Opinions matter

Just for kicks and giggles. I mean, what is a blog without any humor right? :)

To be completely honest with you, I have never read an editorial or a JSTOR Daily before. I avoid news… and reading for that matter. If it’s not on Facebook, best believe I have not read it. I like things short and straight to the point. However sometimes you need more space to get a point across. Especially when it comes to expressing an opinion.

When you want to express an opinion you can either go the 100 yards and do some research in order to bring credibility to your opinion. This helps to have a strong argument that will provoke for an action to be taken, like the JSTOR Daily’s, or like editorials, you can focus on just the current event and recent actions that have been taken that helps express your opinion.

We all have an opinion and most of us want our opinions to be heard so why not write about them?

Opinions are a very sensitive subject to many people, especially during the 21^st century where people get offended by even a look. Now imagine the risk you are taking when you publish your opinion for pretty much the whole world to read. While reading both the Op-Ed and JSTOR Daily, I realized that depending on where you publish your opinion it affects the way you must express it.

It is known that the JSTOR Dailies are academic journals that express academic opinions on real life events rich of valuable and credible information do to research within the published article. If its posted in an academic website like the JSTOR, the audience knows that it’s not just someone rambling but rather someone well educated expressing their side on a current event. In knowing that background information of the host publishing the article, it attracts a specific kind of audience that expect a more formal and strongly supported opinion. For example, in the article I read from the JSTOR Daily, Viral Black Death: Why We Must Watch Citizen Videos of Police Violence, the author was well aware of where she was publishing and of her audience that she used rhetorical strategies of persuasion such as research, ethos, pathos, logos in order to express her opinion that also helped her persuade the audience to take action. Fain uses appeals to ethos when she says “as an attorney, African American historian, and scholar of black masculinity, I believe that we have a responsibility to #staywoke and look.” Here she is pretty much connecting with the audience and justifying why her opinion matters. In other words, she is saying “hey I’m not just a random girl giving her opinion but rather I am an Attorney with knowledge on African American history that wants actions to be taken.” Right after this sentence she supports it with her use of pathos saying that “We should acknowledge and absorb the pain captured in the videos, just as antiracist activists bore witness in the past to gruesome photographs of lynching’s.” Here, she is letting the reader know that she wants them to feel the emotion of pain when they are watching the videos of these African Americans getting violently attacked. To support her ethos and pathos she uses logos throughout the article to help her gain credibility that will make the reader think like her and take the action that she’s asking for.

Hopefully I'm making sense and I don't have you feeling like Paris.

On the other hand, Editorials are simpler and definitely shorter. Editorials seemed to me more like an article that in their opinion matter attack a person or a certain group with minimal rhetorical strategies. They pick a subject and take pieces of different current events that partially affect their opinion and make a huge argument that it’s not quite supportive. Like I said, it all depends on the place the article is posted and by who is posted. Like the article I read, Criminal rape cases should not be on a ticking clock, is hosted in a famous newspaper article, The Los Angeles Time, and they have all sorts of audiences. Like professionals, well studied people and none professionals, none well studies people so their articles balance from formal to informal on and off so that it appeals to almost all their audiences in order to get them to take action on their opinion.

Although they take a different format, the Editorials and Academic journals, at the end of the day they have more in common than differences, they both try to express an opinion and persuade the reader to take action.

If I had to choose between feeling more persuaded by either one, I would choose the Academic journal just because it shows more thought put into it and its very supportive that it might even change my way of thinking while reading it. Like Joseph Cashman says in his blog, “Then again, that is just my opinion.”