in small groups giving each group one speech from a collection of famous speeches on different topics.  I like that she has her students select one of their own sources from their research writing for completing this project.  She also is offering a freebie of her PAPA Square Analysis Project if you sign up by email.

6-  The College Board site for the Advanced Placement English Language Exam has exams going back to 1999.  Every year has a rhetorical analysis question that is passage-based.  You can even get sample analysis responses with scores and commentary.  I use the passages for reading practice and annotation.  Students can even do some scoring on the sample essays themselves.  I also use them for sample analysis with questions for students to see great examples.

7-  John Grisham’s A Time to Kill is a great novel.  The movie with Matthew McConaughey is also stellar.  His closing argument is all kinds of fun to use with rhetorical analysis; plus, who doesn’t love Mr. McConaughey?


8-  Pernilla’s English Classroom’s post on writing an argument speech has a great image, which is also available on her posters tab and a link to another video of one of President Obama’s speeches that illustrates ethos, pathos, and logos.  Given the current political climate, I am leery of using the current president or former president’s speeches and prefer to go back farther for examples.



9-  The Rhetor’s Toolbox’s post on How to Teach Analysis Like a Boss gives a basic process for working through rhetorical analysis.  I love chunking the text and looking for patterns and shifts.  Plus, I am always a huge fan of writing the introduction and conclusion last.  As a bonus, there is a link to another post on writing a thesis statement for the rhetorical analysis essay that I am using regularly. 

10-  Open Classroom’s Rhetorical Analysis Bookmarks are a stellar reference for students. There is both a foldable, two-sided bookmark and a one-sided bookmark that you can download and print for free.  Any reference that students can have on their desks as they read is a bonus.

Setbacks and Pitfalls

One of the things you have to watch for on this is student copy and pasting text into their draft in order for it to look like they have written or written more than they actually have. I had several students copy and paste the entire text of a movie script into their post. It was pretty clear something was going on when their words for the month skyrocketed that one day; I also don’t know if they think I am smart enough to catch such silliness. However, it was pretty easy to see they had a big spike in the number of words written; I wish that I had been able to just remove the post from their total, but that is not an option. Another fun one the students tried is to paste one post over and over. Again, they thought they outsmart me, but it was very obvious when I pulled up their writing page to comment and give feedback (two great features of the site) and I was reading the same writing over and over. Again, I wish that I had been able to remove duplicates, but I couldn’t, so I just didn’t put their grade in until they met with me, logged in, and corrected the problem. It isn’t enough to turn students loose to write and check the graphs at the end of the month. You have to be giving them feedback and comments.

Grading

My students get three or four grades for this part of their overall score each month. My courses are set up with category weights so that 10% of the final grade is the daily writing. Ten percent may seem like a lot, but I put that value on it because the daily practice is so important to their growth as a writer. I give students grades on word count, published posts, and drafts. If we are using commenting in the course, there is also a score for comments. Remember that I am spot checking students writing through feedback and comments. I tell students that they need 300 words a day; this is about 2 full paragraphs, and Write About will tell you the average words per post for each month, so that is what I score that out of and it is the largest portion of the grade. I then gave them credit for writing every day through published posts and drafts. Each of these I make worth 10 points. Finally, if I am requiring commenting, I will make those each worth 10 points. All of these items are presented to the teacher on the Student Statistics page. I simply scroll through the students on the first of every month and put the totals down for the previous month. On a normal month it looks like this:

October Average Words /300

October Published Posts /40

October Comments /40

Feedback

It is fairly easy to give feedback to students on their drafts and published posts in Write About. You can filter the writing by drafts or published posts or you can filter by the individual student. I try to go in a rotation and give every student comment or feedback before I start the list over. There is not, sadly, an easy way to see who you have given feedback too, but if you go in order, you can make sure everyone gets feedback.

You can also comment on published posts. When I taught full-year English classes, this is what I added in the second semester. This allowed students to read other people’s writing and have an authentic reader. Every Friday we publish a post and then comment on someone else’s with a substantial and useful comment. This took some pre-teaching, so students could make comments on other people’s writing. After some practice with commenting, students had another layer of feedback on their daily writing.

At the start of each term, I instruct my students to install Grammarly on their Chrome browser. This allows them to run this impressive grammar and spell check right in their Write About posts. It will also track their errors and send them weekly emails with their stats and common errors. It has improved the quality of their daily writing significantly.

One of my favorite ways to use Write About is for the prewriting or paragraphs. We are currently working on research papers and as their daily warm-up writing for several days; I had students write on different parts of their research paper topic. Not only were they able to count it as their daily writing, but they were also able to make a start on the draft of their paper. When it came time to start our draft, students could log in an go straight to their drafts in Write About and copy them directly into their draft.