Course Overview (Rationale and Purpose):
This course is designed to teach you effective strategies of rhetorical argument and persuasion common to our contemporary online mediascape and common to what many call “the public sphere.” Thus in this course you will explore and apply theories of both contemporary and classical rhetoric (mostly classical) plus theories of the public sphere and of how knowledge and “truth” circulate, reading and writing as a scholar of rhetoric and as a citizen actively invested in specific issues. The centerpiece of the course will be a focus on the genre of the “public opinion essay,” which we will be analyzing and also writing. You can see how this will play out by looking at the assignments listed below!
Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs):
The “public opinion essay” will be our primary vehicle for helping students get better at the following:
- Adapt writing to a clearly identified purpose and audience, according to disciplinary conventions and genres;
- Develop and organize appropriate and relevant content;
- Evaluate and integrate supporting materials from appropriate sources, and credit them appropriately according to the genre and discourse requirements of the field; and
- Control style and mechanics to communicate effectively.
The section below explains the specific assignments that meet the primary SLOs above and how they will be graded accordingly:
Assignments and Evaluation:
Graded assignments (out of 100 total points for course):
- News Updates (10/100) Between most class sessions, you will be required to post updates about the news and/or responses to such updates. You’ll do so as a means of recording and reflecting on current events, which you’ll be reading about in online news sources on a weekly basis. This is a “low stakes” assignment that will be graded according to a contract: do the work, and get full credit.
- Participatory Projects (30/100) As part of the active learning processes of this course, you will routinely be required to produce informal discussion content: sometimes this might be a short, semi-formal essay that you will post to an open “Discussions” page on our class site; other times, you might work individually or collaboratively to produce learning materials for the class; and still other times you might be asked to provide written peer reviews of a classmate’s work. This will also be evaluated according to a contract grading method.
- Annotated Bibliography. (20 points) You will produce an annotated bibliography on an issue that is being argued about in the public sphere during this very semester. This will involve about 1000 words of text.
- Rhetorical Analysis. (20 points) You will produce a rhetorical analysis of a few sources from the annotated bibliography you created. The essay you write will be between 750 and 1000 words.
- Written Public Argument. (20 points) You will produce one substantive public opinion essay on the same public issue that you wrote your annotated bibliography about. The essay will fit the “editorial” genre and will be between 1000 and 1500 words.