Have any of you ever come into contact with school assignments which were just badly designed? Either as a student, a parent, a teacher, or just a random person.
My story comes from a college speech class, where the focus was on Classical Rhetoric; in short, Logos, Pathos, and Ethos. The standard. To drive home the point, the professor had us give two speeches on the same topic, one of them purely factual and not intended to be persuasive, and the other explicitly persuasive.
I think a lot of people will see the problem right away.
Well, a number of the students in the class took on social issues, like how the military was generally deficient in taking care of veterans. Problem is, presenting the bare facts of that is, in itself, persuasive; there’s no way to talk about homeless veterans without people coming to the conclusion that the system isn’t working right. The professor almost twigged to the fundamental problem, except she kept “reminding” people that their factual speeches weren’t intended to be persuasive.
It did drive home a lesson for me, anyway, as a reminder that bias is inevitable and that lists of facts can be extremely persuasive.