Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Key Rogerian Ideas

Just to be sure you've got these down...

I. Carl Rogers's Principles of Communication:

1. Threat hinders communication. (When a person feels threatened by what another person is saying or writing, however correct it may be, she or he is apt to stop listening or reading in order to protect the ego and reduce anxiety.)
2. Making strong statements of opinion stimulates an audience to respond with strong opinions. Once people have expressed such opinions they are more likely to be interested in defending them than in discussing them.
3. Biased language increased threat while neutral language reduces it.
4. One reduces threat and increases the chance at communication with someone by demonstrating that one understands, or is actively striving to understand, that person's point of view.
5. One improves communication by establishing an atmosphere of trust.

II. Rogerian Rule for Negotiation:

"Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker, and to that speaker's satisfaction."

III Typical Stages in Rogerian Synthesis (in a version of Young, Becker, and Pike 's formulation):

1. An introduction to a problem and a demonstration that the opponent's position is understood.
2. A statement of the contexts in which the opponent's position may be valid.
3. A statement of the writer's position, including the contexts in which it is valid.
4. A statement of how the opponent's position would benefit were it to adopt elements of the writer's position. If the writer can show that the positions complement each other, that each supplies what the other lacks, so much the better.

Hope that's helpful. d

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Recordings of the lectures...

Prof. Carrico has give me the o.k. to record and post his lectures on-line; I'll try to link to them here every time I upload them to my hosting site.

The last two lectures can be found at:

09/02/08 - Aristotelian Rhetoric
09/04/08 - Hecuba

Cheers,
Ernesto Lopez