Round Robin

We'll go around the room and encounter 8 different passages. Work with your small group to identify rhetorical strategies and brainstorm ideas about why they'd use them with their audience.

What's the quote saying? What does the author want to convince us is true?

What rhetorical strategy you see?

What argument can you make for why they chose this strategy?

Passage 1: Margaret Thatcher

"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money. The future of our nation depends upon a thriving private sector, one that is unencumbered by excessive regulation and taxation. We must reject the failed ideas of the past and embrace the principles of personal responsibility, hard work, and enterprise. Only by doing so can we unleash the full potential of our people, create wealth, and secure our economic future. The role of government is not to try to create equality of outcome, but to create equality of opportunity. And by providing a stable and predictable environment for businesses to flourish, we can do just that."

--TV Interview, 1976

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Passage 2: Carl Sagan

"The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space. Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

From his book "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space"

Passage 3: HL Mencken

“The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.”
― H.L. Mencken

Passage 4: Shirley Chisholm

"I ran for the presidency, not because it was impossible for a woman to become president, but because I wanted to make it possible for a woman to become president. I ran for the presidency, not because I was hungry for power, but because I had a burning desire to be of service to my country. I ran for the presidency, not because I wanted to be a trailblazer, but because I wanted to be a voice for the voiceless. And I ran for the presidency, not because I wanted to make history, but because I wanted to make a difference."

Passage 5: Caesar Chavez

Spoken in a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in 1984:

"Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. "

Passage 6: Horace Mann

"Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery. I do not say of men and women, for it is woman who, in the great majority of cases, will determine the education of the future race. This being so, she should not be placed in a position of ignorance herself. But whatever may be the case in respect to women, as a general proposition, it is education alone which can conduct us to that enjoyment of political liberty and that rank in the scale of humanity, to which the laws of nature and of God entitle us. In the various countries of Europe, the people have struggled for the right of education. It was the right which they first claimed and the right which they first obtained. It was the key-stone in the arch of their liberties. I do not go so far as to say, that without education a people may not have political liberty; but I do say, that without education they will not know how to use it wisely. They will know that they are free, but they will be like the invalid who has strength enough to break his crutches, but not enough to walk."

--in a speech to the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1848

Passage 7: Gloria Steinem

"The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to un-learn. We are filled with the Popular Wisdom of several centuries just past, and we are terrified to give it up. Patriotism means obedience, age means wisdom, woman means submission, black means inferior–these are preconceptions imbedded so deeply in our thinking that we honestly may not know that they are there.

Unfortunately, authorities who write textbooks are sometimes subject to the same Popular Wisdom as the rest of us. They gather their proof around it, and end by becoming the theoreticians of the status quo. Using the most respectable of scholarly methods, for instance, English scientists proved definitively that the English were descended from the angels, while the Irish were descended from the apes. It was beautifully done, complete with comparative skull-measurements, and it was a rationale for the English domination of the Irish for more than 100 years. I try to remember that when I’m reading Arthur Jensen’s current and very impressive work on the limitations of black intelligence. Or when I’m reading Lionel Tiger on the inability of women to act in groups."

--Commencement Speech for Vassar College

Passage 8: Grace Lee Boggs

“As Jimmy Boggs used to remind us, revolutions are made out of love for people and for place. He often talked about loving America enough to change it. 'I love this country,' he used to say, 'not only because my ancestors' blood is in the soil but because of what I believe it can become.' Love isn't just something you feel. It's something you do every day when you go out and pick the paper and bottles scattered the night before on the corner, when you stop and talk to a neighbor, when you argue passionately for what you believe in with whoever will listen, when you call a friend to see how they're doing, when you write a letter to the newspaper, when you give a speech and give 'em hell, when you never stop believing that we can all be more than what we are. In other words, Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after.”

― Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century