Academic and Professional Writing Courses | University of Chicago Writing Program

A writing-intensive course in persuasive techniques that influence opinions and attempt to change behavior. This year our focus will be on an issue that presents a challenge for persuasion theory: the environment. People are notoriously slow to change their beliefs and behavior on environmental issues, and persuasion theory suggests reasons why this might be the case. Environmental problems ask readers to weigh costs that affect one group against benefits that might accrue to someone else. They involve time frames ranging from moments (which are easy to think and write about) to millennia (not so easy) to geological epochs, a time scale so remote from our experience as to be opaque to the imagination. Environmental problems are complex in ways that make them difficult to capture in a coherent, emotionally compelling narrative. Many individually innocuous and seemingly unrelated environmental events can converge over time to produce consequences that are counter-intuitively larger and graver than their causes. This felt disparity between actions and outcomes can violate an audience’s sense of fairness, biasing the audience against a persuasive appeal.

This course will examine how writers on environmental problems have tackled these persuasive challenges when writing for non-scientific audiences. The readings will be short pieces and that attempt either to explain environmental issues or to persuade readers to adopt a course of action. Half of the assignments will analyze rhetorical techniques used the readings; in the other half, students will put these techniques into practice in their own essays. Over the course of the quarter, each student will develop a portfolio of pieces on an environmental topic of his or her choice. Readings will include selections from Rachel Carson, Robert Cialdini, Amy Harmon, Elizabeth Kolbert, Aldo Leopold, George Marshall, Bill McKibbin, and Cass Sunstein. Instructor: Tracy Weiner