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CM220 UNIT 1 READING AND RESOURCES

CM220 - Developing Effective Persuasive Communication Skills

The goal of CM220 is to develop the skills to use persuasive communication strategies in a variety of contexts. In this course, you will focus on developing persuasive skills in scholarly writing contexts by developing a clear thesis, seeking research to understand and prove an issue, and presenting a clear argument for change.

In this week’s readings, you will learn about academic writing standards and how writing can be used to enhance understanding a topic of exploration. This week’s readings will introduce you to the basics of the persuasive model you will be using in College Composition II. These concepts will form a foundation for the rest of your learning this term and help you prepare for this week’s discussion.

Unit 1 Reading - Part 1: Really? Writing? Again? Yes. Writing. Again.

In the age of email and smartphones, you might already be writing more often than speaking. However, when it comes to writing, there is no such thing as too much practice. In fact, research shows that deliberate practice makes a difference in how one performs. Practicing your ability to write effectively in personal, professional, and academic contexts can strengthen your communication skills and save you time and hassle in your studies, advance your career, and promote better relationships and a higher quality of life. Honing your writing is a good use of your scarce time.

A recent survey of employers conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities found that 89 percent of employers say that colleges and universities should place more emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing” (Hart Research Associates, 2010, p. 9). It was the single-most favored skill in this survey. In addition, several of the other valued skills are grounded in written communication: “Critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” (81%); “The ability to analyze and solve complex problems” (75%); and “The ability to locate, organize, and evaluate information from multiple sources” (68%). Employers seek out professionals who interact frequently with others, can anticipate and solve complex problems, and coordinate their work with others (Hart Research Associates, 2013, p. 2).

Formal written work is a critical part of online education. Creating and sharing knowledge depends on writing. The assumption behind college instruction is that students are the engine of learning and that most of the significant learning happens while students are working on their own. Most online college classes meet only once a week for seminar and do the bulk of their collaboration in the discussion boards. Consequently, college instructors think of class meetings as an opportunity to prepare you for the heavy lifting that you’ll be

CM220 UNIT 1 READING AND RESOURCES

doing on your own. Sometimes, that involves direct instruction (how to solve a particular kind of problem or analyze a particular kind of text). More often, professors want to provide you with material not contained in the reading or facilitate active learning experiences based on what you r ead.

Professors assign papers because they want you to think rigorously and deeply about important questions. To your instructors, writing i s for working out complex ideas, not just explaining them. They expect you to look deep into the evidence, consider alternative explanations, and work out an original, insightful argument that you c are about. Writing a paper isn’t about getting t he “right answer” and adhering t o basic conventions; it’s about joining an academic conversation with s omething original and borne of rigorous thought. Virtually all instructors shape their expectations for a final project around the idea that you’re writing to learn, writing to develop, writing to think—not just writing to express.

So what do professors want? When professors create writing assignments, they craft them to be

challenging to write and to advance your skills and knowledge. Professors want to see that you’ve thought through a problem and taken

the time and effort to explain your thinking in precise language. These skills will help you in college and in your everyday lives. Communication isn’t just about expressing yourself; it’s about connecting with others. And it’s other people—in families, couples, communities, and workplaces—that shape the most important experiences of your life.

Don’t get discouraged! On my first college paper, I got a very low grade. It felt like a slap in the face because I was a straight-A student in high school. It’s just a fact of life. Talk to your professor about what you c ould have done differently. This will help you be b etter prepared for future papers.

--Kaethe Leonard

References Hart Research Associates. (2010). Raising the bar: Employers’ views on college

learning in the wake of the economic downturn. The Association of American Colleges and Universities. http://www.aacu.org/leap.documents/2009_EmployerSurvey.pdf

Hart Research Associates. (2013). It takes more than a m ajor: Employer

priorities for college learning and student success: Overview and key findings. The Association of American Colleges and Universities. https://www.aacu.org/leap/presidentstrust/compact/2013SurveySummary

(Reading from Guptill, A. (2016). Really? Writing? Again? Yes. Writing. Again. Writing i n college: From competence to e xcellence. (pp. 1-8). Open SUNY Textbooks.)

CM220 UNIT 1 READING AND RESOURCES

Unit 1 Part 2: Writing as self-exploration and self-enrichment Often, when people think about writing, they think about the need to

communicate a message. Common communication models present a sender (e.g., a writer) and a receiver (e.g., a reader) and different concepts of what happens as information is shared. Sometimes, the purpose for writing isn’t about sending information to some other receiver or reader. Sometimes, your purpose for writing might simply be to explore an idea or even just to figure out what you think. The author Flannery O’Connor summed up this need by saying, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” If you take some time to think about it, this probably doesn’t come as a big surprise. Just like students, many people write all kinds of things solely for themselves: lists, goals, notes, journals, and more.

The act of writing has the power to help you make connections between yourself and the world. Writing can help you establish your own experiences and ideas in relation to the experiences and ideas of others. In short, it can help you figure out what you think about things and help you to situate those thoughts in relation the world and among the multitude of opinions and ideas that exist within it. That’s a powerful tool!

Creativity

“Sand Butterfly” by Garry Knight is licensed under CC BY 2.0

CM220 UNIT 1 READING AND RESOURCES

You might already be sensing that the process of self-exploration described above is a creative one. Writing your observations and thoughts and how they relate to other observations and thoughts can ignite your imagination and expand the possibilities of what you can accomplish—personally, academically, professionally, and creatively. It can also help you develop and shape those ideas in a way that makes them useful, entertaining, and thought- provoking for others.

Comprehension and Academic Performance The previous paragraphs have already discussed the potential for writing

to help you think, so it also should come as no surprise that it’s a wonderful tool to help you learn. At some point in your experience as a student, you may have noticed that you understand a concept better once you’ve used it or worked with it. We learn more about how to build a birdhouse by actually building one than we do by reading a book about how to build one. The book is helpful, but we need to work with the materials and the tools to help us understand the process.

One of the reasons that experiencing or working with a concept helps you understand and remember it is that experience requires action. Have you ever read a chapter or two in a textbook only to ask yourself a few hours later (or even a few minutes later), “What did I just read?” The consumption of media and information can be a passive experience. We read. We watch. We listen. It takes effort to keep our brains engaged in a passive experience. Moreover, educational materials usually lack the level of excitement of our favorite action movie franchise or the allure of cute animal videos on YouTube. It’s easy for our entertainment-hungry brains to check out and stop absorbing the meaning of what we’re reading. If we can experience a subject in multiple ways, with increasing levels of engagement, we are more likely to remember what we’re trying to learn. More importantly, beyond simply remembering it, it will allow you to understand its relevance to our own lives.

Writing about what you’re learning can expand your understanding of a topic by helping you make connections between that topic and other things that you already understand or to other things that you’re learning about. You can use writing to help you organize complex topics, to pick out main ideas, and to help you remember important concepts. If you can say it in your own words, you can move beyond merely knowing something to comprehending it. Part of this process of understanding involves extending our usual thoughts and reactions to a topic to gain new thoughts and new perspectives. Part of the process of academic writing (or even personal writing) involves wrestling with new or contradictory ideas. And even if right now you’re mostly writing for your teachers, as your academic and professional experience broadens, through writing, you can participate effectively in your academic or professional community.

Effective Communication and Persuasion Whether for the benefit of your academic or professional life or even for

your personal life, writing is an effective tool to help you to be understood and to influence others. Much of what we’ve talked about so far regarding the value of writing has been about its ability to help you understand yourself and to help you

CM220 UNIT 1 READING AND RESOURCES

understand the world. But writing also has the power to help others to understand your message.

As we’ve already stated in discussing its creative potential, writing gives you a voice. Writing can help you to state your position and support it in a way that might persuade others not only to understand your perspective, values, and beliefs but also to adopt them. And when you’re unsure about something, you can even use writing as a method for self-persuasion, to help you make up your mind about an important topic.

From resumes to term papers to work-related documents to journaling and self-exploration, writing is an important and powerful tool to have at the ready. This text can help you sharpen that tool and to use it to the best of your ability.

(Reading from Babin, M., Burnell, C., Pesznecker, N.R., & Wood, J. (2017). The word on college reading and writing. https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/wrd/)

Unit 1 Reading - Part 3 - The Rhetorical Situation in College Composition II We live in a world filled with language. Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human community. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup team. Just as the language of power and greed has the potential to destroy us, the language of reason and empathy has the power to save us. Writers can inspire a kinder, fairer, more beautiful world, or incite selfishness, stereotyping, and violence. Writers can unite people or divide them.

Change writers hope that readers will join them in what Charles Johnson calls 'an invitation to struggle.' Whereas writers of propaganda encourage readers to accept certain answers, writers who want to transform their readers encourage the asking of questions. Propaganda invites passive agreement; change writing invites original thought, open heartedness, and engagement. Change writers trust that readers can handle multiple points of view, contradictions, unresolved questions, and nuance. If, as André Gide wrote 'Tyranny is the absence of complexity,' then change writers are founders of democracies.

--Mary Pipher Writing to Change the World

In this class, you will explore persuasion through the theoretical lens of rhetoric, which is the art of persuasion. Rhetoric helps us to advocate for the things that we need and value. It also influences how we think and see the world. We engage in a persuasive interaction any time we read a billboard, watch a commercial, or participate in an election cycle. In those circumstances, we are members of the audience, receiving and digesting a message. At other times, we are the speakers and we are actively seeking to influence an audience.

CM220 UNIT 1 READING AND RESOURCES

Sometimes the stakes for an argument are low, like the daily arguments with our children about doing their homework or trying to convince a spouse to load the dishwasher. At other times, the stakes can be high. We may need to convince a judge that we should have primary custody of our children or convince a school to provide disability accommodations for our child. We may need to convince an aging parent to move closer so that we can support them better or prove that we are the best candidate for a job.

This term, you will use persuasive writing to practice presenting ethical, carefully considered, logical arguments that advocate for a change in your community. You will identify a community problem, critically examine that problem, and then propose the best possible solution to address that problem. Students who have recently moved, are deployed, or feel disconnected from the town they live in sometimes worry about how they will write about a community issue. With that in mind, we will define community loosely. While we often think of our physical community first, like the town, county, state, and country that we live in, a community can also be understood as a group of people with shared values, beliefs, priorities, or even interests. In a work community, everybody collaborates to advance the mission of the company. In a sporting community, the shared value can be the success of a team. In a spiritual community, members connect around shared beliefs. In our learning community, we share the goal of advancing understanding, regardless of what discipline we want to get a degree in.

Shared values are often what help to define a community; however, within any community, one can expect to find both common ground and areas of disagreement. Take this class as an example of a specific community. In the CM220 learning community, most students and the instructor can agree that writing has value. Students share the common goal of working toward a degree. However, some students may feel like writing is going to be minimal in their career whereas other students believe writing will be essential. The points of disagreement give rise to a persuasive opportunity--the opportunity to prove why students should care about persuasive writing.

When a writer needs to enter a persuasive conversation, she can start by considering the rhetorical situation, which has five key elements: the text, writer, audience, purpose, and context. Let’s look at your first reading of the term, “Really? Writing? Again? Yes. Writing. Again.” by Guptill (2016) through the lens of the rhetorical situation. Guptill’s (2016) chapter is attempting to convince students that persuasive writing is important in a variety of contexts.

Guptill is the writer or the one who has to convince students that the work is valuable and relevant. Students are the audience. To effectively engage students, Guptill has to understand their priorities and provide information that feels practical and relevant to the student both now and in their future roles as engaged citizens, family members, and professionals. She does this by citing a survey that indicates that 89% of employers want to see “more” emphasis on effective communication (Association of American College and Universities as cited in Guptill, 2016), talking about the pay-off students will experience from developing writing skills, and explaining how writing can help students demonstrate their knowledge in college courses. The text is a book chapter. The purpose is to motivate students to take the course seriously and empower

CM220 UNIT 1 READING AND RESOURCES

students by giving them information that will help them strengthen their writing skills. Finally, the context is the classroom.

What we just reviewed gives us a surface understanding of the rhetorical situation. Let’s drill down into this more and focus on audience. When we consider audiences, we can examine them at a group or individual level. Sometimes we have a lot of knowledge about the priorities of our audience and sometimes, especially in academic exercises, we have to rely on our imaginations.

Each audience member shows up with a wealth of experience that is influenced by his background, culture, choices, and priorities. We refer to each individual’s unique story and the perspectives that arise from that story as situated knowledge. You carry situated knowledge too and your situated knowledge can be explored by seeking the story-behind-the-story in any given situation. When we bring each individual perspective together, we have a rich variety of experiences and perspectives that can be used to create a shared understanding of an issue. This range of situated knowledge on a topic can be used to gain a complex understanding of the issue, possible solutions, and the implications of those solutions.

Let’s use an imagined audience to get a sense of how situated knowledge and priorities can influence the way students think and what the instructor must consider when trying to persuade students of the value of persuasive writing. John, Eric, and Alice are members of the CM220 writing community. Each brings their own situated knowledge to the work and ideas in the class. Their situated knowledge influences how they think about the course, what their priorities are, and what they will value most as they complete the course.

John is here to study business because he wants to open a restaurant when he graduates. John believes that he will have to write to finish his degree, but his requirements for writing will be limited once he becomes a restaurant owner. He’s not looking forward to the course.

Eric is studying nursing and wants to work as a nurse and help patients with heart disease. He believes that he will have to do a lot of writing because he will have to document information about each patient and communicate that information clearly. He thinks most of his writing will be informative, so he is a bit skeptical about the relevance of persuasive writing to his career.

Alice wants to become a crime scene investigator when she graduates. She believes that she will have to use writing extensively to illustrate critical elements of a crime scene. She has heard that her reports could be used in court and she could be asked to testify to defend her conclusions, so she is especially interested in learning how to write effectively and convincingly.

To persuade John, Eric, and Alice that College Composition II will be beneficial in the long run, the instructor needs to figure out the story-behind-the- story that influences how they think about writing. The story-behind-the-story can help us tap into that person’s situated knowledge. One of the best ways to find out the story-behind-the-story is to start with key questions. What does the teacher need to learn to understand each community stakeholder’s perspective on the issue of writing? What is their background in writing? How have those

CM220 UNIT 1 READING AND RESOURCES

experiences shaped how they think about writing? Once she has that information, she can think about how persuasive communication is relevant to each student.

What would create a need for persuasive communication for John? Say John opens a taco restaurant. He may want to create a commercial that motivates people to try it. John can apply the rhetorical situation to make sure the money he spends on advertising is well spent. His rhetorical text will be a commercial, which means he can use music, actors, and written words to convey his message. Next, he has to think about his role as the writer. This is a brand new restaurant, so he can’t rely on reviews and word-of-mouth. He has to find some way to entice people to his restaurant based on novelty and what his restaurant adds to the community. His purpose will be to showcase the restaurant and get new patrons. As he thinks about purpose, he needs to consider his audience. Does this audience want something new or exotic? These considerations will influence what he chooses to showcase in his commercial. Finally, he thinks about the context. What does the community already have and what does it want? How can his commercial demonstrate that this restaurant fits well with the community it is situated in?

Let’s turn to Eric. He has to convince a patient to follow a doctor’s recommendation. Eric works in a cardiac ward at a hospital and has been counseling Elsa, who recently had a heart attack. Elsa eats a lot of highly processed foods and doesn’t exercise. She feels overwhelmed about the idea of completely changing her diet and starting an exercise regimen. Eric somehow has to motivate her to make these necessary changes. Eric is the writer and his text is a conversation. Elsa is the audience. Eric's purpose is to convince her that the difficulty of making these changes and going through the transition to a new lifestyle is in Elsa’s best interest. To convince Elsa, Eric needs to find the story behind Elsa’s resistance to change. He can ask her questions to better understand her relationship with food. Knowing this will empower Eric to provide her information that addresses that backstory. If he discovers that food is a major source of comfort for her, he may need to recommend non-food based comfort tools to replace food. Alternatively, he may offer resources and recipe sites that follow the dietary guidelines while still maintaining some of the comfort food features, like replacing the deep fryer with an air-fryer. Eric needs to get to know his patient and understand the resistance that this patient is going to raise before he can advocate for a solution. The context may be to Eric’s benefit because he is talking with her in a hospital ward, which demonstrates the urgency of her health condition.

Finally, let’s consider Alice, who has become a Crime Scene Investigator and has to appear in court to provide evidence in a trial for a crime that she helped to investigate. Her conclusions are being used in the prosecution of a crime. The text is her testimony and the documents she wrote in the initial investigation. Alice is the writer. Her audience is the judge and jury, but she will be questioned by a defense attorney and a prosecutor who may prove to be one of the toughest audiences. The defense attorney’s job is to undermine her investigative conclusions, so she has to present herself as credible, careful, and

CM220 UNIT 1 READING AND RESOURCES

accurate. Her purpose is to provide evidence that convinces the jury that her conclusions were accurate and valid. The context will largely be established by the attorneys and the information they present before and after her testimony.

As you can see, each persuasive situation starts with a need to communicate. Once the need to persuade is established, you can use the rhetorical situation to figure out how to proceed. The participants (both writer and audience), the environment (context), the purpose of the communication, and the best method of communication (text) work together to ensure a successful argument.

In this class, you will practice using the rhetorical model to advocate for a change in your community. You will be the agent for a positive change. In the process, you will deepen your understanding of a community issue and hopefully gain new insights. As you can see from the scenarios above, the solution is often not the first one that we thought of. John may have wanted to start by opening a sushi restaurant, but when he surveyed community members and looked at what already existed in the community, he realized there was no demand, so he adjusted his ideas and decided to open a taco restaurant. Eric wanted Elsa to shift to a Mediterranean diet, but after he talked with her, he realized that her dietary changes would have to be more gradual, and she may need a nutritionist to work with her directly as she makes the changes. By considering her story- behind-the-story, he was able to come up with a solution that was feasible for both of them. This highlights the negotiation involved in effective persuasion. In Alice’s case, negotiation may be detrimental. She has to appear certain and clear. Alice may have a lot of highly specialized knowledge and terms to explain her ideas, but she needs the information to be meaningful to a jury that has little understanding of her work. As a result, she has to figure out how to explain it in layman’s terms. By doing so, she deepens her understanding of the scientific process that she uses and the limitations that she needs to consider when drawing conclusions.

As you can see, persuasive communication is less about winning than it is about discovery. While we may have a very clear goal in mind, we have to be open to learning new information and seeing things in a new light. We have to ask critical questions to get to the story-behind-the-story and to expose the areas of disagreement. We need to seek out perspectives that challenge our own so that we can round out our understanding of an issue and increase the effectiveness of our argument.

References Guptill, A. (2016). Really? Writing? Again? Yes. Writing. Again. Writing in college:

From competence to excellence. (pp. 1-8). Open SUNY Textbooks.

Pipher, M. (2006). Writing to change the world. Riverhead Press.