Albion College Course Webs

In today’s business environment communication plays several critical roles and the development of communication skills is a key component of success. This course will help you become aware of and cultivate those skills. Specifically, you will have the opportunity to improve your writing skills, presentation skills, and ability to communicate and work with others.

This course is built around two fundamental areas of social science in general and communication studies in particular—theory and research. With regards to theory, this course will cover the numerous theoretical traditions that have both emerged from and informed the scholarly study of human communication. It will provide you with a sense of the broad scope and interdisciplinary character that defines the field of communication. You will learn to think abstractly and utilize multiple perspectives to critically analyze communication phenomena that occur in your own life and the world around you. With regards to research, this course will cover the detailed steps involved in constructing a research project and actually testing the theories we develop as we observe communication in our world. In other words, you will learn the process behind the development of all the theories you learned about in previous courses and will also have the opportunity to apply that process to a project of your own choosing.

Persuasion is designed to introduce students to current as well as classic theories and research findings on attitudes and attitude change, as well as behavioral compliance. It presents a broad overview of this area with an emphasis on making and analyzing messages from a theoretical perspective. The approaches to persuasion studied in this course will focus on both interpersonal and mass communication processes.