Topic Selection & Audience Analysis

Hey all,

Today's post will address two major issues: encouraging students to select topics that work well, and teaching them to analyze audiences (as well as ethically consider how audience analysis works). Both of these issues were discussed in a lot more detail at the workshop on Friday, which was very productive! Thank you to everyone who attended.

Topic Selection: 

• The Persuasive Number Line: Imagine a number line that looks kind of like this:

<-----------------------------------I----------------------------------->

Extreme "against" argument         Moderate           Extreme "for" argument

• Now, say a student has a position way over on the "conservative" side of an issue. Rather than writing to try to bring the hardcore liberal all the way over to the conservative side, they should instead try to develop ways to move that person part of the way toward the more moderate position. This number line is also helpful for conceptualizing the "persuadability" of the topic. If every single person falls in the moderate "middle" on the topic, chances are there's not going to be a lot of persuading going on if they choose that topic. The way to teach this is pretty simple: Have students pitch their potential topics, then get a read on where their classmates fall through a simple vote regarding where they fall along the line.
• Encourage arguments about policy, not fact or value. Students often gravitate toward questions of fact: These are your conspiracy theories: "Oliver Stone killed Kennedy so he could make a movie about conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination!" or "The moon landing was faked!" style-arguments. These arguments obviously require students to locate unbelievable or weak evidence in sources like silly conspiracy theory documentaries. They also are simply impossible to persuade people about, because people are either inclined to believe in unsupported sensationalist nonsense or they aren't. So, I just generally put a ban on this type of topic (except in exceedingly rare circumstances, e.g. a student wants to challenge a prevailing stereotype about a type of person or a major).
• Students also often gravitate toward questions of value: Difficult arguments grounded in fundamental beliefs that people hold regarding religion, politics, and so on. When people want to argue about abortion or other moralistic topics, this is often where they're coming from. Again, point to the number line to help students recognize how incredibly hard it is to actually persuade people about these topics.
• Instead, concentrate on issues of policy. Policy arguments may be rooted somewhat in questions of fact or value. But they differ in an important way: They require that students provide a plan or solution to the problem. So, rather than getting up and giving us all a fire-and-brimstone apocalyptic story about how bad something is, students must instead develop a policy or proposal that would help to solve the problem. An important part of this is enabling the audience to actually go out and promote something. An example of this is a speech I watched a student give about the College Bowl system for football last year. Rather than just attack the BCS system, he developed an elaborate and feasible counter-proposal that would resolve some of the problems in the BCS and could easily be implemented within a year.
• The benefit of the policy speech is that it encourages students to develop a unique or innovative approach. It forces them to think about the feasibility of solving the problem, which--by necessity--causes them to gravitate away from gigantic problems that cannot be solved. It gets them thinking about their agency in society--how would we actually go about making this change into a reality?-- and it leads them to more conciliatory messages that invite others to their side, rather than just repeating talking points and value statements.
• The "Be Original" Rule: The ever awesome Jade Olson recommended giving students a strict rule: If you talk about a cliche topic that's been done before (Animal cruelty! Abortion! Climate change! Gun control!), you need to discuss it with a new spin, argument, or approach that I (the teacher) have never heard before. That forces students to figure out a way of talking about the issue that doesn't rely on the exact same talking points that they've likely used before. As a tool to help students decide a "new" way of arguing the issue, she recommended sending them to iDebate and looking up the topic in their "Debatabase" to identify the common arguments on either side of the issue. They then must develop a new approach to arguing the topic that does not rely on any of these more common points.

The Ethics of Audience Analysis:

First of all, I like to kick off the audience analysis unit with this PBS Frontline video about Republican pollster Frank Luntz (a man who emanates pure evil):

1. Lead a discussion about the ethics of what Luntz is up to. Start with the question posed in the documentary: is he telling people what they want to hear, or is he manipulating or disguising messages as something the audience wants to hear? 
2. Ask students about some of the incredibly cynical things Luntz says directly into the camera. "Life is 80 percent emotion and only 20 percent intellect. I care much more about how you feel than how you think." There's something deeply bothersome about this assumption--especially when we recognize that Luntz has made a ton of money, has influenced our laws and policies, has shaped what we purchase and what we think, and has elected people to some of the highest offices in the country.
3. Consider, then, the ethics of the audience analysis process we're about to enact here as a class. Should students feel uneasy about tailoring their message to their audience? How much audience adaptation is too much?  
4. The moral: We learn these things not just to do them better, but also to be conscientious about them. There's something unethical here, something problematic about what he's doing. And while we're practicing it in our speeches, we are doing so not just to be better at it ourselves (to "get ahead" and convince others with our arguments), but also to generate in students an admonitory appreciation and guardedness against the powerful language manipulations inflicted on them every single day.

Teaching Audience Analysis:

Survey: One approach, again shared by Jade at yesterday's event, involved creating a survey of basic demographic and psychographic (Berko, et. al., p. 300) information about the class. One way to do this would simply be to create a SurveyMonkey survey and share it with students on ELMS to create before class. It can address information about age, gender, religion, ethnic background, educational background, occupation, racial background, attitudes, political affiliation, etc. The results of the survey (which is anonymous) can be printed out and shared with students as they are constructing their speeches, and then students can all draw from the information as they are preparing their arguments.

Focus Group: Another approach that can either complement or replace the one above involves having students generate focus group questions during class time. Questions can address:

• How receptive classmates might be to a certain argument. "When you hear me argue that ____, what do you think?"
• Classmates' prior misconceptions or positions on an issue: "What do you already know about ____?"
• Classmates' reasons for opposing or supporting a topic: "What about ____ is most/least compelling to you?"
• Whether classmates would accept a certain piece of evidence: "If I told you that ___, would you be more or less inclined to believe that ____?"

Then, break students into groups of 5-6. (My classroom, with 23 students, would split into four groups in four corners of the room). Students will turn their desks to face each other--as much as is possible, anyway. And they will then circulate, asking each other questions and jotting down notes about what their classmates think. 

As part of their speech, you can then require students to include data from the survey and focus group into their persuasive speech. They can address misconceptions they heard from their classmates, the prevailing opinion they have to persuade against, why a piece of evidence should be respected or treated as more valid than classmates argued, and so on. This can be part of their leadership/credibility grade.

Have a good week,

Michael