 Hello and welcome to English 1302, Writing and Rhetoric here at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. I'm Dr. Eric Luttrell and I'll be your professor for the next 15 weeks. So what do you think of when you think of a writing class? A lot of people think of a process of starting with a conclusion and looking for ways, looking for information, looking for a format that you can use to make that conclusion persuasive to other people. You may have learned formats like the five paragraph essay in high school or maybe even sooner where you have a paragraph that introduces a major topic with three subtopics and then you have a paragraph for each of those three subtopics and then you have a conclusion that basically just repeats what you just said. That sort of format is easy to sort of pour any idea into. In fact, you don't even need an idea. You just pour a topic and just come up with like subtopics. Whether anyone was interested in that topic or not. But that sort of thing, starting with a conclusion and just pouring information into a particular rhetorical format, that's not what we're going to do in this class. That's something we're going to have to rethink. In fact, rethinking is going to be the sort of first and most critical part of this class. We have four main goals for this class. The first is to distinguish between motivated reasoning and critical reasoning. And critical reasoning is a term you're going to hear a lot. You've probably heard a lot already. People use it all the time, but what do we really mean by critical reasoning? A lot of people use that term just to mean, well, you know, smart reasoning, being intelligent. And critical reasoning isn't just being smart. It is being smart, but it's a particular kind of intelligence. We all can use intelligence to critically evaluate an idea that we're not really that attached to. An argument that someone else makes that we don't necessarily believe in ourselves, especially if we disagree in it. We're really good at showing that, oh, that information is inaccurate or that reason does not lead to that conclusion. When it's somebody else's, when we're not invested in it. But when it's our own assumption, our own belief, our own foregone conclusion, we're not very good at critically evaluating the argument that supports it. In fact, we're motivated to cherry pick data. We're motivated to use logical fallacies to make that conclusion seem like it's the only or the best one while ignoring counter evidence, evidence that we'd rather not have to contend with. And when we do that, we're doing the opposite of critical reasoning. That's called motivated reasoning. We're motivated to get to a foregone conclusion. So we're all capable of critical reasoning, but how often do we actually use it? And how often do we instead fall back on motivated reasoning? Well, this is something that psychologists and anthropologists and several others have begun to study over the past few decades. And the answers they found are not entirely encouraging. The psychologist Jonathan Hyde compares the way the human mind works to a lawyer writing on the back of an elephant. The elephant in this metaphor is all of the background cognition that the brain is doing at any given point. The generalizations, the stereotypes, the heuristics, these sorts of vague assumptions about the world that used to get through a day and most of the time they work fine, but they might be a little bit simplistic. They might be a little bit overgeneralized. Cognition in this sense is the sort of thinking you don't really think about if that makes any sense. If someone tosses you a basketball, you can catch it without stopping and thinking, that is a basketball, it is coming toward me, I should put my hands up and catch it. That background cognition is capable of taking care of that. And it's capable of doing other things throughout the day, opening doors, even driving home if you've ever caught yourself not paying attention to a drive from the time you get in your car, start the engine and get out on the road to the time you turn home, you probably didn't consciously think about, here's a red light so I need to stop, it's green now I can go. I should turn left at this street and right at the next street. You just sort of think about something else and then all of a sudden you're home. That background cognition is capable of doing quite a lot. And in Heitz metaphor, that's the elephant. The elephant knows where it's going and knows what it wants. The lawyer on the back isn't steering the elephant, but sometimes if the elephant gets out of control, if the elephant goes barreling down a city street and knocking over bicycles and making pedestrians jump out of the way, stopping traffic, breaking windows, that sort of thing, the lawyer can't stop it. He can't redirect it. He can't steer it. All he can do is make a rationalization for what the elephant has already done. He can say, well, you shouldn't have left your bike there. You shouldn't be on this sidewalk. You should cross the street to get out of the elephant's way. Or that window shouldn't have been there. So there's an argument being made. There's reasoning happening. This is not reasoning that is leading to a conclusion. The conclusion has already happened. The reasoning is just following along behind, trying to make the action, the thought, the outcome seem as if it was something deliberate, as if it was the right thing to do in order to persuade other people after the fact. And Heide is not alone in this characterization. Many psychologists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, behavioral economists over the past decade or so have, through independent studies, been coming toward basically the same characterization of the human brain. We're capable of a lot of very intelligent reasoning, but we typically use it to validate foregone conclusions that weren't very good in the first place. And the goal seems to be just to be persuasive. Some have even speculated from this research that human beings develop the capacity to reason consciously, not in order to make decisions in the future, but in order to present themselves to a social group in the best light possible, persuading other people to do what we want them to do for our own sake rather than what they might want to do or what's good for the larger group. And people who had that ability would have a selection advantage over people who did not. But of course, we would have to develop critical thinking to understand other people that might be trying to deceive us so that faculty emerges. It's just not something we use on ourselves. While the scientific data that creates this characterization is mostly very recent, this awareness of our own sort of propensity to self-deception is not new. This is the key insight that Socrates had almost 2,500 years ago. Socrates was famous not for what he knew, but necessarily more for what he knew that he didn't know. He was famous because he set out on a mission to sort of figure out or question the things that were taken for granted, some of the big questions, but also some of the small questions that everybody just sort of assumed that they already had the answers to. He would question those answers and he would go to the experts and he would find out, well, actually the experts don't always have a clear idea or really good logically sound reason for the conclusions that they hold. It was through these investigations that a lot of the insights that people like Socrates and later Plato Aristotle and later philosophers actually came to the insights that they were famous for. It started not with a foregone conclusion that they thought they had to persuade everybody about, but realizing that a lot of the assumptions they held needed to be rethought, investigated, and reworked into a more accurate and testable form. This class is designed to send you out on a similar Socratic quest. In this class, we're going to learn a lot about the psychological and sociological cognitive biases, problems in understanding new things and then communicating those things. I'll cover that in video lectures and you'll read articles about that sort of thing and then take quizzes about it. But after that, and the point of that is that you're also going to choose an issue for investigation, something that you're going to gather sources talking about a particular issue, analyze those sources, their rhetorical structure, compare them to other sources that might take a different position and make a different argument in that same issue, then make your own foray into that issue, make your own argument, arguing for a particular conclusion, then looking at different strategies for creating an argument that can get through people's motivated reasoning, get through their barriers to get people to see things that they don't necessarily want to see. All of this is going to come from your particular investigation of an issue that is completely up to you. Whatever issue you decide to investigate is going to be up to you, it can't just be an issue, it can't just be a topic. You're not just providing information. You're setting out to understand something that people don't totally understand, people don't totally agree with. This might be something that's very controversial or it might just be something that people think they know enough about that actually, you know, they may not. And each of the writing projects, each of the essays and the annotated bibliography and the peer review assignments that you'll write and submit and you'll receive feedback from your classmates. Each of these builds on the research that you've done on your issue, the writing that you've done on that issue. Each of that, each project stacks on top of the previous one in order to allow you to build up a certain repertoire of expertise about this issue while you find new ways to understand it and new ways to communicate it. So to get started, if you haven't already, you'll want to go to the class's blackboard site. And as with every class, the first thing you're going to want to do is read the syllabus. Now you can get to the syllabus by clicking the link on the left and the menu on the left. And this is where you'll find out my information. My information has been redacted here because this is on YouTube. But you can find my email address. You can email me directly. My office location, my telephone in my office. I only answer the telephone in my office when I'm in my office during office hours. It's possible to leave a message, but sometimes that message doesn't always get to me. So the best time to use the telephone is during my office hours, which are posted directly below that on the syllabus on blackboard. But outside of office hours, the best way to contact me is probably through email. Here also is listed the textbook that's required for this class. The book is called Naming What We Know. You should be able to find a lot of these in the TAMU-CC bookstore. Every composition class requires the same textbook. You'll find the grade distribution that tells you how much each major writing assignment is worth and collectively how much the peer review assignments and the quizzes are worth. This class has been converted to a point system that these percentages aren't going to be exact, but this is pretty close to what each one is worth. After the syllabus, so you should read the entire syllabus. I'm not going to go over every bit of it now, but I'm going to go over the major points. Be sure in this class and in every other class, read the entire syllabus as soon as possible. After the syllabus, the most important link on here is the schedule. This is where you'll see what we'll be doing each week, what you need to read, what videos you need to watch, what assignments are due, and it will also allow you to look ahead. For the purposes of the course, a week lasts from Monday at noon until the following Monday at 11.59 a.m. So Monday mornings for the rest of the semester are going to be the time when you can turn in the last bits of the previous week. That means that some assignments from the previous week can be done over the weekend on Monday before 12 noon. I try to set the class up so that people who work 9 to 5 during the week can do the majority of the work on the weekend and then turn it in by Monday at noon before starting the next week. However, there will be some exceptions, some things that have to be done by Wednesday night. When you check the schedule on Blackboard, you'll see dates here whereas I have left the dates off for this tutorial video. I'll also make weekly announcements on Monday morning to remind you that this is due on Wednesday. This is due the following Monday what you need to be doing during that week. Those announcements will appear on the announcements section which you can get to on the left-hand menu there on Blackboard but they'll also be sent out as emails. It's best to do the readings and viewing the videos and doing the assignments in the order that they're listed in the schedule. For example sometimes I'll have readings listed first and then lecture videos later and if that's the case then in that lecture video I'm going to presume you've already read the reading that's listed above it if an assignment is posted it may presume that you have already read the previously listed material and are ready to either take a quiz on it or write about it in a peer review assignment. So each week will contain lecture videos in which I'll talk about the concepts and material for the class. The links to those videos the YouTube links are listed on the schedule of readings. When you watch these videos take notes. I know it's YouTube we tend to fall into that passive entertainment mode but treat this as a university, college classroom lecture. Have a notebook. I recommend a paper notebook rather than just typing it. Studies have shown that people who have to actually write down with a pencil on paper or pen and paper retain the information a lot better than people who type it out. I'll usually put key terms in a red font so you know that you definitely need to write those terms down. Those are the kinds of terms that can show up again on a quiz and they're the kind of terms that I'll use in assignments and I'll assume that you know what they mean and how to use them. Because it's on YouTube you can pause the lecture to write things down. You can go back and repeat part of the lecture obviously but you can also speed it up if you're especially if you're reviewing a lecture that you've already watched the on the menu bar on the bottom of the YouTube video you'll see that little gear you click on the gear you change the speed to like you know 1.5 times the usual speed if you're you know if you want to turn an hour long video into a 45 minute video. You'll also see listed the authors titles and links to the readings. Most of the readings are not going to be in the textbook naming what we know. They're mostly going to be online readings like this one the first one is Jerome Groupman's article the mistakes doctors make which is an article in the Boston Globe and there's the link to the Boston Globe. Some of these sources like the New York Times will have a limit to how many free articles you can get if you're not a subscriber. So if you run into a paywall if it says you have seen all the five free articles you can see this month usually you can switch to another browser and it will start over again. So sometimes there will be more than one New York Times article in a particular week. It usually will be in a month so if you start clicking through other articles you might use those up if that happens you know you could switch computers or you could just most of the time you could switch to another browser if you're using Firefox switch over to Safari or Chrome or something like that. If you don't see a link next to a reading it may be one that has been posted or uploaded on Blackboard so if you just see BB in parentheses you can click on the BB and it should open an Adobe PDF in your browser or you can download it as a PDF and then the others without links are short articles in naming what we know with the page numbers listed and again you'll have to get a paper copy of that book at the bookstore although there is also a Kindle version and maybe other ebook forms in that case the page numbers may not work but you've got the section number like 5.3 or whatever you'll notice at the end of this week we have our first quiz and by the end of this week I mean it is due at 12 noon next Monday. Now you can do that anytime between now and then the quiz is already open but it will no longer be able to submit it after 12 noon next Monday. The quizzes are there to make sure you're gaining the necessary comprehension of the concepts that are discussed in the articles so the articles, the lecture videos are going to cover a lot of material about how we think, how we write how we read, how miscommunication happens and how to overcome that those key concepts and the examples used in those articles are going to be things that you want to take notes on and then be prepared to discuss them or at least recognize them on the quiz. The quizzes are all multiple choice there's rarely more than 4 choices to choose from. There will be 10 questions you have 10 minutes to take it once you begin to get to the quiz go click on quizzes on the left hand menu once you're there you'll see the quiz for that week to appear right now the only quiz that appears is quiz one next week the quiz two will appear you won't be able to take quiz one after the due date but you will be able to go back and review it after the due date to get to begin the quiz sometimes it's kind of hard to tell you actually have to click on the title this is a problem with a lot of black board assignments you see the description and you don't see anything that looks like a link but you can actually click on the title for that assignment or in this case that quiz anytime during that week between now and the due date you can begin but once you begin you have 10 minutes and that 10 minute clock is ticking no matter if you click away from the page you turn your you click off the browser if you lose your internet connection the timer is still going so no matter what happens on your computer 10 minutes from the time you begin the quiz it expires and you won't be able to do anything else that's why it's very important that you have a secure internet connection and that you are free from distractions nobody's going to come in and distract you ask you to do something that sort of thing I don't recommend trying to take the quiz from the blackboard app on your phone there have been a lot of problems with that in the past some a lot of people have complained they couldn't even access the quiz so your best way to do it is to do it on a computer I recommend that you use your handwritten notes I don't consider that cheating I encourage my face to face classes to do that but in my face to face class I will only allow students to use their handwritten notes anything they've copied or any text documents anything like that I don't allow the way the quiz is set up you know you're on your own as to what sort of notes you're using but if you're not familiar with the material you're not going to be able to answer the questions in the amount of time given if you're familiar with the material you'll be able to answer the questions in that time frame and if you've written notes you're already familiar with the material so you may not even need them but you can use them back on the schedule you'll see the peer review assignments are listed in pairs there's a peer review 1A and peer review 1B that's because each peer review has two phases the first phase is the submission phase this is when you are giving your own answers or writing about your own work in progress during the submission phase you write your portion and you upload it and you have to have that in before the submission phase ends when the submission phase ends the peer evaluation phase begins and at that point there's no possibility of a new submission because Blackboard has to assign other students in the class the submissions to review the submissions of their peers that means that there's no possibility of a late submission on most weeks there is a peer review submission that's due on Wednesday night at midnight and then the evaluation peer evaluation period will go from Thursday morning until the following Monday at noon sometimes it's the opposite sometimes there is a submission due on a Monday and the evaluation is due on Wednesday just be sure that you've kept up with the schedule to be sure what's due on that week to get to the individual peer review assignment click on the tab on the left you'll see submission and evaluation dates posted for each of the assignments you can submit before the submission date you have to submit within that window you can't submit anything after the submission date ends to begin the process to begin the submission click view complete assignment and then once you're in you'll have that problem of finding the link again in this case to answer question one click on question one it doesn't look like a link but it is then once the submission phase is over and the peer evaluation phase begins when you click on the same assignment it will take you to this screen you'll have links for each of the students whose work that you're going to review it may have the students name or it may just say user one and user two click on that either the name or user one or user two and it will take you to that student's submission something like this in this case there are four questions and you'll have to click that up at the top you have to click through for each question so that you can review evaluate and give points for each question you'll read your peer submission below that is the criteria that I'll put up there I'll say when you're evaluating your peer be sure you look for these things be sure that they don't do this or make this mistake be sure that they follow this or have this minimum criteria then you will make comments you'll make suggestions maybe point out where they could have done something differently or make suggestions about you know information or research that they might want to do and then give them a points it'll say how much how many points maximum anywhere between zero and usually three to five it's just going to be a few points just enough so that you can let them know this criteria was or was not met the purpose of the peer review is so that you can give and get feedback from other people in the class on a few of these assignments it will be about conceptual material from case studies and that sort of thing most of the time it will be you writing about your research project and getting feedback from somebody else getting another opinion getting someone else saying you could have phrased that differently this might offend somebody oh did you know about this resource just the closest thing we can have to a conversation in an online class and we depend on each other to get ourselves out of our own habituation of thoughts our own presumptions our own heuristics our own sort of cognitive biases and motivated reasoning we need other people to look at what we've written and say here's how you might consider doing that differently you will be assigning each other grades but I will then be going over those grades to make sure that they're justified to make sure that somebody didn't buy mistake or through callousness give you a low grade when you deserved a higher grade if you have an issue with a particular grade that someone gave you you think it's unfair email me and I'll check on it but I'll be looking over them either way now the larger writing assignments three basic essays and annotated bibliography and then a final revision these are all part of a larger project that I mentioned earlier is your choice something that you're interested in it needs to be something that is not just a topic not just some information to put in a paper but an issue something that is up for discussion a problem that needs to be solved a point of controversy or something like that where maybe this is something a lot of people know and disagree about maybe this is something a lot of people think they know but there's actually a new innovation or something that would change things and maybe you're making an observation that most people don't stop and think about when they do this thing or see this thing that's what makes it an issue it's an open question and if you have an absolutely firm belief about the conclusion it may not be the best issue you want an issue that you can investigate with an open mind that you can challenge yourself you will be reading the writing of people with different perspectives on this issue you'll be looking at the logical structure of their argument you'll be comparing them you'll be gathering new data and comparing that data against old collections of data and that sort of thing and this will be something that you will continue to research for the entire semester so it should be something that you at least feel a little bit interested in and each contribution all the work you put into each paper it doesn't just disappear when you're done with that paper when you submit the first essay it's not like all that work is just now is no longer relevant it continues to be relevant the rhetorical analysis you'll do in your first essay will be relevant when you put together your own argument in the second essay then in the third essay you're going to write a proposal for how to adapt the information in your second essay to a potentially hostile audience and then in that final revision you're going to write the type of essay that presents a really strong logical fact-based argument but tries to present it to people who might be motivated to dismiss it people who really don't want to listen we're going to try to look for strategies to get them to listen and participate in that conversation all of these essays are going to be an APA format now that's the basic format I'm not going to require you to write an abstract with an essay you don't have to have a title page but you definitely have to have the citation format and a lot of people learned MLA, Modern Language Association format in high school we're going to be using APA in here and there are links here in the syllabus in each of the essay descriptions once you go to read the essay prompt you will use the APA format when you do the in-text citation, the parentheses with the author's name and the year, you'll also use it in the reference list in MLA that will be called the work cited in APA it's called the reference list the list of the works that you cite in your paper that is at the end to submit your essays go down to the essays section on the menu on the left and then click on the title in order to submit now you can read the essay prompt as is all you have to do is go to that section but once you're ready to submit your essay you'll click on the title, in this case essay 1, Rhetorical Analysis once you're there the really the only way to do this is to upload a file and the file needs to be either a Microsoft Word document or an Adobe PDF you'll see there are a few other files that this app can process but Google Docs it can't take and sometimes when you use Google Docs and then save it as a Microsoft Word .docx there are formatting problems so be sure that you're uploading either a Microsoft Word document file format or an Adobe PDF file format and once you do check in the browser and see if you can read it if you can open it and see it in the browser without using your software on your computer if you can read it in the browser then I can read it if you can't read it if it's just a blank screen then I can't read it either so if that happens and you've already uploaded it email me and let me know and I will take down the blank file and you can upload it again I will say that you have access to Microsoft Word in all of Microsoft Office as a TAMUCC student every single TAMUCC student has access to Office 365 you just go to the TAMUCC's IT page and they'll have a link to get Office 365 that will allow you to use Microsoft Word for free or at least you know incorporated in your tuition if you get an error message when you try to submit your file if there's a red banner at the top that says something like cannot access it might be that you've been logged out so you may have to refresh the page and it may ask you to log in to Blackboard again at that point you should be able to go back to the same page and submit your file and all of these essays are designed to be a sort of gradual construction each one becomes a foundation or at least a building block in the next and that's going to require us to do a lot of research it's going to require us to do a lot of rethinking of what we think we already know comparing arguments that come to opposing conclusions evaluating counter arguments proposing our own arguments you know you are going to make your own claim eventually it's not going to happen in the first essay the first essay the rhetorical analysis you're going to analyze someone else's writing argument you're going to look at the logical structure of it see how it works see what the rhetorical situation is talk about what works what doesn't but you're not making your own argument in the first essay then you're going to gather more sources for the annotated bibliography you're going to write about how you can use these different sources in that annotated bibliography are you using them to support your own argument are you using them as counter arguments and then in the second essay that's when you make your argument about your chosen issue you'll make a claim you'll give the reasons behind it you'll give the data you'll try to qualify it so that it enters into that conversation in a way that it's not misunderstood that it actually addresses relevant issues it addresses the arguments made by others and that sort of thing then in the third essay you're going to write a proposal this is you're writing this to a different audience than your second essay your second essay you're writing to people who don't necessarily share your conclusion and the third essay you're writing to people who actually share your conclusion on that issue but you're saying hey here's a better way to make this argument here's a problem here's why people might resist our arguments to this conclusion and here's a way around that we'll talk all about those sorts of rhetorical strategies and you'll pick one and you'll sort of design your own and you'll write about it in the third essay and then at the very end of the final week or you know you can turn it in anytime during the final week you'll revise your second essay using the strategy you designed in your third essay in which case you're not only making an argument you're testing an innovative rhetorical strategy to deliver that argument to people who might otherwise not want to hear it and so this is all part of process it's a process of investigation, revision thinking, rethinking, learning, re-learning, questioning and then asserting a claim backing it up with data, with evidence but evidence that is logically connected in an identifiable structure to a claim and this may not be a claim that you have right now you may not know where you're going with this that's okay in fact that's maybe better than if you think you know exactly what you're going to write what your final conclusion is going to be think of it as a process the word essay as I'll discuss later originally meant a sort of process of testing something and you can't and you would have to test one thing against another but this is our journey away from just being that lawyer on the back of the elephant just letting our non reflective cognition decide what we think and then just trying to rationalize it afterwards we're going to get away from that and get into a world where we share ideas with other people we can dispute with other people but do it in a way that is productive for everyone and most importantly we are now thinking about our own thinking we're thinking about other people's thinking and we're thinking about how to get our minds in communication and dialogue with the minds of others okay so now you know what to do go back to blackboard read the syllabus then go to the schedule see what the first reading is read that, watch the videos get ready and once you've done all the readings and watched the videos for the first week take the quiz and look forward to hearing an announcement from me about the following week and start thinking about what issue you want to spend this semester investigating