Description
Are you well? Are you healthy?The answers to these questions reveal much about your sense of self and your experience of the world. But this class argues that the answers reveal much also about the rhetoric of health in the world around you. Doctors aren't the only ones who decide what mental, physical, and sexual health mean; TV commercials, online ads, e-mail spam, drug companies, and public officials do too (or try to) through persuasive arguments about health. In this course we will examine those arguments with the goal of learning both about rhetoric and about health in our society and history. One major premise of this class is that arguments made by medical texts throughout history have not shared a common definition of health and that the definition of health remains a site of controversy even today. Another major premise is that even non-medical texts often make implicit arguments about this controversial concept. Therefore we will work with texts as varied as ads for Zoloft and Viagra, news on government health care and avian flu, and works by Freud, Hippocrates, and Pasteur.
Goals
In this course students will learn to
- identify and analyze contexts - identify a text’s purpose
- analyze the various ways a text appeals to its specific audience
- examine how a text contributes to an ongoing conversation or conversations
- summarize multiple perspectives fairly
- assess the credibility of sources, including Internet sources
- think critically―invent, organize, and revise college-level thinking
- read and write well-researched, college-level papers
Units
This course will be broken down into three major units. Each unit will introduce new rhetorical, writing, and research skills, and advance the skills from the last unit. Each unit will also include at least two related writing assignments.
Unit I: What was Health? History of Medicine
Our course will begin with arguments from the past. We will read important texts from (and about) the history of medicine for homework and discuss them during class meetings. Students will work through these texts to identify and synthesize their arguments. When reading about conditions like hysteria (female madness caused by a moving uterus) or practices like phrenology (reading psychological character by feeling head bumps), we may find past arguments about health unfamiliar, off-putting, or even ridiculous, but students must put aside these reactions in order to write fair and accurate summaries. Students will write two short summaries of the argument in two assigned texts.
Unit II: What is Health? Advertising and the FDA
In our second unit, we will move from summary to rhetorical analysis, with a focus on different appeals to specific audiences. Our focus will also shift from the past to the present, and from verbal texts to verbal and visual. In Unit 2 we will focus on the persuasive genre of advertising. In our class meetings, we will analyze contemporary advertisements in order to identify these texts' purpose and how they appeal to their specific audiences.
Students will be responsible for providing the class with at least one suitable advertisement for analysis, introducing it to the class, and leading a discussion of the ad’s rhetorical strategies, context, and credibility. Students will revise their blog post on this ad based on feedback from classmates.
Once we have completed detailed written rhetorical analyses, students will exploit the same rhetorical strategies in order to make a persuasive argument in their own advertisement. Working in groups, students will “invent” a new drug, be assigned side-effects, and create an FDA-approved advertisement that includes the required information but remains persuasive to its audience.
Unit III: Where is Health? Contemporary Controversies and Public Policy
In Unit 3 our focus will shift to public controversies and student research. Each student will choose a public controversy over health or care and will begin their final project by creating an annotated bibliography of sources that provide background information on and that argue for a position within the controversy. This assignment will be accompanied by research lessons and support in the classroom, and discussions about the credibility and usefulness of different sources.
The next stage in this project will be to write a controversy “map” which historicizes the issue and summarizes major positions in the debate. This writing assignment will be workshopped through peer review. The final stage in the the project will be an essay on the same controversy that analyzes points of stasis in the debate and makes an intervention with its own argument.
Policy
Student Responsibilities
Students are required to attend class on time, to prepare by doing the readings and homework, and to submit all research and writing assignments by the due date.Absences and Tardiness
If you must miss a regular class meeting please notify the instructor by email, and please contact a student to get a report of what you missed. Any missed assignment should be completed as soon as possible. If you must miss a student group meeting or a group presentation, please notify your fellow students.Missing more than 4 regular class meetings (6 hours of class time) may result in a failing grade for the course. Being late for 3 classes, or being more than 20 minutes late for class will be counted as an absence.
