last post! concept from any chapter

Something that I feel we should have gone over more in class was the idea of cause & effect. I think that this was one of the more difficult concepts to grasp in class, and I felt that the textbook or web supplements should have gone further into detail about explaining it. Many of us understand the idea of “Cause & effect”, but the book went into detail much more that what most people associate with that phrase. I feel that maybe visual diagrams would have helped out more. Actually, I felt that charts would have significantly improved the textbook. Many ideas seemed confusing at first and I had to physically draw them out in order to understand them. The Cause & effect portion of our class had so much material, not to mention web supplements, that it might have just seemed intimidating at first, but after reading some other blogs on here, it really seemed to make sense.

ch 14

I enjoyed the chapter on generalizing. I feel that this is something people around me do often, and I feel that it often leads to bad consequences. Generalization is very closely related with stereotyping, and such generalized has led to incidents like the holocaust various genocides. While they are obviously very rare cases, they happened as a result of generalization. The section of this that I appreciated the most if the section on sampling. I think often peoples people look at statistics and do not look at all the aspects that go into a statical graph. People need to know there is a major difference between “random sampling” and “Representative sampling”. Knowing these terms, and understanding ideas such as variation and risk, allow citizens to make informed decisions when reading statistics. Companies often try to deceive people by using misleading stats and charts, and there are very few (if any) laws in place to prohibit this business practice.

posting-lessons learned in class

Over the course of this semester I learned that arguments can be analyzed extremely in depth. Last semester, I took a SJSU argument and debate class last semester, and I thought that taught us how to analyze arguments. I had no idea that that was just barely the basis of it. We leaned various tools that help us examine each and every aspect of a statement in depth. I particularly liked the sections of fallacies, and I felt it was beneficial to get a clear explanation of each one along with various examples. I also felt another valuable aspect that I learned this semester is the idea of strong/valid arguments. I feel that knowing the difference between a strong , weak, valid, and invalid argument. I liked not only the extensive amount of examples they used to try to explain it to you, but also the charts they used to outline which is which. Overall, I was surprised how useful, comprehensive, and entertaining the textbook was.

Posting 3

The mission critical site is a great addition to our current textbook. When I saw the link, I assumed it related to cause/effect as that is what we are studying. I was surprised to see that it is rather an overview of many if not all topics we have learned in this class. I feel that it is a great addition to the textbook, but not a replacement for it. The textbook gives an in depth explanation as if it was someone's first time learning about communication studies, and this is an excellent review tool. I like how in depth this website gets about deconstructing every single part of the argument, but turns chapters and chapters of information into a few pages. I feel that many people in the class will sell their textbook, so this is something we all should bookmark and return to at a later date in case we need to review something from this class. I liked the quizzes, but it was not the questions that struck me as interesting, but rather the detailed answers as to what the answer is.

Post 2

While we were given a web site specifically adding more to our cause
and effect discussion, I particularly enjoyed the sections of our
book dealing speciifically with finding a cause. In many sitatiions,
pinpointing an exact reason for why something happens can be very
diffucult. There seems to be cause/effect chains that come into play
and the cause is not always clear. I liked how on page 318, the book
instructs us to use a scientific method to find the cause of
something. We are told to “conjecture possible causes, then by eliminate them until there is only one”. This is an idea
that I will try to use in my day to day life. I liked the examples they used in this chapter. I felt like this chapter really went in depth, and I am not sure if the rest of the class agress with me but I felt that there were certain topics that
the book briefly covered but left me confused. However, reading other
peoples posts on the the blogs helped me understand key topics.

posting

I enjoyed reading about the cause and effect situations on the web site. The scenario with the car made me think quite a bit about what the law would decide in that given scenario. It is certainly a chain reaction, and who would hold responsibility? I felt their explanation and analysis of why many more areas of reasoning come into effect when deciding who is at blame for this car accident. I liked how there were practice questions for us to complete. I found myself doing very well on them as a result of reading the page on cause and effect. I think these theories are very relevant to our lives because although not all of us will go into fields where this is heavily required (such as law or counseling), almost ever career that I can think of will use this method of deduction and logic at some point. I found the end of the page to be the most helpful, mainly because it gives you a list of the 3 factors the strength of causal argument relies on (how acceptable or demonstrable the implied comparison is,

how likely the case for causation seems to be, and how credible the "only significant difference" or "only significant commonality" claim is.)

book question # 3

Appeal to fear is a tactic that I described earlier in my blog post, and is something that is used quite a bit in todays society in order to get people to believe/buy something. While looking for ads to analyze for this prompt, I discovered that there were more ads that use this tactic than I could have imagined. The one that I ultimately decided to analyze for this assignment is a an ad for a medicine that that is supposed to increase health and lessen the risk of heart attacks. Instead of advertising themselves as such, they draw reads to the bold words on top reading “It was a year ago that I had a heart attack and died”. This statement is very misleading for many reasons. If you read the small print underneath it, the man in question did not really die, but rather his heart stopped for a small amount of time. This ad is very misleading in that sense. The ad draws readers in that the scary heading, and all of this is to convince the reader to buy the medicine. The medicine in no way prevents a heart attack, and through online research I learned it actually not not do a lot in terms of helping. The company knows that heart failure is something that affects many people and most of us have known family or friends who have suffered from it. The company is using this fear of it happening to us to sell their product, something that is unfair and unethical.