COMM 401 Self Analysis

The following is designed as a self-test for you to check your mastery of the material of COMM 401. The four lists do not contain all the information you need to know, but other things you need to know allow you to do and know these things. Nor are the lists entirely separate. You need to know the systems of vocabulary to do the things you should be able to do. This is simply intended as a checklist of things you should master.

Because this is not a comprehensive list of what you need to know, I do not recommend it as the place for you to begin your studying. Use your notes for that. I recommend you use this rather when you are nearly finished with your studying to check your level of mastery.

Things you should be able to do:

• Evaluate a message by any of four standards of evaluation
• Analyze a rhetorical situation
• Analyze an audience
• Locate the purposes of a discourse
• Analyze the framing of a discourse
• Evaluate the presentation of ideas
• Analyze ethos and personae in a message
• Evaluate Arguments, which requires that you be able to:
  • find claims, theses, and propositions
  • discover issues
  • evaluate the strength of warrants
  • identify fallacies
  • evaluate the strength and credibility of evidence
• Evaluate strategies using visual arrangement
• Evaluate the aesthetic and strategic dimensions of style
• Evaluate strategic discourse in its cultural context, including
  • evaluating the execution of a genre
  • evaluating good reasons
  • identifying motives and values
  • evaluating the selection of narratives and myths

Vocabulary systems to master:

• Elements of the rhetorical situation
• Types of audience
• Standard purposes of discourse
• Strategies to frame discourse
• Strategies for defining ideas
• Dimensions of ethos
• Three persuasive persona
• Different levels of claims
• Parts of an argument
• Stock issues
• Types of evidence (forms of argument)
• Fallacies
• Tests of Evidence
• Patterns of Organization
• Dimensions for evaluating visual arrangement
• Tropes and Figures of Style

Other things you need to know:

• What is public communication?
• Difference between descriptive and evaluative analysis
• Difference between an audience as a collection of individuals and a constructed public
• Difference between communication as information and communication as form or frame
• Difference between argument₁ and argument₂
• Relationship between claim and support
• The structure and uses of narrative
• Different types of news stories
• Uses of motives in communication

Speeches you have encountered

For the speeches you have studied this semester, you need to know:

• The speaker
• His/her audience
• The decade in which they were given
• The subject matter or purpose for which they were given.

I recommend you work on this by making yourself a chart for each decade beginning with the 1930s, listing the speakers and their concerns.

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