1. Visualizing teaching in action
Arizona State University Writing Programs
Jordan Loveridge
ENG 105
October 31, 2014

2. On Halloween of 2014, Jordan Loveridge’s Advanced First-Year Composition class took an innovative approach to understanding the rhetorical concept of ethos. Jordan, costumed as Zeus for the occasion, invited his students to adopt fictitious personas to explore the rhetorical shaping of identities.
ASU Writing Program’s Visualizing Teaching in Action (VITA) project visited the classroom to observe the day’s activity.
On November 14th, we asked Jordan to reflect on the assignment, and what he and his students achieved that day.

3. Jordan: This was part of a two-day lesson on ethos; this was the second half of the lesson. And what I was really trying to do with this lesson is that students often think of ethos narrowly as credibility, like citing sources and seeming trustworthy, and I’m trying to get them to think about it more in terms of the classical sense of ethos, in terms of how you generate goodwill in your audience about whatever you are trying to say, so it’s an exercise in getting students to broaden how they see ethos as a rhetorical appeal.

4. Jordan: The basic idea of the assignment came from UT Austin’s Digital Writing & Research Lab, which is a great resource that I frequently borrow and modify stuff from. The original assignment asked students to read sample dating profiles from, I believe, OK Cupid, and have students analyze whether the profiles were effective at generating goodwill. And this works because dating profiles are almost exclusively an argument to persuade the audience to have goodwill toward the writer.

5. Jordan: So that part I used almost identically; I even used the same dating profiles that the original teacher had posted in the DWRL. And then I asked students to briefly write up a description of the person whose profile they had read and then just match them up with other profiles. That part was just a fun exercise, not really having much to do with effective appeals to ethos, just a nice way to conclude the lesson.

6. Jordan: The original lesson plan from the DWRL was a little vague about the next step; it asked students to write a dating profile themselves, or to write in a different genre, which was maybe a way around the awkwardness of asking them to write a dating profile of themselves. And I agree about the awkwardness but I really liked the original idea of writing a dating profile.

7. Jordan: My solution to the awkwardness was to basically draw from the classical progymnasmata, the ancient rhetorical preliminary exercises in rhetorical education, and one of the exercises that is part of this is called ethopoeia, composing a speech in character, where you are asked to adopt a persona and write a speech as that persona, and since this class was occurring on Halloween I thought it would be fun for students to do that. So then I thought, how am I going to make speeches in character work for my students?

8. Jordan: What I did was I made a list of something like 40 fictional characters or pop culture icons, let them choose one and asked them to keep the persona a secret. Then as homework they composed a dating profile for their persona that they chose, as you see the assignment written on the board.

9. Jordan: So the assignment was to figure out how that persona would go about creating goodwill, how they emphasize their good attributes or minimize bad ones. And then to kind of mirror the first activity, I had them share the profiles that they wrote, and then match up couples from the profiles that they made, and then guess, or eventually reveal, the identities behind the profiles.

10. Jordan: I think the activity basically went as I expected
Jordan: I think the activity basically went as I expected. The classroom setup is kind of terrible for discussion, I hate it because I always get them to try to discuss things in groups, but you can’t move things around, the screens are in the way, and they can’t see each other. So there’s no way to sort of deny them the opportunity to disengage with each other and stare at their screens instead.

11. Jordan: The environment definitely constrains the way these activities go. Part of it is students’ personalities, I think a lot of them are just reserved, but part of it is definitely the classroom setup. I want to get them to feel what it’s like to engage with each other rhetorically but the classroom just doesn’t lend itself to that.

12. Jordan: I think it’s a really interesting assignment because it gets into not only ethos in the basic sense, but also voice, tone, personality in writing, which are parts of ethos that students tend to overlook.

13. Like one student who got the Cat in the Hat wrote their entire dating profile in rhyme. It was a way of showing how we identify distinctive attributes of character and express that in writing.

14. Jordan: It goes beyond the typical conception of ethos as limited to credibility, and this is something I noticed about FYC students, that if I don’t provide them ways to think about and write about it in different terms, they won’t see it. They won’t see ethos as more than trustworthy, but as also being likeable.