Welcome to A & P 122

Welcome to Analytic and Persuasive Writing! First and foremost, I want to address the importance of analysis and persuasion in our culture and our ethos. Every day, we are faced with the issue of getting our voice heard, whether it be as we order our morning coffee, call into a local talk radio show, create and maintain a facebook or myspace page, or deal with instructors and classroom settings. In a sense, all communication involves analysis and persuasion. With this in mind, our ability to communicate our needs, desires, and fears to a willing audience is ingrained in our psyches. At our core are our stories, our remembrances, and our perspectives, and it is these areas that we attempt to use to engage us in the human community. However, each human community and culture utilizes different methods of discourse and each of these methods appears with a specific vernacular and subsequent rules. Yet at the core of each of these human communities and cultures appears a common structure and desire: the desire to speak and the desire to understand. Those two desires are our goals for this course.

Specifically, we will focus on learning how to witness, understand, embrace, and create utilizing our need to be heard. We will examine how are need to understand our various communities and cultures teaches us the necessary clues and reminders necessary for engaging in the cultures. We will create meaningful explorations that focus on our roles as individuals within the sub-sected cultures that we engage with on a daily basis. We will share these explorations and will learn what it means to be us through analysis and what it means to “persuade” others to listen to our stories. We will also focus on the ideas of creativity and collaboration in regards to text and to text analysis and creation. The idea of texts is changing at this point, with the arbitrary essay and traditional formats being replaced by technologically-informed formats.

The journeys that we have all taken to arrive at this point are not arbitrary; in fact, our journeys have brought us to this place in our pursuit of knowledge. This pursuit is ours, and by that, I mean, I, too, am part of this Socratic inquiry into knowledge and understanding. With this inquiry, we will utilize texts, as reading material and a means from which to craft our own narratives and explorations. We will write; we will revise, and ultimately, we will create our own knowledge.