“The two driving forces of modern history- politics and technology.” The author of this article says that we believe that our lives are constantly changing, and we must be ready to access the information about these changes.
Thanks to the advances in technology, he says, we can easily access information, vast amounts of it. Yet, despite the vast amounts and accessibility of information, what we gain from them has not increased at all. “We are reluctant to admit that we are simply swamped with information and have lost the ability to make sense of it.”
However, there seems to be several flaws in this piece of writing. First, the author is being much exaggerated. “We are made to feel … something may occur … something that if we failed to learn about instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellow human beings”, he says. The pronoun “we” is in constant use. By this means, the author is trying to generalize many statements which may not apply for many people. For example, not many of us “leave the theatre vowing to reconsider our entire lives in light of the values shown on screen” after going to the cinema. These exaggerations can be seen a few times throughout this article.
Another flaw is that there are too many assumptions throughout the article. Many phrases are missing logical links, and some sentences seem to be irrelevant to what the author is trying to say. The author downgrades the value of our overflowing information, and says that information was more valuable in the old days. However, the reason for this is that in old days, books were harder to make. This explanation makes no sense at all, since it is the values of the books which were more valuable, not necessarily the information inside the books.
This article was written in a very persuasive manner. “Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting.” We can see that the author is trying to influence us through this piece of work. However, there are too many flaws in this writing for it to be persuasive. The author keeps exaggerating and generalizing his ideas. Many of them do not make sense; there are not enough explanations and some words are unrelated to the main idea of this article.
'access the information'...acces information
답글삭제'author of this article'...who is the author and what is the article?
'information, what we gain from them'...gain from it
'being much exaggerated.'...is exaggarating
'apply for'...apply to
Very good. You have approached this assignment in the right spirit. Not only have you given a general assessment of the validity of de Botton's argument, but you have also analyzed his argument in terms of its use of language. You have also given examples from the text to support your claim. There are a couple of points where you have suggested other fallacies in de Botton's argument but haven't capitalised on them to the extent that perhaps you might have. Despite this, this is a very good piece of work and bodes well for future assignments. Grade A