I have quite the collection of these "introduction to rhetoric" lectures going all the way back I think to 2014. I might make them a playlist one day. I was thinking about not posting this one, but after a conversation with a couple of friends I think it's good to have a record of all the changes over the years.
I always try to find a contemporary example, something worth the power of rhetorical analysis, and this time I chose the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad. It didn't really impact the students as much as I had hoped, and the powerpoint slides failed me. I'm usually pretty good with video links so I'm not sure what happened.
I think looking at these over time now gives a pretty good long term view of where my attention goes in the history of rhetoric and how much time I spend on different ideas. It doesn't give the why though, and I'm not sure about it most of the time. This one is inspired mostly by contemporary U.S. politics as I think we are mapping onto the Roman transition to empire pretty neatly. So more attention to Roman rhetoric seems like a reasonable idea.