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English · Grade 10

Rhetoric, Claims and Evidence

Learners study persuasion at one of its most famous moments: the two funeral speeches in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, where Brutus and Antony address the same crowd with opposite purposes. They analyze rhetorical situations, weigh appeals to ethos, pathos and logos using Aristotle's definitions, explain how devices such as repetition and verbal irony move an audience, and evaluate the evidence in a modern student speech. They finish by writing a rhetorical analysis comparing the two Roman speakers.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 135 minutes
  • Rhetoric and evidence check: 10 questions
  • Ways to answer: choose an answer, highlight a text, match pairs, sort into groups, arrange tiles and true or false
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What learners will discover

  • Analyze a rhetorical situation: speaker, purpose, audience, context and exigence.
  • Identify appeals to ethos, pathos and logos and evaluate how effectively and fairly they are used.
  • Analyze rhetorical devices (anaphora, antithesis, rhetorical question, repetition, verbal irony) and explain their effects on an audience.
  • Evaluate whether a speaker's evidence is relevant and sufficient, and identify false or unsupported statements.

Lessons

  1. The rhetorical situation 5 steps2 practiceabout 30 min
  2. Ethos, pathos, logos 6 steps3 practiceabout 34 min
  3. Devices and their effects 6 steps3 practiceabout 34 min
  4. Evaluate the evidence 6 steps3 practiceabout 34 min
  5. Rhetoric and evidence check 10 questions at the end

Keep exploring

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Guide for grown-ups