Rhetorical Analysis Of Your E-Book Is Reading You By Alexandra Alter

The article “Your E-Book is Reading You” by Alexandra Alter appears to be controversial in regards to the rhetoric aspect because it manages to prove not only positive stance on the issue of E-Book surveillance, but the negative one as well. The author manages to keep her stance objective, so it becomes unclear what exactly the she is attempting to prove. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the rhetorical devices that the author uses, which are ethos, pathos, and logos (Brundage, 8-9), in order to reveal make author’s standpoint on the matter.
Before getting to the three major rhetorical techniques, examining the title gives a clue as to the author’s implied position on whether the digital surveillance of E-book producers is good

The author only uses testimonies of people in authority and their personal experience on dealing with the digital surveillance that the e-book producers conduct. “We think of it as the collective intelligence of all the people reading on Kindle," says Amazon spokeswoman Kinley Pearsall” (Alter, n.pag.). Apart from experts’ testimonies and statistical data, the fact that the text is published in a reputable media source, the Wall Street Journal, adds a lot of credibility to the information presented in the article. Since the Wall Street Journal is considered to be authoritative in a variety of areas, a reader would tend trust the testimonies and research published in the article. Otherwise, the quotes that the author attributes to some prominent figures and powerful corporations as Google, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. would have been noticed if they were falsified. Therefore the ethos of the article influences on a reader’s trust of the source. Furthermore, the fact that Alter presents the information in quite a confident way also adds to the sense of