Assignment Author
Emily BloomSoftware / Hardware
DVD player
Context of Assignment
I use this assignment as an introduction to Unit 3, so that students can begin to think about the kind of rhetoric they want to cultivate for their own argument by deconstructing and reconstructing an argument they recognize as ineffective.
Pedagogical Goals of the Assignment
Moving from rhetorical analysis to argumentation, this assignment aims to shift class discussion so that students can begin looking critically at rhetorical techniques and make good choices for their argument paper. They will analyze, critique, reconstruct and rebut a bad argument from the movie "Clueless."
Assignment Description
I begin by playing a clip from the movie "Cluless." The clip is in section 1-4 of the DVD main menu, titled "As If." In this scene, the main character has an assignment in debate class to argue the pro-side of the controversy, "Should all oppressed people be offered refuge in America?"
After watching the argument and the rebuttal, I asked students to analyze the rhetoric non-evaluatively. In other words, what was she trying to do rhetorically? We discussed analogy, audience, ethos and proposal arguments. Then, I asked them to tell me why it didn't work to persuade her audience (either her fellow students or her teacher). Students were very aware of these problems and I asked them to particularly focus on false analogy, diction (particularly as it relates to a serious issue), and her over-reliance on ethos over other appeals. Finally, we reconstructed her argument as a class using more effective rhetorical techniques. I have an hour class so we only outlined the argument as a group, but a 1.5 hour class may want to break them up and have them actually write new arguments. After reconstructing the pro-argument, we outlined a rebuttal argument.