A female student in the class was asked to give a speech at a campus undergraduate forum on speaking and writing about war and terrorism.  The aim of the forum was to bring together students who would otherwise be separated in discrete September 11th seminars in order to share perspectives in a public arena with time alloted for both extemporaneous speeches and a question and answer session afterwards.

This student was chosen to speak at this event to balance three male undergraduate presenters: a campus conservative quick to provide multiple statistics and a thesis about a liberal media conspiracy, a charismatic anti-authoritarian student who opened his presentation by showing a roll of toilet paper and attacking American consumerism, and a student from the university's Model United Nations who defended the Arab radical position.

In the class we had discussed how the rhetoric of September 11th reflected and propagated gender archetypes of masculine agency and feminized victimhood, while the rhetorical situation around terrorism also facilitated the development of female rhetoricians who could be important actors in public discourse.

In her forum speech the student, Valerie Terrell, focused on the figure of the pregnant rhetorician in discourses about terrorism, a presentation which she later developed into her own website.