Thank you guys for being my guinea pigs today! I’ve done persuasive essays over Othello before, but I’ve never had students write an attorney’s closing arguments before. So, just like with the Marrow Essay, let me know what I need to tweak to make this easier or better. Second Block has already told me that rather than pre-writing, they’d rather just have suggestions for organizing the essay rather than collecting information before we start writing. The point of pre-writing is to HELP you write the essay, not waste your time.

The first thing we did was take a test over appearances: I gave you a bunch of people who had been convicted of a crime. I had YOU see if you can figure out which people were convicted sex offenders.

The point of that was to talk about how you can’t judge someone based on the way they look because appearances can he deceiving. Iago says that people shouldn’t be liars if they appear to be honest. He also is the person who LOOKS the most honest in the play up until Act 5.2 – the very end of the play.

Then, we did an Excel spreadsheet distributing guilt and responsibility throughout the characters of Othello.

When you assign the correct amount of guilt to each character, make sure it equals up to 100. You might not need to use all characters (you might even need to add a character in!)

Then, we looked at the Instructions for the Closing Arguments. We talked about ethos, pathos, and logos. We looked at snippets (when the internet was working) of closing arguments in the Trayvon Martin case (they lawyer used pathos well, but his ethos may have lost him the case), and then we looked as a few snippets from Atticus Finch’s closing arguments where he displayed logos.

We looked at the Closing Arguments pre-writing, but I am NOT REQUIRING this as a grade. HOWEVER, use this to help GUIDE you when you are writing.