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advocacy project

Unit 7.5: Advocacy Assignment

 

For this small group assignment, you will draw on your studies and performances so far in Rhetoric and Civic Life to produce an advocacy piece for some version of an issue (perhaps related to your civic issue blog or your persuasive essay), using the communicative mode of your group’s choice. 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 or State College 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? Live and recorded?  Another inventional 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.

You will be given an opportunity to justify your choice of mode, so the choice itself needs to be a rhetorically sound, deliberate one, and the choice of mode should be based on the conditions under which your desired audience will encounter the advocacy piece. The range is wide open: a short video, a speech of some sort, a podcast, a brief written appeal to be placed in an appropriate venue, a visual flyer or poster, some sort of flash performance, the list of possibilities could go on for awhile.

 

The aims of this assignment are twofold:

  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.

 

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