Background and Purpose
For this assignment, you will explore how authors can create authority/ethos within a variety of writing environments. An awareness of authority in writing situations helps as you work to gain membership in the discourse communities, such as that of your major. As a student, you may feel you don’t have authority/ethos in your field, but that shouldn’t stop you from writing as though you do. So this assignment benefits you in two ways: as you are sharpening your skills in assessing other rhetor’s authority, you are also building your own as you compose the text of this assignment.
Compare the decisions made by the authors that accommodate the expectations of their respective audiences. Look at their word choice, their assumptions, their arguments, and their negotiation of authority present in the form of textual signifiers of authority. Your job for this assignment is to draw conclusions about the differences you observe in the texts. Your ultimate goal is to answer this: How and why do authors make adjustments for different discourse communities, different audiences?
This will be somewhat similar to what you wrote in the Module 2 Assignment, except you will be analyzing two, not just one text in order to compare them, with your focus on ethos and authority in the text and its rhetor, and you will be including summaries, paraphrases, and quotations from both texts in order to illustrate your points. Each time you summarize, paraphrase, or quote the essays, you will be using in-text citations to cite these sources properly.
For this assignment, you will need to read the “Ethos and Authority” LibGuide content and view the videos included in Module 7.
Objectives
Analyze how writers navigate authority/ethos in various situations
Identify textual signifiers of authority as listed in the LibGuide
Explain authorial decisions in terms of audience awareness and accommodation in the REFLECTION concluding your writing.
In Your Writing,
From the list of writings included below, select the one which you will be comparing and contrasting with Alice Wong’s “The Last Straw.”
Explain how the language and other textual signifiers of authority used by each rhetor indicate the authors’ ability to respond to audience expectations showcasing their ethos/credibility.
Structure your writing by discussing the first essay completely, then moving on to discussing the second one, and concluding with a REFLECTION, answering the question: How and why do authors make adjustments for different discourse communities, different audiences?
