Persuasive Techniques - Activities and Slide Presentation

Persuasive Techniques includes a set of activities and a PowerPoint presentation for teaching students to identify and evaluate eleven specific persuasive techniques.

The eleven techniques presented are:

Testimonial

Bargains and Bribery

Plain Folks

Band Wagon

Flag Waving

Word Choice

Reasoning

Card Stacking

Name Calling or Innuendo

Call to Action

Fake News

The slide presentation provides explanations and examples, including real advertisements, of major persuasive techniques and includes three slides of student practice.

At the end of the PowerPoint, there is a fill-in student notebook sheet that can be printed out in advance for students to list and explain the techniques while viewing the slides. A completed version of the note sheet is also provided for students who might need it.

The student activity set includes six activity sheets and four ready-to-use worksheets. The activity sheets are designed for students to use with current advertisements or news articles. (Ads and news articles are not provided with this resource.) The activities and worksheets include:

Activities

Evaluating an Ad

Comparing Two Ads

Evaluating a News Article

Comparing Two News Articles

Gossip Game with a Point of View

Consider the Source

Ready-to-Use Worksheets

Multiple Choice

Design a Product and Create an Ad

Match and Identify

Checking the Facts

Teaching students media literacy skills such as recognizing persuasive techniques supports common core standards for many reading skills including identifying the author's purpose, using context clues, comparing two texts, and interpreting information presented visually.

For more practice on a variety of reading skills, see Reading Skills.

From Classroom in the Middle