Welcome to Rhetoric, My Friends

So, by this point, you know about the class theme. You know that we will be studying the power and persuasive appeal of fear in all types of media in the upcoming quarter. These media may include Youtube videos, clips of horror films, radio broadcasts, newspapers, TV news, TV shows, interviews, magazine articles, journal articles, and websites. As you study this wide variety of texts, you will hopefully begin to notice the difference between writing and communication in the public sphere vs. the academic sphere.

After all, our Commonplace project will ask you to produce a piece of public writing stemming from the academic work you will do in this class. This class blog project is the perfect place to start practicing your analysis and evaluation of public writing. Because, despite the fact that we label public writing as laid-back, carefree, relatively unhampered by convention, etc., it actually is often constructed very deliberately as well.

Writers use ethos, pathos, and logos (terms we will talk about later if you don't know what they mean yet) to persuade and encourage an audience to read further. They choose pictures and visuals, consciously or unconsciously, that back up the claims they make. The very words they choose can indicate mindset, view, or bias. So use this class blog as a useful forum to strengthen your skills of writing and analysis.

And have fun.