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Course Description

This introductory course provides students with the knowledge necessary to create ethical, logical, and impactful persuasive messages that advocate for positive change. Students are invited to examine historical and contemporary approaches to persuasive messages, including how to analyze, criticize, and promote oral and written ideas. Students are encouraged to demonstrate their understanding of how to test evidence and advance a persuasive position based on inductive and deductive reasoning processes and logos, pathos, and ethos appeals. Students are coached on how to recognize formal and informal fallacies of language and thought and to develop the ability to distinguish matters of factual evidence from judgement or opinion. Students are guided on how to write substantive persuasive sequential essays, which may include a combination of process drafts, inquiry-driven research collection, peer responses, critical evaluation, and self-reflections about their own knowledge. This course also focuses on how to confidently and ethically present persuasive appeals, including how to apply foundational rhetorical theories and techniques of public speaking in a multicultural democratic society, to construct, prepare, and deliver extemporaneous persuasive speeches to a live classroom audience. Honors Introduction to Persuasion uses the pedagogical methods common to all Honors courses: interdisciplinary, writing-intensive, collaborative, and experiential instruction.