WRIT 083: RHETORIC AND WRITING STUDIES

Spring 2022 Courses

---

WRIT 083 301

TR 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Abbott

How Media Persuades

Fulfills the Writing Requirement

Have you ever read a news article, watched a TV commercial or a music video, and wondered about its power to get into your head? This course examines how modern media engage in the rhetorical art of persuasion. Rather than focusing on social media, we'll be looking at professional media: everything from news to advertising to entertainment. We're bombarded with media rhetoric daily, and often we're aware of it as a means of manipulating our thoughts and actions, yet we consume and often succumb. We're all products of our media's unrelenting rhetorical machinations. In this seminar we'll study the rhetoric of persuasion in modern media, its historical development, and the ways it draws us into its milieu. We'll investigate how these media unite us and divide us, and hopefully come to understand them well enough to resist being pawns of the rhetoric we encounter. As a student in this seminar, you'll learn much about rhetorical strategies, critical thinking, and critical writing theory and practice. You'll produce two major pieces, a white paper and an op-ed, as well as shorter assignments designed to increase your writing knowledge and your self-awareness as a writer: keys to meeting the writing tasks in your future.

---