Unit Six: Persuading and Advocating

In Unit Seven, we will direct our rhetorical skills to persuading audiences and advocating for causes and ideas. We’ll discuss the subtle differences between persuading and advocating as we attune ourselves to the forms of our arguments. Unit Seven consists of two major assignments, collectively worth 25% or your final course grade.

1. The Issue Brief (18% of course grade)

The aim of this 1,500 word or so policy-oriented “issue brief” is to draw on all the rhetorical skills you have been building, incorporating research and analysis in a responsible and convincing way. For this issue brief, you will make a sophisticated, substantiated case for implementing, changing, or enforcing a policy or strategy. This issue brief 1). should be directed toward governing bodies who can enact the policy or course of action; 2) should affect public opinion with regard to this policy and 3). should incorporate convincing research and substantiated arguments and 4). should aim to be shared widely.

Your issue brief should:

  • Establish a relevant title, context, and exigence for the issue brief
  • Establish a thesis regarding the course of action that should be adopted
  • Provide evidence and arguments for such a course
  • Incorporate two to four infographics that support your policy direction (with at least one original graphic and up to three that are shared from other sources but are appropriately cited)
  • Should use subtitles to enhance reability
  • Discuss issues of feasibility and handle possible objections
  • Be submitted in PDF form on Canvas and follow the Issue Brief Template
  • Use Chicago Style end notes correctly

Tips for this assignment: Your intervention should be smaller, not sweeping, and actually actionable. It should indicate that you have been following this topic and are making a recommendation for a policy course that is responsive to the rhetorical situation.

 

2. Advocacy Campaign (7% of course grade)

For this assignment, you will draw on your studies and performances so far in Rhetoric and Civic Life to produce an advocacy piece for the issue featured in your issue brief paper, blog, or another topic using the communicative mode outlined below. The key here is to make a direct appeal to your audience–or change the audience to whom you are speaking–and cause them to act. For the advocacy project, you will likely draw more deeply on ethos and pathos than you may have in your issue brief. Also, you should consult Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the Motivated Sequence to be sure your project is persuasive.

For example, perhaps you will want to take a civic issue that you have been exploring mainly on the level of the nation and create an advocacy project for the Penn State community or for your hometown. After you have given some thought to specific action you would like to encourage, the other key part of this assignment is to choose an appropriate mode for this advocacy work. Will it be oral? Written? Visual? Will it be made available online? Recorded live? Another option is to work in the opposite direction: that is, begin by choosing the mode in which you would like to work and then ask to what message or action or audience that mode might suggest.

In addition to the project itself, each student will submit a one-page justification of the mode and audience and for the advocacy project. This one-page, single-spaced letter, to be uploaded to the appropriate Canvas dropbox, should also include a discussion or evidence of how the project was implemented in an online or live environment. Your choices need to be a rhetorically sound, deliberate, and based on the conditions under which your desired audience will encounter the advocacy piece.

The aims of this assignment are three-fold:

  1. to demonstrate an awareness of what constitutes effective advocacy (e.g., its differences from persuasion)
  2. to show a strong awareness of the rhetorical benefits of different modes of communication as well as their weaknesses.
  3. to appeal to the audience and move them to act.

Your should spend about 4-6 hours on this project to make it successful.

Choice and Range of Projects: 

  • A 3-minute video encouraging a certain behavior or action that could be sharable in online formats
  • A 3-minute recorded speech that encourages a certain behavior or action that could be sharable in online formats
  • A detailed infographic that explains a process and asks for a specific action (some examples of infographics)
  • A 10-to 20-minute podcast with a guest
  • A 4-5 minute recorded live speech to the people whom you are living about an action they should take (donating money, sticking with a schedule or behavior, taking safety precautions, etc., that they should take)

Successful projects will:

  • Draw upon principles of effective and ethical advocacy
  • Draw upon Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and The Motivated Sequence to motivate
  • Be executed well, excelling in the Five Canons
  • Conform to the appropriate assignment length and prompts suggested above
  • Show an awareness of audience and genre
  • Include a specific, actionable step for the audience

Advocacy-Project-Rubric