As with the other chapters in Part One, we recommend working through the rhetorical concepts in Chapter Three during the early part of the semester. By this point in the semester, you'll probably want to be integrating Internet activities into your syllabus. If you haven't gotten your students onto the Web, you might use this chapter as an opportunity to have your students visit the NARA site where "Rosie the Riveter" and other similar materials are available.
We'd like to suggest that the principle method of instruction in this chapter, the rhetorical analysis of the "Rosie the Riveter" poster, is a good model for further classroom discussion. We'd like to encourage you to supplement the discussion of this poster by analyzing other similar cultural artifacts. There is a wealth of material at the National Archives and Records Administration site (http://www.nara.gov/) that you can discuss in class. (Look especially at the Online Exhibit Hall http://www.nara.gov/exhall/exhibits.html, and the Digital Classroom http://www.nara.gov/education/classrm.html) You could also bring in (or have your students bring in) print advertisements and perform similar analyses.
Exercise 4.1 Composing with a Purpose
Time: This is a good exercise to have students complete in class, though if you want to discuss their results, you might assign it for homework.
Suggestions: This should be an enjoyable task for students, and can quickly teach them about the needs to adjust their compositions for a particular situation. To make sure they apply this exercise to the class, be sure to examine their word choice and content decisions carefully. The contrast between the two letters should help to clarify the importance of bridging the gaps between a speaker and an audience rather than offending that audience.
Exercise 4.2 Argument and Information
Time: Again, this is a good in-class exercise, though it will probably take most of a class period. If you're interested, you could expand this assignment to cover two or three class days and turn the class into the TV audience of each group's commercial.
Suggestions: This exercise focuses more on presenting credible, logical arguments to an audience and the importance of offering information in the form of support for an argument. In addition, the issues of confidentiality and the sensitive nature of the disease require a great deal of positioning in terms of speaker and audience. Encourage your students to implement what they know about audience values. Stress that they consider the purpose, to sell this particular test, as a way of narrowing down the information they want to present in their infomercial.