Article of the Week #1: SOURCE - www.nytimes.com
This entire article was all about how New York and Washington D.C. are preparing (safety wise) for this coming Sunday – the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The cities are doing a “clean-sweep” of the entire foregrounds to check for any suspicious actions linked to terrorist acts.
There were two authors who composed this article: Al Baker and Scott Shane. To discern credibility, i searched their backgrounds. Neither of them had a biography but both had written abounding amounts of political writings – just like this one – and had many printed versions of them (giving it permanency). They also gained important information from real officers, e.g. "Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly".
The context was more relaxed and not as formal as some other types of articles. It was more laid back because, to inform the public about safety issues, especially during an event that could be extremely detrimental, you must approach them in a calm and soothing manner.
The one main purpose of this piece was to notify the community of the current situation connected to the anniversary of 9/11 and give recent updates on the increasing security.
The audience for this article was the general public (mostly in the communities around NY and D.C. area) because these areas were mentioned as well as local streets and places they would only know - e.g. “Around city hall”, “Pennsylvania Station”.
In this article, there was a predominant amount of logos intertwined within because there were many statistics mentioned, ex: when they discussed the amounts of “F.B.I.”, “Joint Terrorism Task Force” and “Secret Service” members working to calm high tensions. They were also trying to persuade the public that everything is OK.
I believe that the authors completely accomplished their purpose because their drive was to inform people about the newly increased forces to calm the hysteria of 9/11 - and they carried this "drive" through to the end and left readers satisfied.
I do not think I would have picked up on the idea that the reason the authors' tone was casual was because they did not want to alarm anyone but they also needed to warn people of terrorist activity on the anniversary of 9/11. From reading your post, I can also clearly see how the authors connected purpose and context: while the article was written in order to interest the public, the authors were really targeting people in NYC and Washington D.C. because the main purpose was to warn them about terrorist activity. Since I was able to gather all that from your succinct blog post without even reading the article, I think you completed your task of describing the authors' rhetoric very well :).
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