In this assignment, you will compare and contrast two academic articles from your field of study with a popular source (e.g., newspaper article or website) about the same topic.
In your essay, you will create an argument to answer the questions:
How do different authors use language, rhetorical strategies, and authority to persuade their intended audiences?
What does an author’s use of language, rhetorical strategies, and authority say about the values of their respective discourse communities?
Begin your work by selecting two scholarly articles in your field from two different journals found in the library’s databases and one popular source from the internet that examines the same (or a similar) subject.
Questions you should investigate for each source include:
Who is the author?
What can you find out about them?
Who is the intended audience (Who did the author intend to persuade/speak to when writing) How do you know?
Where/when was it published?
What does that tell you about the intended audience?
Are the journal articles from open access journals? Are they behind paywalls or only available through library database access?
What did he/she intend to convince readers of?
What strategies does the author use to persuade the audience to agree? Evidence? Credibility? Emotion? Provide concrete examples from your sources.
How is jargon being used/not used?
How effectively is the information presented?
Do you think readers would be convinced after reading? Why/why not?
To get you started, think about these example comparisons:
How does the author of academic article 1 present their information differently than the author of academic article 2? Are they written to the same audience?
How would article 1 be different if it had been directed, instead, to the audience of article 2?
Next, how do academic authors 1 and 2 communicate differently than popular source author?
Further, how do the academic sources present their information differently than the popular source? How can you tell the difference in audiences for each source?
Remember that your explanations of the evidence and showing readers how it relates to your point should be at least 2-3 times longer than the evidence itself. Use a combination of direct quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing from your texts with proper in-text references per style. Explain what the textual evidence you provide means (what is the author saying here?) Discuss how it connects to the point you are making (do not assume your readers see the connection)
You should include direct quotes from the example texts in each body paragraph.
The paper should be in APA style.
Length: Minimum of 1200 words
