Welcome to Rhetoric 101, the first semester of a two-course sequence designed to hone the skills you’ll need for writing in college and beyond.

You will write on four topics in this class:

1. YouTube #Education
2. the Rhetoric of Advertising
3. the Eloquence of Photographs
4. Data-Driven Campaign Ad Proposal

Core Dogma

• Good writing is based on evidence, not merely opinion.
  • Interesting evidence does more than just confirm prior understanding — it complicates, teaches something new.
  • Vivid description makes readers experience evidence for themselves.
• Passionate argument makes readers care about the issue being argued.
• Stepwise structure helps readers follow your logic.
• A topic is not a thesis. But you need both a topic and a thesis.
• Almost all writing aims either to inform or to persuade — or both.
• So, besides knowing what you want to argue about your topic (your thesis), you need to know what the reader already understands or believes about your topic — what your essay takes as its starting point, its preliminary understanding.
  • Journalism tends to take as its starting point the understanding of a typical reader.
  • Academic writing tends to take as its starting point the understanding of experts in the field.