Attitude:

1) Value the role of skilled message critics in our pluralistic and diverse society.

2) Desire continuous development of your skills as a message analyst/critic.

Skills:

3) Develop the ability to apprehend significant rhetorical patterns, devices, or strategies for persuasion within any particular discourse.

4) Effectively use relevant research tools for message analysis.

5) Generate insight into persuasive messages via application of appropriate critical methods or search models

6) Prepare well-grounded arguments, whether oral or written, that clearly present your insights to others in a useful fashion.

7) Monitor and control your critical thinking about any given message.

8) Articulate the orientation that guides your analysis.

9) Appropriately generalize learnings about the critical process.

10) Appropriately generalize learnings about communication.

Knowledge:

11) Develop a technical vocabulary that enables precise discussion of messages.

12) Know mainstream definitions and critical orientations generally accepted in the discipline.

13) Discover your own theories of how messages work and compare to mainstream disciplinary theories.

14) Know "tricks of the trade" in finding and applying appropriate support for creating and writing/reporting message analyses.