2.2: Empathy--In-Class Activity
- Page ID
- 248260
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We have discussed the importance of knowing your audience to write a persuasive essay. Your goal is to form partnerships with your readers, and that requires you to study your audience. Your understanding of their backgrounds, needs, and preferences should guide your essay’s strategy, research, structure, tone, and word choice. The best way to develop this understanding is to use empathy. This is especially true if your audience includes people with different cultures and backgrounds than yours.
Strong writers focus on nurturing their empathy and learning how other people think. This includes working to identify your personal biases. Thus, they often examine their behaviors in social situations and review attitudes to assess their level of empathy and how well they relate to people from other cultures.
Your in-class assignment is to do your own self-evaluation of your own level of empathy and summarize your conclusions in a short essay of about 300 words. Here are a few questions to get you started. We do not expect you to answer any or all of these questions. They are intended to jumpstart your thinking.
- Do you ever contemplate issues related to race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, and access? How often?
- Do you watch movies, plays, or TV shows or read books that portray people of diverse cultures?
- Do you ever find yourself in social settings with people of other backgrounds or preferences?
- Are you attentive to others, especially in conversations? Are you aware of non-verbal clues?
- When you disagree with someone or find the behavior and attitudes off-putting, do you get angry and dismiss them or do you try to understand where they are coming from?
- If someone takes a position on an issue that is counter to your own, do you reject it out-of-hand or do you consider it seriously and see if your views need adjustment?
