The article titled “Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either)”
The article titled “Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either)” talks about the reasons why according to the author, a person is not supposed to be interested in an iPad. The most important thing in discussing the context of the article is the author’s aims as well as his or her target audience and the kind of information that is portrayed in the reading. The purpose of the article is evidenced by both the title as well as the context of this particular article. The aim of the author in this specific article, as the title depicts, is to go against the is the love iPad, which is prevalent among most people, especially in the modern world. The rhetor of the reading appeals to the audience to consider the negative things about iPads, which for a large population of people it is the essential form of entertainment, especially for the young and growing generation.
It is evident from the article that the author uses the three rhetorical appeals of pathos, ethos, and logos to enhance message delivery to the target audience. For instance, the author says that “If I had a share of AOL for every time someone told me that the web would die because AOL was so easy and the web was full of garbage, I’d have a lot of AOL shares” (Doctorow). This is a depiction of pathos which is the emotional appeal to the audience. In doing this, the author concentrates on telling the audience what it feels like to be denied the right of this particular modern-culture game. The speaker responsible for narrating this story has some unique describable aspects in terms of emotions. In the case of AOL for example, he expresses his feelings by stating how most people have high chances of getting worried about their mothers. This acts as an origin of emotions in this essay because it is from this context that the pathos rhetorical element is earned from. In addition, the author uses the concept of infantilizing hardware to illustrate his logical appeal to the audience. Through this, he talks about the smartness and thoughtfulness of the iPad hardware design. The third and final rhetorical style is ethos which is primarily used to persuade the audience into believing whatever information that the author is trying to pass to them. Undoubtedly, this has been used in the passage provided as it can be evidenced by several statements such as in the case where the Doctorow quotes that “The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps”. Through this statement, the author is trying to expose his intentions to the audience, which fortunately emerges as a very remarkable convincing method.
In summary, the reading can be termed as complete because the author uses all the appropriate ways of delivering his message to the target audience, which in this case can be any interested individual. According to him, buying an iPad should not be advocated for, and he proves his argument by looking at both hardware and software elements of the technology. His final points strengthen his points the more because of his reasoning on the coming and going of technological gadgets. Through this point, the author proves the point that all devices, including iPads, are will be interesting at some point and boring in the coming days.