This half-semester course takes its inspiration from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations.” In his essay, Coates employs a mix of writing modes—the statistical and the anecdotal, as well as the journalistic and even the biblical—to argue for a policy idea that might be otherwise all too quickly dismissed. In our course, you’ll choose a policy topic you care deeply about and, like Coates, use a variety of methods and modes to make a “case” for it.
To make their case, students will draw upon the qualitative and quantitative. From our readings, we’ll analyze not just an author’s argument but how she crafts this argument. Our principle here is “productive theft”: i.e., what techniques can we learn (or learn to avoid) and consider applying to our work. As such, we’ll examine how authors tell stories through numbers; best practices for translating the quantitative into effective prose; persuasive usage of anecdote or history; and honest, ethical approaches to writing about people and data.
