Researching the Web:
Rhetorical Purpose and Intended Audience
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:
- Can you readily determine the identity of the author and/or sponsor of the website? Is the author and/or sponsor someone who has done significant research and thought reasonably about the conclusions he or she presents as valid?
- Does the creator operate ethically? That is, can we infer that the author and/or sponsor is a reasonable and ethical human being(s)?
- Lastly, does the author and/or sponsor care about the audience’s welfare?
The 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:
- How did you find the page? Did you cross-reference search engines, and if so, did you look at other pages (beyond the first page of hits) to cull resources?
- How does the style and presentation of material (arrangements of text, colors, shapes, images, and animations) contribute to the credibility of the website?
- Does the website work in terms of images, links, and other structures? What can you infer from the quality of the page design about the quality of information?
- What other links are available to and from the page? Are the links internal to the website, or do they extend out beyond it? How does the presence of these links contribute to the credibility of the website?
- Does the website contain hard to notice “fine print” or tiny links? What do they reveal?
- Look up the source code (VIEW: PAGE SOURCE). This may reveal to what degree the author and/or sponsor is exploiting the possibilities of website design, which in turn is an indication of the extent of available resources at their disposal (money, skilled talent). Does the source code have any information about authorship or keywords that help you identify the website’s reliability?
- Another way to access information about currency and authorship is to search the URL within the WHO.IS database. If this reveals anything new, what does this mean about the author and/or sponsor? What motives might each have?
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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