Question: Questions for "No, That Robot Will Not Steal Your Job." Each answer should be between three and four sentences.
1. Is this article to inform or persuade? Explain your thinking and provide at least one quote from the text that supports your position.
2. What type of text is this (a newspaper article, an advertisement, etc.)? Explain your thinking and provide at least one quote from the text to support your position.
3. What are some things you can infer about the audience for this text? Remember to not only use the topic of the text for this inference. Also consider the diction, the setting, etc. Explain your thinking and provide a quote from the text to support your position.
4. Is this article popular or scholarly? Explain your thinking.
Rhetorical Analysis of Dan Shewan's "Robots Will Destroy Our Jobs-And We're Not Ready for It"
As we discussed in class, if you think of the definition of rhetoric as an awareness and ability to use the best available means of communication, the way to do this effectively is for the writer to know as much as possible about the audience he or she wants to reach and what the author hopes to accomplish (the purpose). These imperatives lead writers to use certain rhetorical strategies to appeal to a given audience or a specific reason.
Please answer the questions below to identify the choices Shewan made when writing his article.
1. The first thing to consider when thinking about the type of source and the rhetorical strategy of an author is to see where the piece is published (one aspect of the setting). Look up Guardian, briefly describe it and state whether it is scholarly or popular. Explain in a sentence what led to this conclusion.
2. Based on what you learned in #1, how would you describe Shewan's likely audience?
3. How would you describe the tone (attitude) and diction (word choice) he employs? Give an example from the text that illustrates this.
4. Does Shewan assume reader knows a lot about employment trends or automation? Quote a place in the text to support your answer.
5. How would you rate Shewan's credibility? What is your evidence?
6. What do you think was his purpose in writing this? Start with determining whether this text is informative or persuasive, and then try to get more specific.
7. Finally, how would describe the genre of this article? What type of article is it?