Post 3 12/8

  For the last post of the semester, I found something from Chapter 14 which seemed useful, which is the concept of generalizations. According to Epstein, generalizing involves concluding "a claim about a group, the population, from a claim about some part of it, the sample" (280). For example, here is a generalization that can correspond to the current issue of college athletes getting paid to play college sports: Of the college athletes that were interviewed,  55 percent said that they were paid to go to the college which they attend in order to play sports. So about 55 percent of all college athletes get paid to play sports for their school. In this argument, the sample is the group of student athletes who were interviewed, and the population is all college athletes. Because the same proportion of the whole as in the sample will have the property, this is a sample of a statistical generalization.

Post 2 12/8

When I first signed up for this class, I did not know what to expect because I had never taken an online class before. I was also curious to see how an online communications course would work, because I had previously taken Comm 40 with Professor Harris and enjoyed that class. However, one of my favorite things about this class was having the opportunity to interact with a group for the projects throughout the semester. It was helpful to have the same group for the semester has well because it was cool to build relationships with those people and have trust in each other to get our parts of the projects done, instead of having to get comfortable with a whole new group for each project. Something that I did not like about this class was that the projects seemed like they were rushed and that we had to find seven to ten people from outside of class for the public relations part of the project, which is a lot because other people are also very busy. This class can be improved by possibly having more instruction on the projects because it seemed like my group had many questions about each project.

Post 1 12/8

   Over the course of the semester, I believe that I learned a lot from this communications class. All of the concepts which we learned in this class seem to be very important for every day life, whether it comes to using claims or fallacies when speaking out in a group. Especially in college, you are meeting so many people and need to develop new social skills to connect with people, and this class is needed to develop those skills. For me, this class comes in handy as well because I work at PF Changs as a server and I am talking to many people each day that I have never met before. One of the many things I learned this semester was the difference between prescriptive and descriptive claims. For example, at work this weekend it was very busy and the food was taking a long time to get to the tables. For my table, one of their entrees took thirty minutes to get to them. They were nice about it and knew that we were busy, but i told them that we would take care of that dish because it should have been ready with the rest of their food.  At that moment, I realized that I had made a prescriptive claim, which is a claim that says what should be.