English 1006
Prompt #6
18 September 2013

Persuading people

Reading and reflecting on persuasion

There are now eight "persuasive" arguments for reading particular articles on the Moodle site. They're in a forum titled "Rating the persuasion."

Your task, before Thursday's class, is to read them and rate their persuasiveness (and to reflect on what it is that makes some more persuasive than others). As you think about this, you might do well to bear in mind three of the questions I posed in the last forum:
  1. What's the basic issue or problem or dispute behind the article? What might people disagree on?
  2. Are there really people you know who might hold the different views or opinions you've identified?
  3. How interesting do you think the article is likely to be to members of the class?
Here's what the forum says:

Read all of them, and for each indicate whether you think it (1) very persuasive, (2) not so persuasive, or (3) not at all persuasive. Rate all eight, but you need to award each rating to at least two of the recommendations (if you're not persuaded by any of them, pick the two least unpersuasive and rate them as very persuasive; if you think all eight are convincing, pick at least two that are the least convincing). For the ones you rate "very persuasive" indicate in a couple of sentences what you found particularly strong in persuading you that we should read and discuss the article.

You'll only be able to see other people's ratings after you've rated all eight.

As you do this, think about what is actually persuading you to want to read and discuss one of these in preference to the others. We're going to talk about persuasion in class (and probably make a decision about which article or articles we're actually going to spend some time on).


Go to the previous prompt
Go to the next prompt
Go to the list of prompts
Go to the main working site for English 1006G