The Art Of Persuasion: Rhetoric Analysis

“…rhetoric teaches one how to begin, even or precisely when beginning seems impossible.” (Sellars) When a student first starts university they are often only seventeen or eighteen years old, they have likely just completed high school and are getting to experience freedom and what it is like to be an adult for the first time. The first decision they are going to have to make is what they would like to study when they get to university, this is basically asking someone who is just learning who they are to decide what they want to do for the rest of their life. No matter how much someone has thought about their future it is impossible for them to know that they are on the right path unless they get a glimpse of what the other paths offer. This is why we need courses like ENG205 – The Art of Persuasion: Rhetoric and its uses and abuses from Classical to Contemporary Culture to be required during the first year of every undergraduate program.

Specifically, ENG205 is an interdisciplinary course, which means students look at rhetoric through scientific, philosophical, visual, and many other lenses. If we consider that the U.S. Department of Education states that during the 2011-2012 school year 33% of undergraduate students changed their major at least once, and 9% changed it two or more times and that according to Statistics Canada only 30% of women and 60% of men who graduated with a degree in STEM ended up working in their field in 2016, we can see that there is a problem with how students choose their