First Major Course Assignment

2). Discuss the usefulness of the first or second major course assignment. Use specific examples.

The first assignment, Critical Thinking in News and Politics, was a useful assignment because it allowed me to apply concepts from the Epstein book to a real life argument, as well as the concepts that came from the Group Communication book.  From reading the Group Communication book, it was easy for my group to begin the project as we learned previously to the assignment, that it was important to be open to everyone’s opinion towards the argument, to listen and to consider everyone’s comments, and to keep in contact in order to complete the assignment efficiently. These concepts on group communication would lead us to complete the assignment on time. In addition to having the skills on group communication down, this assignment proved to be useful to us another way, as it allowed us to really peer into a real life argument and apply the concepts we learned in the Epstein book on things such as premises, effectiveness of an argument, and strong/valid arguments. The section that proved the most useful to me, and probably my group members as well, was the part where we had to identify if was a strong/valid argument based on Chapter 5.  I feel that if we hadn’t have been asked to identify whether it was strong/valid based on Chapter 5, I wouldn’t have learned those concepts as well as I have.  We really had to learn them so that we could correctly identify our argument as strong/valid to receive the desired grade of an A.  Overall, this assignment proved useful to me as I now have had a group communication experience, and have learned how to identify and apply Epstein’s concepts to real life arguments.