Unit 7: Weapons of Mass Persuasion

Summary and Purpose of Unit

This unit is a palate cleanser — but the kind that burns a little. After the sustained literary immersion of Units 5 and 6, students shift modes entirely, moving from interpretation to argumentation. The goal here is not to write a beautiful essay about what a text means. The goal is to think more carefully, reason more honestly, and recognize — with increasing speed and precision — when an argument is trying to fool you. Including your own.

Students begin by learning the anatomy of bad reasoning from the inside out. Through the Fallacy This! assignment, they engineer intentionally flawed arguments, loading them with logical fallacies, weak evidence, and faulty reasoning — and then watch a classmate take the whole thing apart. The experience of being on both sides of that exchange is the point. It is very hard to build a convincing bad argument. It is also very hard to dismantle a convincing bad argument. Students will discover this firsthand.

From there, they move into FART — the Factual Authority for Repurposing Trust — where the stakes are higher and the scaffolding more demanding. Students construct a credible, well-researched argument on an assigned topic, then submit it to three sequential rounds of peer critique: fallacy and logic identification, Socratic questioning, and formal written rebuttal. The Socratic questioning round is not casual discussion. It is a disciplined, methodical hunt for the warrants behind claims — the unstated assumptions that hold an argument together. Once students understand what a warrant is, they begin to see them everywhere, and they begin to see how much of what passes for argument is really just a warrant no one has bothered to examine.

The Toulmin Model is introduced here as the structural spine of everything that follows. Students learn to distinguish ground/observation from claim, and to recognize that the real leverage point in any argument — the place where Socratic questioning does its most powerful work — is the warrant. This framework will be applied under pressure in Unit 8. In Unit 7, students build it carefully, at their own pace, through digital discussion boards on Google Classroom that allow for asynchronous engagement, revision, and peer response.

The unit does not ask students to win arguments. It asks them to understand how arguments work — and fail — at the level of their underlying logic.