The Role Of Ethos In A Discourse Community

Communication is the study of social science, a collaborative construction and negotiation of meaning between the self and others as it occurs within cultural contexts. It is the process of using words, sounds, signs, or behaviors to express or exchange information or to express ideas, thoughts, feelings, and so forth, to someone else. The goal of this discourse community is to inform members of the community about new research ideas and understand how people use messages to generate meanings within various contexts, culture, channel, and media. According to the writing department’s glossary, a discourse community is defined as “a group whose shared language practices work toward a shared goal or goals… the discourse community’s shared …show more content…
The author of this article has decided only to focus on the appeals of ethos and logos. For this particular genre, a research article, the appeal of pathos will not be needed because the author does not need to convince the audience through emotions. So, in this case, I will be focusing primarily on ethos and logos. They are each designed to impact the audience, using either logic or credibility, respectively. The authors use ethos to show the credibility of the writer from their credentials. A writer’s credibility represents the trustworthiness of the author and their reputation. The authors demonstrate their credibility by using ethos. Ethos or the ethical appeal refers to “the character, credibility, or reliability of the writer” (Glossary). It deals with you as the writer, your own character and what you bring to the topic as an individual. For an example, in the article, the author has included a section that provides background information about them. The article introduces Brooke Foucault Wells "an assistant professor of communication studies and a faculty affiliate of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University” (Wells 180). Moreover, there is information about Noshir Contractor the “Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication... and director of the Science of Networks in Communities …show more content…
To illustrate the link in online social relationship formation, the authors use logos. Logos refers to using logic and reasoning as an appeal. It is the words we use, the clarity of the message itself, the credible arguments used, and supported evidence on which our arguments are built. To successfully support their claim, the authors use logos. In the journal article, the author conducted an experiment using a “random sample of twenty groups [that] included a total of 1,254 users” (Wells 185). Using the data from the sample, the author decided to find the aggregate weighted average effect of the twenty sample networks. Instead of using a graph or images to represent the results, the authors decided the most efficient method to present the data result would be using a well-labeled table. The author uses this method because the table style will provide them a way to display their data visually without any confusion. The table is broken into six columns; each represents a different category: “hypothesis, structural effect, sample size, standard error, weighted least square aggregation, and two sampling” (Wells 187). It shows how each variable was used and its calculated result with the model. As seen in the table, there were two statistically significant effects in the model. The first was for digital proximity which