Week 6 Discussion — Which Appeal Carries It? — Traditional alternative (no AI)

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

Hook

A text rarely persuades with one appeal alone, yet one usually does the heavy lifting. This week you learned the four appeals — ethos, pathos, logos, kairos — the devices that serve them, and the claim, evidence, effect engine that turns a label into analysis, all on the verified fragments of King's "I Have a Dream" (28 August 1963, the Lincoln Memorial).

Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: Which appeal carries King's "I Have a Dream" for the audience of that day? Pick one or two fragments from this week's verified set, argue which appeal does the most persuading through them, and explain the effect on the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial. This is an analysis of craft: argue how the speech persuades, not whether you agree with it.

Option B: Which appeal carried a real message that persuaded you, or failed to? Pick an ad, a post, a flyer, a fundraising email, or a workplace message you actually met, argue which appeal did most of the work, and explain how and with what effect. Then say whether naming that appeal alone would have told a reader anything.

There is no single right answer. Careful readers argue for kairos, pathos, or logos in the same speech, and the same ad can lean on timing for one reader and on feeling for another. Argue the case you can actually support with exact words, and keep your own agreement with the text out of it.

Expectations

Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.

Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):

• Say which option you chose.
• Name the fragments or the real message you chose, so a reader knows what you are looking at. Quote King only in this week's verified fragments, copied from the archived transcript.
• Use at least two of this week's terms (rhetorical analysis, appeal, ethos, pathos, logos, kairos, label, effect, anaphora, antithesis, metaphor, allusion, parallelism) correctly.
• Take a position and support it with claim, evidence, and effect: name the appeal, quote a few exact words, and explain what they do to a specific audience.
• Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):

• Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
• A substantive reply does more than agree: argue that the move leans on a different appeal, point out a sentence that is still a label, or ask how the occasion changed the effect. "Nice point!" on its own does not count, and neither does a reply about whether the text is right.

What a strong post looks like (illustrative, written for this course):

I chose Option A. I think kairos carries the speech. King opens four consecutive sentences with "Now is the time", so the present tense keeps landing on the crowd, and he calls waiting "the tranquilizing drug of gradualism". For people who had gathered for a march, those two moves make waiting sound like the dangerous choice. Someone could call the drug metaphor pathos, and it does stir feeling, but its force comes from the moment the speech names.

Notice how it states a position, quotes a few exact words, explains the effect on that audience, and names a fair counterpoint without saying whether the speech was right. That is the bar.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.

Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.

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