Discourse 200
Fall 2014
Ferrel
Culture and Discourse Speech: Speaking Up (Speech Project 1)
“Now I see that, no matter how well meant, politeness is a kind of organized silence. Not discussing race
helps keep racism in place and is part of the invisible system that maintains injustice in our society.” – Louise
Dunlap, Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing, 2007, p. 4
For this project you will give a five-minute speech responding to a brief segment of discourse that
you identify as empowering or oppressive. The segment you are responding to could be an excerpt from a
song, TV show, movie, speech, written text, or personal experience. The focus of your speech should be a
developed and complex discussion of why the segment is empowering or oppressive. In addition to
writing your speech, you must write a short paragraph that quotes or summarizes the discourse segment
you are analyzing and describes the scene and audience for your speech. If you include sound or video
clips of the discourse segment you are responding to as part of your speech, the clips in total may not
exceed 30 seconds in length.
Works Cited
Dunlap, Louise. Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing. Oakland: New Village Press, 2007.
Print.
Created by: Thomas Ferrel