Class 16 (April 23) - Stories and Persuasion

Welcome

Welcome back to something like normality. I hope you are all okay. Today we’re going to explore Silent Spring together, and talk about this idea that stories, although they are not arguments, provide metaphors to make arguments real to us.

Check-in

First, we’ll check in. In your breakout groups, you can chat about the following:

• What’s happening in your life at the moment?
• What did you like about the reading?
• Do you have any questions about the course

Silent Spring

Let’s look at Silent Spring and share some lines that we like on a shared document. Select any sentences you like, and paste them into the document without any commentary or additional information.

Writing Exercise 1:

Select some lines and compose them together into a poem!

Writing exercise 2:

Select just one line or sentence and use it to start a piece of free-writing.

Background context

Let’s watch this film about Carson for some background context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeJNRaE11A0

Stories to Make Arguments Real

Storytelling about the dangers of climate change is increasingly popular. You can read more by reading Rob Jordan’s piece on Climate Storytelling: https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/stranger-fiction-climate-storytelling

But for now. Let’s try the following exercise.

Writing to change the world

One way to explore this is to try writing something. Think about an issue you care about. What is this issue? How could you write a fictional story that nevertheless changed people’s views about this? Are there things that storytelling can do to bring about change that other things (for example, academic argument) can’t?

First, think about an argument you want to make about an issue that matters to you. You have five minutes to write this down.

Now think about the tricks, literary devices and forms of rhetoric you can use to really persuade your readers that this issue matters. But also think about making it a good story — readers want to be moved, but they don’t want to be lectured to! :D

We’ll write some stories, and share extracts in our breakout groups.

Homework and next time…

Next time, we’re moving on to talk about gender. I’ll share the reading with you now!