A Modest Proposal/Persuasive Techniques

Submitted by kknighton on Sun, 2010-01-03 17:08
Teaching Level: 
High School

In this lesson, students are asked to analyze both "A Modest Proposal" and a modern work of satire (a blog entry from Jon Swift's blog) for the persuasive techniques used by both authors. You may choose to use the provided guided worksheet or not.  After fully reading/discussing both pieces, students will either write their own ironic "modern proposal" to a problem that they see or they will create a video outlining their proposal. Students could work alone or with a partner. If they worked alone, they turned in a written proposal.

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Comments

Jenn Collison's picture

Hooray for Modern Modest Proposals!

Submitted by Jenn Collison on Thu, 2011-03-17 19:17.

 I love your idea for making modern proposal videos.  I do a live town hall meeting, where small groups of students research, then present, their satiric proposals to the rest of the class, posing as concerned citizens, in the auditorium.  After each group of four students present, I run around with a microphone, talk-show style, to ask for questions from the audience.  The student teams must respond using the same ironic tones of their proposals.  Also great fun!