<p>anyone have any experience with these courses? What should I expect? (I'm intended rhetoric and I'm taking R20 next semester)</p>
<p>I’m taking Rhetoric 10 right now. The amount of work is definitely manageable (some days, you’ll have only 10-20 pages of reading). What gets most students (including myself) is actually understanding the material. You might have 4 lines to read for one of the articles, but it will take half an hour or so for you to actually figure out what they’re trying to say (referring to some of the infuriatingly confusing Chinese texts). I usually didn’t bother analyzing the texts and relied on the professors and GSIs to help me with that - in retrospect, it would have helped with my analysis skills, but it’s a little too late for that.</p>
<p>If you don’t have a very interdisciplinary way of looking at things, you will need to if you want to do well. I spent half of a lecture trying to figure out why human morality mattered in rhetoric. Sometimes, what you learn in lecture actually doesn’t have anything to do with the coursework - like Ancient Greek history, or the meanings behind Chinese characters. </p>
<p>It’s a class that I definitely enjoy, but I would enjoy it even more if I actually understood what was going…</p>
<p>thanks for the detailed reply!</p>