Week 6 — How It Persuades: From Label to Analysis — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 6 of the term — sort the appeals in a short announcement, rebuild a bare label into an analytical paragraph, write your own analysis of one move in King's "I Have a Dream", and explain the move to someone outside the course.

This week you learned to keep summary, agreement, and analysis apart, to name the four appeals, to tie anaphora, antithesis, metaphor, allusion, and parallelism to the appeals they serve, and to build an analytical paragraph from claim to evidence to effect. In Week 2 you learned to keep a summary apart from your response; this week you add a third job, analysis, and make it the main one. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Writing Studio practise the same moves from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together.

The task

This week you explain how a text persuades its audience, never whether you agree with it. Your material is an illustrative announcement written for this course and attributed to no one, plus the verified fragments of King's "I Have a Dream" (28 August 1963, the Lincoln Memorial). Quote King only in this week's verified fragments, copied exactly from the archived transcript: "Five score years ago", "promissory note", "bad check", "insufficient funds", "Now is the time", "the tranquilizing drug of gradualism", "content of their character", "the color of their skin", "I have a dream that one day", and "Let freedom ring".

Part A — sort the appeals and rebuild a label. Here is the illustrative announcement from a neighborhood association about reopening a community pool, one sentence per line:

1. "As lifeguards who have watched over this pool for ten summers, we know how much it means to this block."
2. "Picture a kid on the high board, toes curled over the edge, about to jump for the first time."
3. "The new filter cleans the water twice as fast, so the pool can stay open on the hottest afternoons."
4. "The city's repair crew finishes this week, the first heat wave is coming, and the pool can open the moment it arrives."
5. "Every season pass sold before opening day pays for one more lifeguard shift."
6. "Remember the summer the pool sat empty, and the long, hot weeks without anywhere to cool off."

First sort all 6 sentences: beside each one, name the appeal it leans on most and the exact words that show it. Use the stranger test to keep ethos apart from logos, and the moment-or-feeling test to keep kairos apart from pathos. Of its 6 sentences, an appeal sort finds 1 leaning on ethos and 1 on kairos; say how many lean on pathos or logos and how you got that number. An analytical paragraph runs on 3 engine parts: claim, evidence, and effect. A classmate's draft about the pool announcement supplies 1 of them, a claim, but quotes no evidence and explains no effect; say how many parts your revision must add.

The classmate's draft is a label: "The announcement uses pathos to make people emotional." Rebuild it into an analytical paragraph of 4–6 sentences about the announcement. Make a claim that names how the announcement persuades, quote a few exact words from it as evidence, explain the effect on the neighbors who read it, and close with a link. Label each sentence claim, evidence, effect, or link.

Part B — analyze one move in King's speech. Choose one or two fragments from the verified list above and write one analytical paragraph of 150–200 words. Name the device (anaphora, antithesis, metaphor, allusion, or parallelism) and the appeal it mainly serves, quote only the fragment words, and explain the effect on the audience of that day, a crowd gathered for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Keep summary and agreement out: the paragraph explains how the speech persuades, not whether you agree. Label each sentence claim, evidence, effect, or link. Choose a move other than the "Now is the time" paragraph the chapter already built, or build on it with a fragment the chapter did not use.

Explain it to a non-expert

A friend who runs the social media for a small bakery says a marketing class told them their posts "use pathos," and they have no idea what to do with that. Write a 3–5 sentence message that tells them, in everyday words, why naming an appeal is only a start: what it means to point at exact words and say what those words do to a reader. Use your Part A rebuild as your example. Name one honest limit — for example, that one post can lean on two appeals at once. Explain any term your friend might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a cousin reviewing a movie trailer who writes only "it was emotional." Model answer: "Saying the trailer is emotional tells me how you felt, not why. Point at one moment, like the music cutting out right before the door opens, and say what it does to a viewer: it makes you hold your breath. That is the part a reader can check. One trailer can do two things at once, so you might find a second moment that works differently."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own explanation of your rebuild.

Reflect on your revision

Before you submit, audit your first draft: put claim, evidence, effect, or link beside every sentence of both paragraphs, check each quoted word against the announcement or the verified King list, mark any sentence that is summary, agreement, or a bare label, and revise. Then answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

• (a) Which change turned your Part A label into analysis for a reader, and what in your appeal sort showed you it was needed?
• (b) Which sentence in your Part B paragraph changed most after your audit, and what does it now tell a reader about the effect that it did not before?

Deliverables

Submit in the assignment entry: the Part A appeal sort with your pathos-or-logos count and parts count and how you got them, and your rebuilt paragraph with its labels; your Part B King paragraph with its labels; your message to your friend; and your reflection. Each part may be written, or recorded as audio or video with a transcript; every form is graded by the same scoring criteria.

Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

The appeal sort, the rebuild, your King paragraph, the message, and the reflection must be your own words. This version of the assignment asks for no chatbot at any step. Quote King only in this week's verified fragments, copied from the archived transcript, and never from memory.

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