The Flight From Conversation By Sherry Turkle

942 Words2 Pages

In today’s society, the advanced development of technology changes people’s ways of communication. Whatever people do or wherever people are, they are busy calling, texting, and surfing the Internet via smartphones. An article “The Flight from Conversation” written by M.I.T professor Sherry Turkle, published in The New York Times, illustrates the impacts of technology on physical communication to emphasize the necessity of stepping back from the non-verbal conversation. Throughout the article, Turkle uses various kinds of persuasive strategies to tell her readers the importance of having a face-to-face conversation. A successful author convinces readers by building credibility, providing quality evidence, presenting the logical reasoning, and choosing appropriate language and tone. In the provided article, through effectively employing problem-solving structure to arrange her argument, …show more content…

Emotional connectedness plays a vital role in a persuasive article. According to Aristotle, to appeal to readers’ emotion is “…to know their causes and the way in which they are excited” (“Rhetoric”). It means that an author should have the ability to connect readers’ emotions and evoke their feelings. In “The Flight from Conversation,” Turkle gives a powerful example that an elder living in a healthcare facility could only be comforted by a robot. She then exhibits that people expect that Siri could become a best friend in the future. It is sad to see that people hope the advanced technology to replace humane communication someday in the future. These stories can evoke readers’ feelings of connectedness. Hence, through demonstrating vivid examples the readers can relate to, Turkle successfully engages their emotions and makes a persuasive point that technology cannot be used as a way to maintain a humane

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