Class Schedule for Spring 2020

This course qualifies to satisfy Arts and Letters Group. It is designed to provide students with appropriate tools of understanding and evaluating critically debates, speeches, and other forms of oral discourse in the public sphere, and to provide students with a performative basis for engaging in that discourse thoughtfully and effectively. Students gain both theoretical and practical knowledge of the rhetorical principles, ancient and modern, underlying oral argumentation. Students learn to evaluate arguments based on the principles of ethos, pathos, and logos, and identify the basic types of appeals used by speakers. They evaluate public oral controversies using these and other rhetorical and ethical principles, in written essays and oral presentations. They read theories of listening and deliberative reasoning, and they apply principles derived from these theories by engaging in the performance of debates and colloquies, both as speakers and as participants in the critical audience.