Amy Davidson Essay

Amy Davidson is a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1995, she is a senior editor who focuses on international news, national security news, and writes a web column about war, sports, politics, crime, and other national events. She attended Harvard University, where she received a Bachelor of Science in Social Studies. In Davidson’s article “Sent to Guantanamo as a Teen-Ager, and Now to Estonia” she took an emotional stance in regards to the topic. She builds up her credibility with facts, reputable sources, and by successfully using emotional appeals. However, toward the end of her article her attempt to reader’s emotions weaken her credibility and her argument. Her purpose throughout the article was to impress upon readers about how a
One specific source she had used in the gist of her article, she states “he had spent time at a guest house associated with the Taliban, where, the government argued, he had been “trained” (in what, exactly, isn’t really clear) and had access to a gun”. When I researched the source she used I had found evidences of Hussain admitting that he had access to a gun. Davidson not only used the source to her advantage, she purposely left his confession out and made it seem as if he was a young boy who did not know anything about firearms. The source she used, “Abdul Al Qader Ahmed HUSSAIN, Detainee, Appellant v. Barack Hussein OBAMA, President of the United States, et al., Appellees”, Hussain confesses “that his Taliban housemates gave him the AK–47 for protection”. Not only did Hussain have a gun, he knew how to use it. The source also included “evidence that Hussain bore a weapon of war while living side-by-side with enemy forces on the front lines of a battlefield... Hussain was part of an enemy force when he was captured is his ten-month stay near the front lines of battle in war-torn Afghanistan”. Never once does Davidson mention how or why Hussain was caught by the Pakistani police. Leaving out these notable facts might make reader reconsider if Davidson is trustworthy or
She needed the evidence to make her argument stand, without using the evidence to her advantage her argument would have been weak. Davidson manipulated the evidence and stretched the information to suit her own purpose. Persuasive strategies make a good paper more convincing, however after examining the issue from all sides the evidence I came to a conclusion that Davidson was using the evidences to sway the readers into feeling sympatric. To an extent this makes her argument convincing because readers do not know the whole truth and are being blinded by only what Davidson wants the readers to