Texting & driving

Learning objective: To describe and evaluate the key concerns around texting and driving, drawing on three texts.

Success criteria:
1. We can describe the main ideas each article
2. We can explain the writer's perspective and how they develop their ideas.
3. We can evaluate the impact of each article on our understanding of the scale of the texting-while-driving problem

Do now: brainstorm the risks associated with two activities:
1. cell phone use
2. drinking alcohol

Text one: Dnt Txt N Drv by Oprah Winfrey April 24, 2010, The New Yorker.
Read this article and answer the following questions:
1. What style of writing is the title of the article written in, and why?
2. Define the word "anecdote."
3. In your own words, summarise the anecdote which Winfrey starts the article with.
4. Copy the rhetorical question used in the article and explain what the effect of this technique is.
5. What country do the statistics used in paragraph two refer to?  What clues in the article helped you to decide this?
6. Who is Erica Forney and how is she important to Winfrey's message on driving and texting?  Why has Oprah emphasised Erica's age and closeness to home at the time of her death?
7. Find the example of alliteration in paragraph three.  What does it emphasise?
8. What key statistic supports Winfrey's claims that driving while texting is a serious problem?
9. Find the parallel construction in paragraph six.  What is the message in this sentence?
10. What is the main message in paragraph seven?
11. When Winfrey says "give it up" in paragraph eight, what is she referring to?  What different habit is more usually associated with the phrase "give it up"?