Assignment Paper

For this discussion, I would like you to read the following two articles in their entirety. Please do not skim the articles. Your response to the discussion must show me that you have read each piece carefully.

Losing Our Minds: Brain Drain Across the United States by the US Congress Joint Economic Committee (Links to an external site.)

The Graying of Rural America by Alana Semuels, from The Atlantic Magazine (Links to an external site.)

In addition to these articles, please also review these rules for summarizing as provided by the OWL Purdue online guide:

How to Summarize
Read the entire text, noting the key points and main ideas.
Summarize in your own words what the single main idea of the essay is.
Paraphrase important supporting points that come up in the essay.
Consider any words, phrases, or brief passages that you believe should be quoted directly.
You may also want to review our Introductory Discussion, particularly the elements of the Rhetorical Situation. There is also a good summary of ethos/logos/pathos here (Links to an external site.).

I’d like you to formulate your response in three parts:

1) Summarize each article. Your summaries should be around 100 to 200 words each.

2) Examine the rhetorical situation of each article. That is, who is the author, who is the audience, and what is the purpose? How does the author employ ethos, logos and pathos to make their point? How does the context (that is, the details of the essay’s rhetorical situation) help to convince you (or not convince you) of their main points? Feel free to take some risks with this answer. Remember that the rhetorical situation is not just about the content of the text, it is about the context. What lends authority to the author? What doesn’t? Remember that audiences are not static, especially online. The rhetorical situation in the digital space is constantly evolving.

3) Now that you’ve done some summarizing and some critical thinking about each article, feel free to now give your opinion of the content – that is how brain drain affects (or does not affect) the community you live in, what you feel the solutions might be, etc.