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A Rhetorical Analysis Of John Seigenthaler's Essay

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A Rhetorical Analysis Of John Seigenthaler's Essay
Zachary Hudson
Professor Adair
ENG 102-J020
2/12/2015
Rhetorical Analysis John Seigenthaler Sr. is a retired journalist who founded the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. He wrote a short essay called “A False Wikipedia ‘Biography,’” that was published in USA today in November of 2005 (543). In this essay he shares his personal story of internet character assassination. Someone posted a fake biography of John Seigenthaler Sr. on Wikipedia saying he was involved in the Kennedy assassinations. It was there for 132 days and spread to other websites such as answers.com and reference.com, slandering his name. It was difficult to track the culprit since the author was anonymous and Federal privacy laws protect the identity of a company’s customers. The anticipated audience consists of internet users and the millions of people who visit Wikipedia on a daily basis for fast reference facts. It also includes Wikipedia and members of Congress. USA Today is a very public forum that created a lot of discussion about Seigenthaler’s essay and made the argument more persuasive. It also brought attention to the issues of freedom and accountability on the internet. The author’s purpose is to testify about his experience with Wikipedia and persuade the intended audience that Wikipedia is not a credible or …show more content…
The argument could be classified as an evaluation because he is setting out criteria and then judging it to be bad according to the criteria. He gives the criteria for why Wikipedia is not a credible source and then explains why the criteria makes this bad. The author relays his specific experience with Wikipedia and then uses inductive reasoning to draw conclusions from it. His experience is that Wikipedia published false information about him which assassinated his character. His conclusion based on the evidence is that Wikipedia is not a credible source since they publish false
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