Persuasive Writing for Change

Description from DukeHub

This course examines the role of writing in shaping and reflecting public conversations, and creating social change, writing as input and output of civic engagement. The course traces rhetorical communication as rhetorical action, the intersection between personal ideologies and community practices and policies, and the fluidity between cognitive and emotional ways of knowing. To do so, we will consider ethics in argumentation, persuasive strategies, marketing and propaganda, and rhetorics of new media as they relate to local and global movements.

Skills

• writingdescription: "writing" and 3 more
• public speakingdescription: "rhetorical" and 2 more
• negotiationtitle: "persuasive"

AI-resilient: 2 of 5 2/5

• No: Physical, lab or field work
• No: Live work with people
• ✓Yes: Judgment someone is accountable for · "policies"
• No: A craft you practice with your hands or body
• ✓Yes: Small, in-person format · seminar, 15 seats per section

The checks lean on Microsoft Research, Working with AI (2025), which found generative AI applies least to physical work and hands-on work with people. A signal, not a promise. How the score works

More in WRITING

• Academic Writing WRITING 120
• Myths That Make Empires WRITING 120-01
• The New Eugenics WRITING 120-02
• The Gothic South WRITING 120-04
• Consent, Freedom, and Feminism WRITING 120-05
• Music Saved My Life WRITING 120-06

All WRITING courses · All of Undergraduate