Digital Journal Prompt #12
In our workshop today, we focused, in part, on showing your reader the credibility of your sources and, in turn, building your own credibility as a someone who ethically persuades.
Look to your sources. Do you introduce any of your sources? Are you SHOWING your reader why they should trust this source and then, in turn, trust your argument? If your reader finds no reason to trust you as a writer, you cannot be successful in persuasion.
Look to our examples of persuasive arguments we have read for this section:
The student writer in the example in Chapter 6 of our Rules text does the following, “The International Center for Media and Public Agenda underscores the importance of news . . . “ . .” (”Openness”).
In the Q&A recorded just after his TedTalk ”How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day,” Tristan Harris says the following: I think it's really interesting. One way to see this is if you're just YouTube, for example, you want to always show the more interesting next video. You want to get better and better at suggesting that next video, but even if you could propose the perfect next video that everyone would want to watch, it would just be better and better at keeping you hooked on the screen. So what's missing in that equation is figuring out what our boundaries would be. You would want YouTube to know something about, say, falling asleep. The CEO of Netflix recently said, "our biggest competitors are Facebook, YouTube and sleep."
As his audience, we immediately offer a little more trust. In the context of his argument, a direct quote of the CEO of Netflix calling “sleep” a competitor, he chose the perfect person to pay attention to - the CEO of Netflix.
Look at your sources. Who needs to be introduced? Does a source need to be put into context. Most do.
Identify A source that should be put into context.
Follow these guidelines in your response:
Identify and look at the credentials of this source. Is this a study conducted by psychologists? What are their names? The person who is writing/arguing/asserting should be the focus and not the publication. This is also true of sources like the NIH, EPA, or departments of safety.
Use a strategy that we talked about in class OR something from Chapter 6 of your Rules text to put that source into context. (Pages 108 and 109 of Rules can also help you with some strategies.)
Offer the before and after (the revision) of this strategy in your post. This is meant to help you to revise and learn more about argumentation. Don’t short-change yourself and your learning.
Your response to this prompt is due by Wednesday, November 22 @ 11:00AM.











