RA, Affirmative Action in Education

I read an article off the internet called Action Alert: Affirmative Action and Education. I'll be analyzing it for my rhetorical analysis this week. The article comes from this website: http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/action_affirmative_action.html, and was generated by the Untied Methodists Women's Action Network.

The article was a exposition on Affirmative action as it relates to education. The main point of the article was to inform the reader about both the historical issues that have arisen around this topic and modern day trends.

The target audience of the article seemed to be simply the interested, reasonably educated reader. The fact that it was generated by a religious group doesn't seem to have anything to do with the target audience. The language used was professional and objective, but clear and easily understood. Logos was the strong suit of the article, as they cited numerous U.S. Supreme court cases, along with various historical facts and examples. The organization writing the article seems to be a fairly credible source. They cited some other reliable sources which increases their credibility, and I didn't see any information that looked skewed or innacurate. The ethos of the article was very limited. It didn't sound like they were trying to appeal to any emotion other than simple reason and logic.

The source did include enough evidence to support it's purpose. Numerous court cases were cited to drive home the idea that affirmative action is being challenged across the country, although they did seem to dwell primarily on one or two of those cases. The cases they cited were consistent with what experts say on this subject. As far as relevance goes, the source stayed focused on it's objectives and communicated it's point effectively. This was an effective argument.