Students will recognize the linguistic strategies that Alice Walker uses in her introduction to Anything You Love Can Be Saved that persuade readers to believe in her causes, and thus begin to think about techniques that they can use in their own activist writing, which they will do in the final lesson of the unit.

The learner will:

• recognize the similarities, making comparisons between Rachel Carson and Mary Eliza Church Terrell.
• summarize the main points in Walker's Introduction to Everything We Love Can Be Saved.
• identify the language strategies that Walker uses to persuade readers to believe in her causes.
• understand the importance of minority voices such as Walker's in accomplishing social reform.

Anticipatory Set:

Have students brainstorm a list of similarities between Rachel Carson and Mary Eliza Church Terrell. If the fact that the two writer/activists are both historical figures doesn't come up, point it out and then state that activism through writing is still an effective way of changing the world and that there are many contemporary writers who are doing just that. One such writer is Alice Walker, who though is most well known from her fiction (“The Color Purple,” “The Temple of My Familiar,” “Possessing the Secret of Joy,” etc.) has been just as prolific in writing about causes she cares deeply about.

• Read the Introduction to Everything We Love Can Be Saved .
• Have students summarize Walker's beliefs about the world. This can be in list or paragraph form. Have the learners develop a comprehensive list of Walker's beliefs.
• Go back and examine the text to find the techniques that she uses as a writer to convince her readers to agree with her. (Suggestions can be found in Attachment One: Walker's Persuasive Writing techniques .)
• Tell students that they might want to try some of these techniques in the next lesson when they do their own writing for action.

Note: students may notice – or if they don't, point it out – that all of the activist writers we studied were female. While there were certainly plenty of male writers that could have been chosen (i.e.: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle , and more recently Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation ) it is important to note that writing has been a good way for the disenfranchised to be heard – and that includes women and young people.

Walker, Alice. Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism. New York: The Ballantine Publishing Group, 1997. ISBN: 0-345-40796-2