Source 3:
In the article, “Teenage Driving,” Chad H. persuades state lawmakers to keep the driving age at 16. Chad’s viewpoint is that the age of the driver is not the root of the problem and that an older person with the same level of experience is just as likely to get in an accident. He refers to a study done by NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Association) in 2005 showing that 23% of drivers killed between the ages of 15-20 were either drunk or intoxicated. This piece of evidence supports the author’s viewpoint, pointing out that it wasn’t careless, immature driving that caused the accident, but what the teens had done before driving that had.
The article is formatted in a descriptive structure, as it analyzes the bad aspects of the proposed law changes, but not enough of the good aspects and how it could help benefit young drivers. With that being said, conflicting evidence is given at the beginning of the article when the author includes facts and statistics such as “car accidents have become the leading cause of death for teenagers” and “sixteen year-olds were found to have higher crash ratings than any age of driver”. The author also goes on to give other facts about texting-and-driving in teenagers and teen death numbers. But, however, the author disagrees with this information and argues his viewpoint later on in the article. Chad’s vocabulary is very matter-of-fact throughout his article as he uses phrases such as “face the facts,” “doesn’t matter,” and “put the worries aside,” not to mention his unlimited use of the word “just”. He is definitely trying to slant his article to make it seem like keeping the driving age the same is the obvious choice. If he hadn’t tried to do this, he could easily have eliminated these words from the text.
The author uses a combination of ethos and logos in his article. Logos is used at the beginning when he is giving statistics on the NHTSA study and giving information on the conflicting viewpoint. For the most part, ethos is used evident by the matter-of-fact vocabulary and the author’s comparison of a new teenage driver to a new 50-year-old driver.
This source of information is somewhat reliable. The article does not display the date it was last modified, questioning the information received. Is it recent? Does it still apply to today? Also, the author does not include background information on himself, only an initial for his last name. Judging by the website, which is teenink.com, the author is probably still a teenager. It is very easy to hypothesize that the teen’s bias toward changing the driving age definitely showed in his article. However, facts and statistics are also included in the article, although a bibliography wasn’t.
I really liked how you used a lot of description and explained whether the article was reliable or not.
ReplyDelete