Researching the Web: Rhetorical Purpose and Intended Audience
While researching the Web, we must strive to understand the reliability of the information provided to us. Some questions we might ask are:
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Note:
Questions about the author and audience point beyond merely listing names of people, or general groups of people; answers to these questions must include speculations about the basic values and concerns of authors and their audiences. In most cases we as researchers must ask such questions to better understand the rhetorical purpose and intended audience of a given website. Answering these questions does much more than determining whether a source is merely good or not for our research—answering these questions helps us to see what the source might be good for in terms of our own research objectives. |
These questions also help us to assess the ethos, or character, of a given website, and whether such an ethos—its central value—is trustworthy. Giving our trust to values that are embedded in a website is more than just believing in something, it involves an investment of our identity as well. So what makes a character trustworthy? We have to be able to infer three interconnected qualities of a website’s ethos:
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Website as a Medium
Here are three common topics that allow us to push our evaluation of a website further:
Reasoning:
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Authority and sponsorship:
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Audience:
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Here are issues specific to the website as a unique medium:
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Because the web is dynamic, strategies for research will change over time. As a basic practice, always save a website you are using as a resource by printing it in PDF format, saving it with the date of access in the name of the file. Happy researching!
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