So, being a lover of games (and one who is not a fan of lecturing) I came up with a great way to review terminology in rhetoric, specifically with respect to fallacies in arguments. It’s fun, it breaks up the monotony of the semester, it’s a great way to review terminology, it reinforces the lesson, and there is next to no prep time involved. This is a great alternative to a pop quiz or a way to give out bonus points. This could also work for reviewing the terminology of rhetorical devices.

Basically it’s a loose adaptation of Jeopardy (very loose) and it goes something like this:

Pre-class preparation:
1. Find about a dozen examples of fallacies in arguments and write them up on slips of paper or index cards. Pull them out of the text your working with, Google them, or make some up. Make sure they’re varied but not too long because you’ll be reading them out loud. If you have access to an overhead projector in class you can also project them.

In class preparation:
1. Organize students into groups of 3 or 4 (more if it’s a larger class, you might not want more than 6 groups).
2. On the board, draw a grid with boxes for the number of groups across the x and y axes (i.e. 6 groups = 6 x 6 grid). Across the top, label the grid A, B, C, etc. Then number the rows, 1 though 6.

Round 1:
1. Read one of the examples of the fallacies to the students. Start with an easy one that students recognize to warm them up.
2. In groups students discuss what the answer is. Give them a time limit of 60 seconds. Usually they won’t need it, but it’s good to have just in case.
3. Starting with group A, have each group tell you what they’ve decided, and write their decision down in their corresponding box for question no. 1.
4. Once you’ve gone around and gotten all the teams’ answers, you tell them the correct answer.
5. Each team that answered correctly gets a point.
6. Sometimes, if the argument is ambiguous, students might try to convince you that their answer is correct. Let them. If they can, then give them the point (or a percentage of the point), especially if it’s ambiguous. What’s important is that they can argue in defense of their answer.
7. For the subsequent rounds, start by reading a statement.
8. After giving the students a minute to agree on their answers, let team B answer first. For round 3 let team C answer first. For round 4, start with team D, and so forth. This will give each team the opportunity to start off each round.
9. As the rounds progress, the fallacies should get more ambiguous and challenging.

Scoring:
After going through the rounds, tally up the scores. Each team that gets a perfect score (or the highest) gets x points (you decide). Each team that scores the next best score gets a percentage of x points, and so on. You can leave it at that and just let the winners walk away with the bonus points. I’m a softy, so all my teams usually get bonus points.

It’s fun, especially when they start trying to convince you that their answers are right.