Today’s Plan:
- Attendance
- Another Paper Outline
- Promoting Healthy Argument
- Homework
Promoting Healthy Argument
I want to start off today by suggesting that argument in America is quite sick. There’s a number of pieces that I could point to in support of this claim. We might look at this piece in the New Yorker that “Facts Don’t Change Our Minds.” Or we could turn to examine this Conversation article on how “Republicans and Democrats Live in Different Economic Realities.” We could look at the Wall Street Journal’s project Blue Feed / Red Feed, which compares how republican and democrats’ facebook feeds differ on the same topic. But I don’t want to frame this merely as a “public” problem (or blame it all on social media), we can look at the increasingly partisan behavior of our congress in this short Business Insider video. (And another BBC video on polarization).
Today I want to share with you one of my favorite essays, one that changed my orientation as a scholar. That essay is Jim Corder’s “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love.”
So, let’s talk about a story in my newsfeed.
And let’s talk about what else you can do.
Homework
Keep at it with those annotated bibliographies. Add new entries into the existing Google Doc.
