'A Rhetorical Analysis Of Henrietta Lacks'

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“Henrietta Lacks” by an unknown author appeared in International Herald Tribune in August of 2013. This magazine has published articles written for the general public on various news topics and issues; for the most part this article was pretty well-written. For example, the author’s purposes was to inform and persuade; he was successful on both parts. For instance, the author tries to inform by making the comment “ubiquitous in labs around the world and have been used in more than 74,000 research studies on almost every disease” (“Henrietta Lacks” 6). The author tries to persuade by making the comment “was not being done for their benefit but for the benefit of science” (“Henrietta Lacks” 6). However, there was some parts of this article that …show more content…

However, the author only answered one of the two questions by stating “Lacks was stricken with an aggressive cancer more than 60 years ago” (“Henrietta Lacks” 6). Although, the author did not give enough information about the family members that were actually on the committee to approve the research. Even though the MLA is at the bottom of the article the author did not cite his or her sources, which makes some of the information plagiarized. On the other hand, the author gave useful information, except the last paragraph because it is irrelevant to the article. A key concepts that the author failed to define were the following words “ubiquitous”, “cavalier”, and “N.I.H.”; the author assumed readers knew what they meant and assumed readers knew about Henrietta Lacks (“Henrietta Lacks” 6.) In addition to that the context clues were vague but all of the words was used correctly. Also, the author implies that he or she is trying to inform the readers about Henrietta Lacks and to keep it from happening to other people. Providing that the points of view are the author was unknown, the expertise was unknown, no direct quote/ paraphrasing/ summarizing from N.I.H. Another point of view is N.I.H. is an expert because of the agreement. It is really hard to understand the details the author

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