Strategies:
Students love mad libs, heck adults love it too. The action of filling a list of random nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs into a chart and then reading the a passage with these words inserted and seeing how the words made it sound is fun. Now taking that fun activity and using it explain a part of persuasion can also be fun. Taking a fun activity and making it a teaching moment can be achieved. Using a website designed by the Harvard Political Review, users can enter in various words into a web page which will then insert them into specific places in President Obama's 2004 Democratic National Convention speech. This activity will follow the past activity in which students understand the ethos of the speech, but this activity will have students measure the effectiveness of specific words in the speech itself.
Student will first do the mad libs portion of the web page, filling in adverbs, nouns, adjectives and verbs into the chart, which will then insert them into the speech. Students will not know what passage these words will be used in. Then after the seeing how their words fit or did not fit the passage, students will go back to the original speech and underline the words originally in the spots where they had placed theirs. The class will discuss how their words did not fit the context of the speech and Obama's words did. Students will define the original words and find synonyms for those words. The class will vote as to what word would work best in the context of the speech. Students will reflect on not only why certain words were chosen for this speech, but also why others were not. This lesson will have students understand the art of word use and also experiment in word use and actively shape a speech, as would a wordsmith.
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