Particularly during a heated campaign season, I’ve often wondered how to broach the subject of political speech/political rhetoric (verbal/visual) in the classroom without creating a partisan-feeling discussion. (This seems especially hard with the wide contrasts in rhetorical strategies employed by the 2008 Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates.)
I’ve just been reading through the posts (articles, really) on a site called Wordwatchers, which, “explores how we can learn about the candidates’ personalities, motives, emotions, and inner selves through their everyday words.” This website seems like a nearly perfect backdrop of academic objectivity to frame discussions of current (almost daily updates) political rhetorical strategies. This might be of particular interest to 103 faculty or Political Science.