About this assignment:
Rhetorical analysis was designed to teach us how to perform a thorough examination of a piece of writing that is based on a topic we are unfamiliar with. This writing was a proposal for an engineering project. We looked into how the audience reads the writer’s argument and how the engineering terminology is used. We were required to identify the numerous rhetorical devices and appreciate how each influenced the author’s point of view.
Rhetorical analysis of “Fake news detection within online social media using supervised artificial intelligence algorithms”
This assignment’s goal is to improve our close reading abilities through a thorough rhetorical study of an engineering proposal. We can learn a lot about the rhetorical craft and its importance in technological disciplines by exploring the complex details of the proposal. The purpose of this study is to set the framework for the assignment by illuminating the rationale behind performing a rhetorical analysis of the engineering proposal and the broad implications it contains. Feyza Altunbey Ozbay and Bilal Alatas wrote “Fake news detection within online social media using supervised artificial intelligence algorithms” for other software engineers and for people who have knowledge of software engineering to fund the project. The authors wanted to inform people about the problem of fake news and inform them about the way they want to solve the problem. Both authors use word choice, use of punctuation, and tone of voice to communicate the purpose of the proposal.
In the introduction of the proposal, the authors start off with some context as to why they want to solve the problem of fake news being publicized. In the text, the authors state, “Social media has become an increasingly popular way of obtaining information for people. Additionally, people share their personal activities, interests, and opinions on different social media platforms.” (pg 1)The purpose of this piece of evidence is to set up the connection between social media and personal information to fake news saying “increasingly popular” leads the reader to believe this problem will benefit many people. Also stating that people’s personal lives are on social media will further support the fact that this is a pressing matter. This piece of evidence further advances the fact the author was to convince the reader that this proposal is of pretty high priority.
The related works section gives the authors a chance to relate back to other research done on this issue. This allows them to show off other information they have and what the authors can do to build off of the research already done. In the related works section it reads, “Although the fake news detection problem has been introduced for the first time very recently, it has attracted considerable attention”(pg 2). The author is allowing the reader to get a better understanding of how important this issue is by the amount of other research that has been done on fake news detection. This piece of evidence starts the paragraph off with a great hook by allowing the reader to realize that many others think that this problem is important enough to research this problem. This allows the author to have previous experiments and research to base their work on to further make their proposal the best proposal out there.
The “Fake news detection model” section shows tables and explanations of the process used to sort through the fake news and real news. The author’s purpose for adding this was so the audience can fully understand the solution they are trying to implement to the problem they are trying to solve. The tables are used to visually show the process of the data sorting process and the subsections underneath them go more in-depth about parts of each table. This allows for a clear and concise understanding of the process (given you are well-versed in this area of software engineering). This evidence allows the audience to better understand the proposal, giving them more incentive to either back the proposal or deny it.
An experimental evaluation was done and the authors explained what was done in the experiment. They explained what each diagram was representing, how they got the data, and what they did in the experiment. In this section it states, “There is only political news in data set 1. Therefore, Horne and Adali have created their political news data set. They have collected fake news from Zimdars’ list of fake and misleading news websites [62] and real news from Business Insider’s ‘‘Most Trusted” list [63]” (pg 10). The purpose of this piece of evidence was to give the reader background on where they got their information from. The use of quotation marks around the phrase “most trusted” makes the reader believe that the list they got their “news” from was claimed to be very trustworthy which makes more of an impact if the articles come out to be fake. This allows the author to persuade the readers that their proposal is worth spending time and money to complete.
The discussion section of the proposal was used to discuss the results of the experiment allowing the audience to have all the information from the aftermath of the experiment all in one place. According to the authors, the discussion section reads, “Performance ordering of the algorithms for the Random Political News data set has been listed in Table 11. SMO algorithm seems the best algorithm according to accuracy and F-measure values. KLR seems the worst intelligent classification algorithm depending on precision and recall metrics”(pg 14). The author added this to the proposal to explain the results of the data and what connection they have to one another. This gives a neutral tone of voice to explain the data to ensure that the data was not affected by human bias. This allows the reader to understand what connections the data have with one another.
The conclusion and future works section was used by the authors to make the proposal come to a close by summarizing the reason why they wanted to create a solution to fake news and by summarizing what they mentioned in the whole proposal. “In future works, the current work may be improved by exploring new algorithms, hybridizing the current algorithms, and integrating intelligent optimization algorithms for better results. Ensemble methods and different feature extraction methods may also be integrated for improving the performances of the models”(pg 16). The author’s purpose of this was to give a prediction on what the future of this proposal could be. In making this prediction this shows the audience that there are future plans in mind with this proposal and that they will work pretty hard to maximize the effectiveness of this data sorting process. This gives the audience the incentive to agree with the proposal.
In conclusion, the author’s main purpose of this proposal was to bring light to the increase of fake news and to persuade their peers and funders to support this project. The other used word choice, use of punctuation, and tone of voice to convey the purpose of this proposal to the audience. The authors might have persuaded their audience to support this project of how much they thought about the words chosen to relay certain information in the proposal. The introduction already hooked the reader in as to why this proposal is a good project to pursue.
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