Apply rhetorical analysis to public discourse — news media, visual arguments, digital rhetoric, and scientific communication.
How rhetoric shapes civic discourse — from political speeches and op-eds to advocacy campaigns and public address. Recognizing deliberative, forensic, and epideictic registers.
How news articles, editorials, and reporting construct implicit arguments through framing, source selection, word choice, and what is included or omitted.
Images, infographics, advertisements, and mixed-media texts as rhetorical acts. How composition, color, juxtaposition, and design choices create persuasive meaning.
How platform constraints, participatory culture, and algorithmic amplification reshape rhetorical norms — brevity, virality, meme culture, and the attention economy.
How scientists, science journalists, and climate advocates argue about data, uncertainty, risk, and policy — and how public rhetoric distorts or clarifies scientific consensus.
Recognizing how rhetoric operates differently in law, economics, medicine, and other fields — genre conventions, audience expectations, and discipline-specific evidence standards.
Every public text — a news article, an advertisement, a viral tweet — has a writer, purpose, audience, and context. Unit 8 applies RHS analysis to texts whose persuasive intent may be subtle, institutional, or deliberately obscured.
In public discourse, word choice and tone signal ideological positioning, credibility, and target audience. STL in Unit 8 means reading diction and register as evidence of rhetorical purpose — who is being addressed and what relationship the writer assumes.
CLE in Unit 8 focuses on evaluating how public arguments handle evidence — distinguishing expert consensus from opinion, identifying selective use of data, and recognizing when appeals to authority are or are not warranted.