Revised Introduction

Toss It Out, Make It Better

For this blog post, I completely wrote my introduction to my rhetorical analysis essay over again.


I feel that my new introduction is more successful because, chiefly, I think it addresses the prompt of my essay more directly and speaks to my audience much better than the previous version. Additionally, I think I cleared up how the rhetorical situation of America's culture history was used by the author of my text in order to achieve her argument. Lastly, I feel that I augmented my thesis by including a discussion on the author's use of logical statistics and references, to varying effects.

penubag, "Ambox Rewrite Orange" 2008 April 29 via wikimedia.org.
Public Domain License.

Below is my OLD (previous) introduction:

In a time where science is advancing by leaps and bounds and our ingenuity is only limited by the constraints of our imagination, tomorrow’s technology is today’s controversy. In the last hundred years, humans have invented the radio, film, television, automobiles, flight, and the internet, and soon enough, intelligences that will think for themselves. Following a conference spread across four days in January, 2015 that was held in Puerto Rico, claims have arisen across the news websites that our era’s leading thinkers and scientists are professing doom when presented with the topic of artificial intelligence. It is in this context that Dr. Cecilia Tilli writes her article on slate.com in response to such claims in a scientific landscape that is now realizing that artificial intelligence is within reach of development. Dr.Tilli, in her 2015 article "Striking the Balance on Artificial Intelligence," directly addresses our culture's deep-held fears and misconceptions over artificial intelligence research and emphasizes confidence in cautious, steady progress in AI development. Throughout her article, Tilli references her own expertise in AI research and safety while also recalling our culture's history in order to effectively display her understanding of the controversy, which she expounds upon by employing a collected, reassuring tone to connect herself to the reader and successfully convince them of her beliefs that AI has a potential to benefit humanity in a way no technology has before.



And now provided is my NEW attempt at an introduction:

In our world of ever advancing science and boundless ingenuity, the technology of tomorrow is the controversy of our today. Mankind's progression through the last century has seen automobiles become race cars, propeller planes become orbital jets, the Internet become a global community, and now, humans are seeing artificial intelligence become a reality. The field of computer science has, over the course of the last century, increasingly become the leader of producing these historical technological changes, and now more than ever, it is vital to be able to understand and think critically about what computer scientists and researchers are saying about our future. We, as computer scientists, comprehend and process important claims about our developing field through assessing rhetorical arguments, which require us to understand both a text's context of writing and how it attempts to convey its message. For instance, in Dr. Tilli's 2015 article "Striking the Balance on Artificial Intelligence," the author has her own motivations for writing her text, as well as the background situation and context she is responding to, all of which she addresses by employing rhetorical strategies to construct and communicate her argument. Tilli, as a reaction to misleading headlines in news sources reporting on an artificial intelligence research conference, writes to an American audience as she discusses our culture's long-held fears of future technology and convinces her readers to be confident in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) while still maintaining a degree of caution. Tilli conveys her argument effectively by establishing her knowledge of and authority on the controversy, employing a calming, collected tone while qualifying her argument, and by citing relatable economic statistics, while also drawing less effective references to writings on artificial intelligence.