COM 328: Persuasion
Instructor: Dr. Eric Morris
Phone: 417-836-4423
E-mail: EricMorris@missouristate.edu

Hello, my name is Eric Morris and I'm glad you've signed up to take my COM 328 Persuasion course this semester. I'm going to tell you a little bit about the course. I think we'll going to have a good time. This is a course that is a survey of persuasion theory and practice. So over the course of the semester, we're going to be looking at issues from the various theories that tell us how we relate to each other interpersonally, that talk about the rise of the mass media, and the persuasion challenges presented by it. We'll start way back with Aristotle, but we'll quickly move to the 20th century. We'll also talk about topics such as political persuasion, persuasion in the context of advertising, and marketing, and some of the legal and ethical constraints that we place around persuasion.

The semester is going to be kind of an interesting semester because this course is been taught online. It's an opportunity for students taking the course sometimes away from the SMSU campus to do separate readings but participate in the context of discussion boards, and we'll be doing quite a bit of that during the course of this semester. I have a couple of thoughts, I know some of you have taken online courses before and some of you haven't, and those of you who haven't taken online courses before, you might want to spend some time having side discussions with those of you who have, as well as asking questions quite a bit along the way, ask me any questions as well. I encourage you to be very active not just in terms of readings but also on the discussion boards. Not only because it's a class grade but really because it's the core of the course. Most of what you're going to learn in this class, you're going to learn because we have online question and answer and discussion. So I just want to encourage you to do that. I also want to encourage you to send me an e-mail in the first couple days this semester so that we can have a little bit of interaction of discussion and so that we can get to know each other a little bit better. Once again, I'm very excited that you signed up to take the Persuasion course, and I look forward to working with you this semester.