Development of critical thinking skills necessary for evaluating as well as formulating persuasive essays and inquiry-driven research. Critical thinking skills are applied to topics such as political rhetoric, advertisements, editorials, scientific claims, and social commentary. The course covers uses of language, distinguishing knowledge from belief and fact from judgment, deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, evaluating information sources, and the identification of assumptions, common logical errors, and fallacies. The course emphasizes writing, with attention to audience, purpose, context, genre, and language conventions.