Assignment Author
Emily BloomPedagogical 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."

Attribution
Visual Rhetoric WorkgroupPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
The goals of this assignment are 1) to teach students how to argue both sides of an issue (an exercise known in classical Greek rhetoric as antilogia), 2) to teach them to infer contextual information from a given text/image/film without help from outside sources, 3) to teach them how to recognize rhetorical strategy and first amplify it, then steer against it.

Attribution
Visual Rhetoric WorkgroupPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
The goals of this assignment are 1) to introduce them to the difficult issue of causality and images, 2) to get them to think in abstract terms first, i.e., to argue an issue in general terms, before they apply those terms to more specific situations and test their validity, and 3) to help them decide for themselves how much evidence is “enough” for a given type of paper and what level of abstraction they need to employ in a given argumentative situation.

Attribution
Visual Rhetoric WorkgroupPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
This assignment has several goals: a) to give the students the opportunity to realize that successful arguments about rhetorical effect can be quite complex and require much research, b) to give them a chance to revise and incorporate some of their own writing into longer pieces of text with different goals, c) to help them realize that no description or comparison is “neutral;” all descriptions/comparisons have a particular rhetorical goal and audience, and their language and selection of elements is important.