Five-Week Plan
A five-week sequence from rhetorical analysis to a tested campaign pitch.
Open resource →
Year 9 HEAP • English
Persuasion
A five-week unit that treats persuasion as a design problem. Students analyse how arguments work, research a school or community issue, build an ethical campaign and test it with a real audience. The packet is generic, public and free of school-specific material.
What this packet is. It contains 16 public resources, including this overview. Students move from the rhetorical situation and audience analysis to argument architecture, evidence, campaign strategy, visual rhetoric, drafting, audience testing and an ethical review. The packet does not prescribe a political campaign or reproduce copyrighted campaign material. Success criteria are formative and labelled as such.
Unit outcomes
- Map the rhetorical situation of a persuasive text and explain how a choice positions a specific audience.
- Build a contestable claim with distinct reasons, relevant evidence and an explicit warrant.
- Evaluate sources for relevance, accuracy, sufficiency, currency and representativeness.
- Design a campaign that connects a problem, an audience, a desired change, a message and a set of channels.
- Draft and redraft in one medium, then test the campaign with a small audience and change it in response.
- Identify ethical risks such as manipulation, hidden authorship, privacy loss and audience vulnerability, and propose safeguards.
The five-week shape
| Week | Focus |
|---|---|
| Week 1 | Rhetoric and audience. Distinguish informing, persuading, manipulating and coercing; map the rhetorical situation; profile an audience; analyse ethos, pathos and logos. |
| Week 2 | Argument and evidence. Build claims with reasons and warrants; test evidence; answer the strongest counterargument; evaluate sources and record them. |
| Week 3 | Strategy and design. Write a campaign strategy; choose rhetorical devices for a purpose; analyse visual and media rhetoric; complete a one-page brief. |
| Week 4 | Draft and test. Draft in one medium; redraft in three passes; run a small audience test; complete an ethical review. |
| Week 5 | Present and reflect. Prepare and deliver a three-minute pitch; answer questions; reflect on an ethical choice; transfer the analysis to a new campaign text. |
Public resources
Outcomes and Skills
Formative outcomes and success criteria for rhetorical analysis, campaign design and presentation.
Open resource →Rhetoric and Audience
The rhetorical situation, audience analysis and the responsible use of ethos, pathos and logos.
Open resource →Argument Architecture
Claims, reasons, warrants, counterarguments and qualifiers, with a worked campaign argument.
Open resource →Evidence and Reasoning
What counts as evidence, how to test it, and the reasoning errors that weaken campaigns.
Open resource →Rhetorical Devices
Devices that do work: repetition, contrast, address, metaphor, rule of three and the call to action.
Open resource →Campaign Strategy
Turn an issue into a strategy: audience, change, message, channels, resources and success indicators.
Open resource →Visual and Media Rhetoric
How image, framing, colour, type, layout and sound make arguments of their own.
Open resource →Research and Source Evaluation
Find reliable evidence, read laterally and record sources so the campaign can be checked.
Open resource →Drafting the Campaign
Build a complete draft in one medium, with a message hierarchy, script, copy and design plan.
Open resource →Redrafting and Feedback
Three separate passes for argument, clarity and effect, plus feedback that changes the draft.
Open resource →Presenting and Testing
Pitch the campaign, run a small audience test and use the responses to make one real change.
Open resource →Persuasive Ethics
Five tests for truthful, dignified and consent-aware persuasion, with practical safeguards.
Open resource →Teacher Notes
Pacing, differentiation, sensitive content, feedback and practical setup for the five-week unit.
Open resource →Sources and Provenance
What this packet is built from, what is linked rather than copied, and what it deliberately leaves out.
Open resource →Planning and support
Read the teacher notes for pacing, differentiation, sensitive content and formative feedback. Differentiation is built into the teacher notes rather than published as a separate student page. The sources and provenance page records what is public, what is linked rather than copied, and what the packet deliberately leaves out. Differentiation is built into the teacher notes rather than published as a separate student page. The sources and provenance page records what is public, what is linked rather than copied, and what the packet deliberately leaves out.
No assessment instrument. This packet does not publish confidential class briefs, scores, bands, weights, task numbers, due dates or test papers. It is a teaching and formative-feedback resource. Teachers keep their own school instruments offline.
Last reviewed: October 2026. Counts on this page match the public HTML pages in this folder.