Because the study and practice of rhetoric involves language, many activities require students to talk with and debate each other. This can be scary for some students. Ice breakers help students get comfortable with debating and presenting speeches. One ice breaker activity is called two truths and a lie: A student says two truths and one lie about him or herself and it's up to the other students to guess which of the three statements is the lie. Another is the name game, in which each student says his or her name with an adjective in the front that begins with the same letter as the name. It's up to each student to repeat all other names said.
A student should be able to deliver a persuasive speech and write a persuasive essay after a completing a course on rhetoric. Being able to persuade another or pick apart a persuasive argument is a skill students will use for the rest of their lives. One activity to practice the art of persuasion is to construct a speech based on Aristotle's model of ethos, pathos and logos. Students first establish their credibility (ethos) and then appeal to logic (logos) and emotion (pathos). Students can come up with their own topics for the speech or you can give them all the same one to do.
Activities teaching rhetorical analysis are the bread and butter of courses on rhetoric. Students learn how to analyze style, metonymy, allusion, repetition, parallelism and other aspects related to form. After reading a piece or rhetoric, students should figure out the tone and who the intended audience is. Students can learn rhetorical analysis by practicing it on essays, short stories, poems, speeches, congressional bills and even music.
Although rhetoric is associated with the word, whether written or spoken, it also applies to visual mediums such as commercial products, movies, commercials and news shows. Students can practice their analysis of rhetorical devices by watching any of these visual forms. Bring a movie into the classroom for all the students to analyze together, or ask them to analyze a commercial or show they watch at home. Understanding the ways commercial products use rhetorical devices through packaging, labeling and advertising is important too, and you can have your students write a rhetorical analysis of a product they find when shopping.