Instructions: Study the following list of seven basic propaganda techniques until you are familiar with each one. Then evaluate each of the twenty statements on the "sample" sheet, scoring each statement from one (1) to seven (7) to indicate the technique you think is being used. If a statement seems to fit more that one category, choose the category that best describes it. If a statement doesn’t seem to fit any of the categories, give it a 0. You have completed the assignment when you have given each statement one score.

1. Name-Calling—giving an idea a bed label—is used to make us reject and condemn the idea without examining the evidence.
2. Glittering Generality—associating something with a "virtue word"—is used to make us accept and approve the thing without examining the evidence.
3. Transfer—carries the authority, sanction, and prestige of something respected and revered over to something else in order to make the latter acceptable; or it carries authority, sanction, and disapproval to cause us to reject and disapprove. Something the propagandist would have us reject and disapprove.
4. Testimonial—consists in having some respected or hated person say that a given idea or program or product or person is good or bad.
5. Plain Folks—is the method by which a speaker attempts to convince his audience that he and his idea are good because they are "of the people," the "plain folks."
6. Card Stacking—involves the selection and use of facts or falsehoods, illustrations or distractions, and logical or illogical statements in order to give the best or the worst possible case for an idea, program, person, or product.
7. Band Wagon—has its theme, "Everybody—at least all of us—is doing it"; with it, the propagandist attempts to convince us that all members of a group to which we belong are accepting his program and that we must therefore follow our crowd and "jump on the band wagon."

Name: ____________________________

1. The time is now, my fellow Americans, to recapture our destiny, to take it into our own hands. But, to do this will take many of us, working together. I ask you to volunteer you help in this cause so we can carry our message throughout the land.___

2. Everywhere we have met thousands of Democrats, Independents and Republicans from all economic conditions and walks of life bound together in a community of shared values of family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom.___

3. The American people, the most generous on earth, who created the highest standard of living, are not going to accept the notion that we can only make a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves.___

4. The major issue of this campaign is the direct political, personal, and moral responsibility of Democratic party leadership—in the White House and in Congress—for the unprecedented calamity, which has befallen us.___

5. Back in 1976, Mr. Carter said, "Trust me." And a lot of people did. Now, many of those people are out of work. Many have seen their savings eaten away by inflation.___

6. Let us make a commitment to care for the needy; to teach our children the values and the virtues handed down to us by our families; to have the courage to defend those values and the willingness to sacrifice for them.___

7. Four score and seven years later, Abraham Lincoln called upon the people of all America to renew their dedication and their commitment to a government of, for and by the people.___

8. We must overcome something the present Administration has cooked up: a new and altogether indigestible economic stew, one part inflation, one part high unemployment; one part recession, one part runaway taxes, one part deficit spending and seasoned by an energy crisis.___

9. Can anyone look at the record of this Administration and say, "Well done"? Can anyone compare the state of our economy when the Administration took office with where we are today and say, "Keep up the good work"? Can anyone look at our reduced standing in the world today and say, "Let’s have four more years of this"?___

10. We are going to enlist the very best minds from business, labor, and whatever quarter to conduct a detailed review of every department, bureau and agency that lives by federal appropriation.___

11. We are going to put an end to the money merry-go-round where our money becomes Washington’s money, to be spent by the states and cities only if they spend it exactly the way the federal bureaucrats tell them to.___

12. We are going to put an end to the notion that the American taxpayer exists to fund the federal government. The federal government exists to serve the American people.___

13. Work and family are at the center of our lives: the foundation of our dignity as a free people. When we deprive people of what they have earned, or take away their jobs, we destroy their dignity and undermine their families.___

14. When those in leadership give us tax increases and tell us we must also do with less, have they thought about those who have always had less—especially the minorities? This is like telling them that just as they step on the first rung of the ladder of opportunity, the ladder is being pulled up.___

15. It is time to put American back to work; to make our cities and towns resound with the confident voices of men and women of all races, nationalities and faiths bringing home to their families a decent paycheck they can cash for honest money.___

16. An Annapolis graduate may be at the helm of the ship of state, but the ship has no rudder. Critical decisions are made at times almost in Marx Brothers fashion, but who can laugh?___

17. We know only too well that war comes not when the forces of freedom are strong, but when they are weak. It is then that tyrants are tempted.___

18. "I propose to you, my friends, and through you that government of all kinds, big and little be made solvent and that the example be set by the President of the United States and his cabinet." So said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his acceptance speech.___

19. Can we doubt that only a divine providence placed this land—this island of freedom—here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearned to breathe free?___

20. The first Republican President once said, "While the people retain their virtue and their vigilance, no Administration by an extreme wickedness or folly can seriously injure the government in the short space of four years." If Mr. Lincoln could see what’s happened, he might hedge a little on that statement.___

Reagan's speech is result of six weeks of revising  [PDF]

Text of Reagan's Speech 

Institute for Propaganda Analysis

"The Tricks of the Trade" [PDF] from Lee, A. M., & Lee, E. B. 1939. The Fine Art of Propaganda. Harcourt, Brace.