COMM 3615: Argumentation (FA18)

Chapter 6 mainly discusses the work that must be completed by you as the arguing party before presenting your argument to the audience. This is also known as “case building” we often see this type of preparation for arguments in the courtroom, as a lawyer builds their case for their defendant's innocence. The most important part of any argument is to be able to “identify the ultimate purpose”, in other words, what is the ideal outcome of the situation at hand? The best possible scenarios that you can achieve from making this argument? Knowing what you’re arguing for will change the outcome in the end, because how you present your case to the audience will show them how you want them to think about the situation. Like with the war on drugs situation, they started out with the narrative that they needed to stop drug use because it was becoming such a prevalent issue. In reality the fight turned full-force to the drug dealers and cartels themselves in order to stop the distribution of...

Blog Post 1 - Chapter 2 This discussion post will be concerning the material for the upcoming week, from Chapter 2 of the textbook. There were many interesting concepts pertaining to argumentation that were covered throughout the Chapter. One concept that I found particularly interesting was “social influence”. A man by the name of Soloman Asch experimented with the topic of social influence. He was best known for conducting experiments, where he told people to deliberately give wrong answers pertaining to the questions being asked, in turn influencing the actual participants of the experiments. These wrong answers did in fact influence the participants as ⅓ of them said they were swayed to change their answers because of the people planted, giving wrong answers. This makes me thing of our society today, we often react quickly to headlines we see online and on TV. These headlines are just the ones that those specific media outlets want us to see, the answers that they want to plan...