Formatting: Single-spaced, 1-inch margins, Times New Roman, 12 pt. font, submitted in eLearning Dropbox in .doc, .docx, .pdf, or .rtf format (NOT .pages or .odt) and an in-class performance
Length: 5 minutes in length, so approximately 500 – 750 words
Bibliographic Documentation: A Works Cited page is required in MLA or APA style. You will need to reference three credible sources, one of which should ideally argue the counterargument from your speech. In-text citation is not required.
Overview
Even when a writer has a personal motive for composing an essay, to remember, to reflect, to meditate, for catharsis, a writer also almost always wants to create an effect on her or his audience: to entertain, to educate, to move the reader. In our third unit, we will focus on a genre of essays with one clear intention: to persuade. We will shift focus to an oral genre of writing: the persuasive speech. Most often, a speech is written with a large, even global audience in mind in today’s televised and digitized age, so it’s unlikely that a speech writer wants to alienate her or his audience. More likely, she or he wants to win the audience over, thus winning them over to a cause as well. A good speech wins an audience over with its logic, but a good speaker wins an audience over just as much with tone, credibility, charisma, and eloquence. Let me emphasize again that we’re working in an oral medium for this unit. This is writing for the ears rather than the eyes, so the writing should be clear and dynamic in a single performance. Reading aloud and listening to the eloquence of sentences is fundamental to this particular writing process. As you compose your speeches, we will read and watch several examples in the genre that employ a variety of tones and argumentation styles.
The Task
Your task is to write a persuasive speech on a topic of your choice. The most obvious topics are often explicitly political, but don’t rule out topics that aren’t as overtly political, such as debates on WMU’s campus or debates in the consumer marketplace like the one over net neutrality. I will encourage you to focus on a less common debate, because it’s more likely to be new to the class and therefore more interesting. Some debates are just so common that I’m ruling them out: abortion, the death penalty, gun control, marijuana legalization, and homosexual marriage. I’d also encourage you to be as specific as possible in your choice of debate. For instance, rather than write on education reform, write on teachers’ salaries or the new Common Core program. Most likely, you will have to do some initial exploratory research to narrow your speech’s focus. I am also asking that you research three credible sources for your speech, one of which should ideally argue the counterargument from your stance. I ask that you do not use websites, documentaries, or reference books like encyclopedias as your scholarly sources; your best bet will be scholarly journal articles. Databases such as CQ Researcher, PAIS International, and LexisNexis Academic focus on public affairs. I will allow popular newspapers and magazines, but please do consider bias, in any of your sources. For instance, we all know that TV stations like Fox News have a political agenda. The same is true of all media.
At the end of the unit, you will present your speech to the class, so please keep this presentation in mind as you compose. Read your draft out loud as you compose and edit your sentences to sound as eloquent as possible. As you read out loud, you might discover quirks in your own writing style like wordiness, sentence fragments, and misplaced commas that you can finesse.
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