Jacob Means

English 250

Professor Slivka

27 February 2016

Textual Rhetorical analysis

Ustin Talbot-Zorn and Sridhar Kotas piece UNIVERSITIES MUST HELP

EDUCATE WOEFULLY UNINFORMED LAWMAKERS published Jan, 11 2017,

argues, as the title suggests, lawmakers should seek the guidance of

universities to make informed decisions on lawmaking. Talbot-Zorn and

Kotas article was written to persuade lawmakers to better inform

themselves when making laws in technical subject areas. The goal of this

textual analysis is to extract and prove the thesis of this article by analyzing

choice of information, organization of the article, and style of writing. Its

immediately clear to the audience what the goal of this article is; my primary

goal is to determine how successful the article is in conveying its message.

To begin, the objective of the article is obvious: universities must help

educate woefully uniformed lawmakers. Using such a direct method of

asserting the purpose of the article suggests that the article was written to

get straight to the point. The next thing the reader may notice is how concise

the article is; furthermore, this proves how direct this article is attempting to

be. The advantage to such a direct approach is to efficiently inform the

reader of a major political issue, allowing the majority of the article to focus

on solutions. In fact, only the first three paragraphs are devoted to informing

the reader of major shortfalls in lawmakers knowledge of technical issues.

However, the conciseness of the issue may negatively affect the

effectiveness of the authors argument; by going into greater detail about

how a lack of knowledge has an effect on our lawmakers ability to create

new laws, the reader may have a better understanding of the potential

dangers of this pressing issue.

Perhaps the most effective part of this article, is how it presents a

solution to what the authors believe is a major issue. Talbot-Zorn and Kota

state theres no reason that a country with an unrivaled 147 of the worlds

top-ranked universities shouldnt be able to piece together the collective

brainpower to keep its federal lawmakers informed. And then, they follow

this up with an extensive number of ways that universities and our

government have a lot to gain by working together. The primary form of

argument in this article is that of logos. This article states things like

Americas legislative research agencies have 20 percent less staff than they

did in 1979 or PhD students could team up to write a report to help a

Congressional office make sense of a technical healthcare issue, which can

be extremely appealing to the academic nature of its audience. To continue,

the article gives a plethora of ways that universities and lawmakers can

team up, available for office hours with legislators in person or via an online

platform like Google Hangouts, deep dive seminars make the reader
assume this partnership will be easy.

The article also relies on a strong pathological argument. The article

uses words like Bad, frenzy and, Zeal to argue that lawmakers

decision to cut programs like the OTA were impulsive and ultimately

destructive. Whats more, is that the authors use words like ensure,

improve and support to convey the message that if universities get

involved we can have a stable future.

To conclude, this article does an exemplary job in its use of

organization. Talbot-Zorns use of pathos, logos, and ethos in their style and

substance of the article is unarguably persuasive. The article flows

seamlessly from stating the issue to clearly providing a solution to the

problem and backing that with a variety of methods. The article could be

looked at as brief however, due to its lack of background information.

Overall, I believe this article accomplishes its goal and will hopefully make

people more aware of the situation at hand and what can be done to help it.
Works cited:

Kota, Justin Talbot-Zorn and Sridhar. "Universities Must Help

Educate Woefully Uninformed Lawmakers." Wired. Conde Nast, 11
Jan. 2017. 02 Mar. 2017.