In this video I want to give you a sense for what this course is all about and I think really the best way to do that is to talk about our course schedule on course assignments. Now, at the broadest level this class is going to help you work on how to plan, prepare, and present ideas persuasively and that's a pretty complicated task and a very literative sentence. Now, in order to develop our skills we're going to work on argument and arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. These are all the foundations of rhetoric that have been with us for millennia. Now, that's great, but how we actually gonna spend our time? Well, in week one we're going to start with persuasive argument. We're going to be working with tools for gauging our audience and topic in order to design a compelling case. Then in week two we're going to turn to strategy and arrangement. So thinking about how to minimize the differences between us and our target audience. We'll identify what types of actions we want the audience to take and how we can arrange the speech to build to those actions. Then in week three we're going to talk about avoiding fallacies and then we're going to dive into style. In terms of style we want to make smart decisions about the words that we're using. Right? We want to frame our topic in ways that invite agreement. We're also, at this point, going to look into some reliable methods for crafting some memorable lines for your speech. Then in week four we'll focus on delivery. We'll start by studying a few model speakers and then we'll start talking about the dreaded "um". Why we have these fluencies and how you can avoid these disfluencies. Then we're going to finish by talking a little bit about some things you can do to set yourself up for delivery success. So that's the basic structure of the course. Now we move through those sections so that you can practice your skills in the course assignments. And there are three basic assignments in this class: speech assignments, quizzes and analyses. And right now, I'm going to talk about all the assignments in this class. Now you don't actually need to complete all these assignments to pass the class. You only need to complete the required assignments and you can see which ones those are by looking on the course website. So let's go ahead and begin with speech assignments. Now, we start the course off with a short speech introducing yourself. This is a very basic assignment that just allows us to start our study of public speaking and get to know each other. Then, we have a speech outline assignment. So here you draft up a basic plan for your talk and submit it for peer review and you give and get outline feedback. Then, we get to the persuasive speech. The persuasive speeches, the main assignment for this course, it focuses on building a compelling case and delivering it well. We'll spend multiple weeks building and practicing this speech, but I would say the class is mostly about the speech assignments, but we do have weekly quizzes. Now these quizzes don't simply test your memory. They ask you to evaluate different ways of organizing a speech or phrasing an idea and then we get to this final category, analysis assignments. Now, I include these assignments because one of the best ways to get better at performing speeches is to get better at listening to speeches. And in an analysis assignment what you do is you watch a speech, evaluate it, read my analysis and the analysis of others. So that's it. That's a broad overview of the, of the course schedule and of course assignments. Now let's go ahead and get started.