DEBATE CENTRAL
Debating Resources for the World since 1994
HONORS 195: Rhetoric of Impeachment
Fall, 1999, John Dewey Honors Program, College of Arts & Sciences, University of Vermont
Alfred C. Snider, Edwin W. Lawrence Professor of Forensics
This course focused on one area of public discourse (the attempted impeachment of Bill Clinton) for comprehensive rhetorical analysis. Students studied political rhetoric and isolated a specific portion of this discourse for individual study. Students also studied theories or rhetoric, style, construction, strategies, and the criticism and evaluation of rhetoric as applied to the American political system. Students engaged in extensive research on one figure in the impeachment scandal and their associated discourse. Each student had to produce an extensive descriptive criticism of their speaker (analysis of their rhetorical acts), an extensive analytical criticism of their speaker (analysis of these rhetorical acts in context), and then produce a final essay rendering a citical evaluation of some aspect of the rhetoric of their speaker.
This web page features selected essays from my students. I found them interesting and enjoyable to read. I have not edited these essays, since I do not offer them as sophisticated professional academic efforts but as examples of what undergraduate students at the University of Vermont are capable of doing. In that context I am quite pleased with these essays.
For more information about Speech and Debate at the University of Vermont, please contact me at asnider@zoo.uvm.edu.
-Alfred C. Snider
December, 1999