The Persuasion Project is your final for Rhetoric 005, worth 40% of your final grade and due on Monday, 12/16.

I will grade your project using this rubric.

You will bring a draft of your Persuasion Project to class on Monday, November 25.

The following students will offer 20-minute presentations for their projects in class on:

  • Monday, 12/2: Jared
  • Wednesday, 12/4: Raquel, Patrick, Jinyi

Over the course of this semester, you have been thinking and writing about an issue for which you want to advocate. (You may have also been writing about a few different issues. It’s time to make a decision about what you’d like to focus on for the final.) This project is intended to allow you the freedom to advocate for your position on an issue that is important to you, while also demanding rigorous, rhetorically persuasive work.

The Persuasion Project asks you to makes choices about:

  • your position as a rhetor
  • your audience
  • your purpose
  • what genre would be most effective to make your case

Use appropriate rhetorical tools to help you make a persuasive case. Below are some examples of the tools we’ve practiced using this semester:

  • kairos: consider the urgency of the issue
  • commonplaces: what are common ideas that circulate about your issue (take into consideration multiple perspectives)
  • logos: construct arguments that appeal to logic through constructing conclusions based on premises (enthymemes), using historical examples, and creating analogies
  • ethos: creating character for an audience
  • pathos: consider appealing to emotions through use of enargeia, honorific, or pejorative language
  • use extrinsic proofs

What else makes this good? Use this rubric to know how I will grade your project.

  • Your purpose and audience will be clear.
  • You will incorporate evidence from the following sources:
    1. at least one peer-reviewed article that you accessed from Hofstra’s Library Database
    2. at least one news sources
    3. personal experience
    4. extrinsic proof in the form of testimonials, interview data, or survey data
  • Consider multiple perspectives on the issues; account for different biases.

Examples of possibilities (or Dream Your Wildest Dream): Check out this issue of Jump+ to demonstrate just how expansively you can think.