How do writers and their texts shape our beliefs?
Reading suspiciously
As you know, the text we're going to be considering for the next little while is titled "Muslim woman must remove veil to give trial evidence," and it was published on the BBC News Web site on September 16. you can read it online by clicking the link on its title.We're going to be paying this text a lot more attention than most
people would usually think it worth giving to a news story. The
reason we're doing this is to attend to just how strongly texts --
even everyday texts, written pretty casually -- can affect our
beliefs in ways we normally don't notice.
We're going to do this investigation in stages, beginning with a Moodle
forum. The first thing you need to do is visit that forum
and respond to the four questions I've posted there. I'm expecting
all the questions might take a bit of thought; answers that are
shorter than 50 words won't count as completed. The deadline for
this is Saturday night (do it earlier).
After Sunday morning, go back to the Forum and read as many of
the responses to the questions as you can (read, in each case, at
least the five above yours in the list, and the five below), and
reply to at least three of them. Respond thoughtfully (one way to
begin a response is to choose among these openings: "Yes, but . .
. "; "Yes, and not only that . . . ": "No, because . . . "; or
"That reminds me . . . ") To count, replies have to be more just a
sentence. Aim for another 50 words. Your deadline for posting the
replies is Tuesday morning (say, 8:00).