I caught Bill Moyers the other night and the program was all about analyzing the sorts of arguments are being made by campaign ads. It could be a nice was to talk about visual rhetoric, rhetoric and multimedia (sound and images) and different types of arguments. Link below:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02292008/profile.html

I only caught about a half hour or so, but the Bill Moyers special "Buying the War" seems like it would be of great use in a rhetoric class. It's essentially an analysis of media coverage during the run up to the war in Iraq. What this means is that focus throughout (or at least what I saw) is on evidence, argumentation, credibility, tone and the like. While much of it is a critique of current journalistic practices, there's a whole lot going on that could be brought into the classroom.

Jim Aune at the Blogora posted a link to MySpace.com’s MyState of the Union Contest. As Jim notes, this could be a great classroom exercise. I suspect most won't be able to make the January 18 deadline (UT classes don't even start until next week), but this could still be an interesting assignment.

You have probably heard about the recent leaking of Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign "playbook". This text would be a great way to discuss audience with students. The playbook was for insiders, but it got in the hands of some outsiders. What happens when an argument leaks?

However, in addition to this, Joyce Purnick of the New York Times presents an interesting (rhetorical) analysis of Giulian's website. She points to what the site says, but she focuses on what it doesn't say (no mention of his first two wives or his children, and no mention of his ties to Bernie Kerick.

"You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
— Senator John Kerry

Was John Kerry trying to insult George Bush or American troops? At this point, does it even matter what he intended to do? A discussion of how Kerry's comments have been received could be an interesting exercise for students - even the people who attended the lecture heard different things. Here's Bush's response (notice that the White House has flat-out ignored Kerry's claim that it was a shot at the President and not the troops), and here's Kerry's rebuttal (notice that Kerry's "I was a soldier" appeal is falling on deaf ears, just like it did during the elections).

While teaching Rhetoric 306 at UT Austin I'm realizing that students often have a tough time getting past newspapers. In our class students are expected to follow a controversy throughout the semester and, among other things, map out the various positions in the controversy. This is most easily done with argumentative texts, texts that take strong positions. The problem that many of my students are having is that they often grab the first newspaper article on their controversy that they see, not realizing that even a fairly biased news organization is not going to provide them with rich, explicitly argumentative language for analysis, unless it's an editorial article.