Suggested Activities for Chapter 17

1. Ask students to fix Leticia’s speech (pp. 511–12) encouraging her sorority to host the countywide high school mock-trial championship on campus. Request that students create two possible outlines of her speech, using two of the organizational patterns at the end of the chapter.
2. Have students write a reflection on the following topic: “The Last Time I Was Persuaded.”
   When was the last time you were persuaded by someone? What was the situation? What was your position before being persuaded? What was your position after? Why was the persuasion effective? (Write about a situation in which you changed your mind quickly, not one in which you were introduced to an idea, you did research, and came to adjust your position later. The question here is about how often we are persuaded.)
3. Break students into groups of five. Assign each group a product or service, and ask each group to create five different commercials for their product, with each commercial focusing primarily on one part of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Have each student present a commercial to the class, in random order. See if the audience can guess the need. At the end of the presentations, discuss how effective they were and pick the best.
4. Break students into groups and have them write and then act out a commercial for a product that uses unethical persuasion based on each of the four criteria for ethical persuasion: helping audience members make informed decisions; adequately researching facts; noting any bias; and properly attributing research. Discuss afterward how familiar the unethical persuasion seemed.