Periods 1&7: Senior AP English, Room 210

Have students read pages 40 to 45 in The Language of Composition about Close Reading: The Art and Craft of Analysis, paying close attention to the speeches by Queen Elizabeth and Winston Churchill and the commentary the text provides on those speeches.  We want to bring the same awareness to our analysis of the speeches and comments that students found last night.   Give them 15-20 minutes to silently and carefully read those pages (40-45).

Then have students form groups of four with the people sitting around them.  They should share their respective candidate’s comments, first explaining the rhetorical situation and context from which the comments came, and then reading the comments aloud to their groupmates.  They should then explain why the particular comment caught their attention and what they notice about the rhetorical features of the comments.  They might talk about purpose, audience, occasion, ethos, logos, pathos, persona, polemic, subject, word choices, sentence structure, tone, etc.  Anything that they notice about the message was delivered and how it was tailored to meet a specific purpose and appeal to a particular segment of the American audience. (15 minutes)

Homework: Read 48-63.  Please tell students this will provide them with several examples of how one annotates for and writes essays about the rhetoric of piece of written text.