**Please grab your name tent from the table by the door**

**If you were not here on Monday, please grab a piece of paper to make a name tent and a copy of the course schedule**

Writing Into the Day (10 min)

When has a piece of writing, either something you wrote or something you read, made a significant impact on your life? What qualities or context made that piece of writing so significant?

Sharing (5 min)

Overview:

• What is Rhetoric?
• Introducing Rhetorical Devices Assignment
• What are WMDs? Why are they important?
• Questions we have about either topic
• Previewing next week

What is Rhetoric?

• Collective brainstorm of prior associations/meanings
  • tool to help you write an essay
  • a way to get your point across
  • a way to make your speech better, better = more informative and not boring
  • a way to reach your audience
  • to make an emotional connection with the audience
  • to persuade somebody
  • “empty rhetoric”
• Main ideas from the reading
  • Writing is not an inherent talent– it is a skill that can be studied/learned/improved through rhetoric
• 4 Purposes of Rhetoric
  • To persuade
    • Having a strong argument– running for office, being a lawyer
    • Bring up/address counter arguments
    • Use quotes that are relevant — on topic, accurate, who is it from?
  • To inform
    • Enunciate, be clear
    • Use facts, back up your opinions with evidence
    • Having data (reliable data!)
    • Use simple/easy to understand language
    • The news
    • Teaching! Student presenting on topic (teaching!)
  • To express
    • Getting your ideas to shine, have your ideas stand out, stick with people
    • Know your situation– use appropriate tone
    • Use emotions and details– emphasize the important parts
    • Be respectful– or deliberately disrespectful
    • Giving personal examples (either from yourself or from someone else)
    • Giving a eulogy– you’re not trying to persuade people that the person was good/bad, you’re just talking about their life
  • To entertain
    • To not be offensive (or to be deliberately offensive)
    • Turn dark humor into comedy
    • Choose your level of seriousness appropriately
    • Volume
    • Tone
    • Variety
    • Comedic timing
    • Read your audience– what kinds of things are they entertained by?
    • To invoke emotion
    • Fiction more often than nonfiction — build suspense
    • Keeping audience’s attention– cliffhangers, surprises, plot twists, dynamicness,
    • Know when to stop
    • Hanging out with your friends
• Work together in pairs to come up with general rhetorical rules for each Purpose of Rhetoric
• Then also come up with some situations in which each purpose might be useful/important

Sharing/Compiling

Discussing Rhetorical Devices Assignment

What Are WMDs?

• Share out main ideas from the TED Talk
  • The way they grade teachers– the algorithm doesn’t actually measure whether someone is a good teacher, and people are losing their jobs because of it
  • We are being scored by secret formulas
  • Different people get different sentences for the same/similar crimes because of the algorithm used to determine sentences
  • Algorithms are never going to be fair if we don’t make them fair
    • Question them
    • Algorithmic audit– check the data, check the definition of success that is programmed into the algorithm
    • Who does it fail?
    • Be open to feedback, always work to improve the algorithm
  • Consider longterm effects
  • Algorithms can be used to reinforce segregation
    • Prison algorithms are racially biased
    • Different policing of different areas
    • Where is the data coming from????
  • Data scientists should be translators of ethical conversations that happen in the world
    • Data scientists should explain to others when we can trust data and for what
    • Most people are mystified by statistics!
• Create beginning working definitions
• When do we already know we encounter algorithms in our day to day lives?
• Preview Table of Contents from the book

Questions? (either to answer now or to be thinking about /discussing in the future)

If We Have Leftover Time: How do we want to do political issues this semester?

Previewing Next Week:

Monday (2/3): Introduction to Propaganda + Principles of Academic Writing

Readings Due:

“Propaganda is Everywhere”

“Name Calling”

Bandwagon Illustration

Bandwagon Description

Assignments Due:

None!

Wednesday (2/5): WordPress Training and Portfolio Discussion

 Meet in 7^th Floor Computer Lab (NB 7.68)

Readings Due:

None!

Assignments Due:

Your first rhetorical devices assignment! Post examples + analysis of the “namecalling” and “bandwagon” techniques as comments on the blog.