Laura Coughlin submitted her remarkable essay, “Fitting Animal Liberation into Conceptions of American Freedom: A Critique of Peter Singer’s Argument for Preference Utilitarianism” as the final essay in WR 150: “The Rhetoric of Freedom in America,” a course that helps students to research and to write critically about rhetoric in a series of classic texts exploring the concept of freedom. By explicating primary texts by thinkers as diverse as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Martin Luther King, Laura and her classmates were challenged to enhance their reading comprehension skills, hone their critical thinking, writing, and scholarship, and enter into the debate over the meaning of freedom throughout American history.
In the metacognitive introduction to her final portfolio, “Foundations of Freedom: How Foundational Texts Have Impacted the Rhetoric of Freedom Throughout American History,” Laura wrote, “The depth of my arguments has grown throughout the semester as the topics became more open and complex and my sources became more varied. This is particularly true of my final essay, a critique of the modern American animal rights movement’s choice of using Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation as a foundational text. I prove in the essay that his work is rhetorically incompatible with American conceptions of freedom, but concede that animal rights groups’ choice to use his work is still reasonable if they value it for sentimental strength rather than argumentative strength.” Laura, an accomplished member of the Boston University Debate team, brought a precocious understanding of counterevidence and counterargument to the final term of the year-long writing sequence required of Boston University students. In the early part of the term, she struggled a bit with her style; at first, her impressive skills with deductive reasoning sometimes crowded out her voice as an essayist. By the final essay, however, she demonstrated that she could both stage a complex argument and package that argument within the confident and authoritative tone of an expert.
— THOMAS UNDERWOOD
WR 150: The Rhetoric of Freedom in America