The first part of your blog post is to post an opinion you hold about something, anything! It doesn't even have to be about health, although if it is, that's okay. It should, however, be something worth consideration. For example, "I secretly like Miley Cyrus" is not really worth consideration, but "I like Miley Cyrus because she makes people uncomfortable and inspired a lot of interesting conversation" or "It's good that Miley Cyrus makes us questions what it means to be a young woman in an oversexualized society." Get the idea? These opinions could use some fleshing out, but they are expressing an opinion that someone could disagree with. Once you've decided on your opinion, then, using the section on pages 7 and 8 titled "How Do We Form Opinions?," write which category you think your opinion falls into. This should be completed by Thursday night.
For the second part, which is to be completed by Friday night, your task is to reflect on the rhetorical tools in the box on on page 15 titled "How to Support Opinions," as well as the comments following the three sample essays, and choose two rhetorical tools that could be used to support two of your peers opinions. Everyone will respond to two people's posts, and don't load up responses on one post; everyone should have at least one response to their initial post. To clarify, you will not comment on your own post and you will not offer two rhetorical tool suggestions on the same post. Instead, you will offer one rhetorical tool on one peer's opinion post and one on a differnt peer's opinion post.
During the second round of comments, be sure to think about the type of support that opinion would need. For example, it would be inappropriate for me to support the opinion ""I like Miley Cyrus because she makes people uncomfortable and inspired a lot of interesting conversation" by providing statistics about how many people like Miley Cyrus. Statistics aren't going to help support my point. Examples, on the other hand might. I might talk about how in one day I heard a girl in the airport wondering what had happened to good old Hannah Montana, hypothesizing that she just couldn't handle the pressure of being good all the time. On that same day, the MSNBC was discussing whether outcries over Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke VMA's performance wasn't highlighting a double standard on who is allowed to cross the line of sexual crudeness.
The goal of this exercise is to get everyone thinking about applicable support.
Side note: I think it's interesting that when I tried to find an image for this blog post, I started typing in "What happened to" and by the time I typed the first half of "happened," Google's first auto-finish option was "Miley Cyrus." I wonder if any of you have opinions on Google...