Video Analysis
The video has fruitful contexts for observing fallacious reasoning, biases that impact how evidence is being collected or interpreted, and attempts at persuasive maneuvers. Based on your observations, you’ll write a 700 or more word reflection analyzing and evaluating the speaker’s use of fallacies, biases, and rhetorical strategies in delivering their argument.
You Tube Video to Analyze :
“Proof That Humans are Not Alone” (42:02)
Here’s what to do in 3 steps:
1. Watch the video and listen closely for the speaker’s argument. As you’re watching, make note of all your observations.
2. Think carefully about which examples you want to focus on in your reflection and
how you want to organize them. Choose with an eye to the ‘Critical Focus’ part of
the rubric. (This means: don’t dump a laundry list of observations onto the pages.
Instead, you want to Make an argument about the speaker’s argument.)
3. Write about your findings, citing specific examples and explaining how you think
they function in the speaker’s argument. This may include making insightful
connections between different kinds of examples, considering how the speaker’s
purpose directs their reasoning, evaluating the degree to which the speaker is
effective or persuasive, proposing improvements to the reasoning, etc.
Here are some questions to help frame your analysis:
● What is the speaker trying to persuade the audience to believe?
● What’s the situation? What knowledge, values, & experiences are at play?
● What is the speaker’s perspective? What can you gather about what their
worldview or motivations might be? Listen for loaded language, buzz-words, and
other phrases that imply particular POVs.
● What kinds of evidence do they give to support their position? Do they consider
counter-evidence? Can you observe anything about how they gathered their
evidence or whether they seem to be interpreting it reasonably?
● If there are fallacies, are they unintentional due to ignorance? Are they done
intentionally to persuade? Might they connect to some kind of bias or heuristic?
● How effective or persuasive is the speaker’s argument? Do they deploy rhetoric
skillfully? Or do they make sloppy errors in reasoning?
Please see attachments for Rubric and other material that you can use to assist with the paper. The PowerPoint slides show the various names of the fallacies , biases etc. that you will identify in the video and create your argument.
