Ch 13 Opinions/Editorials

From chapter 13, I learned that opinion pieces and editorials have distinct purposes: to address and relate to some sort of community, to respond to the values and beliefs of the audience, and to encourage readers to act upon what they get out of the text. When we analyze an opinion piece or a an editorial we must know how to distinguish the two apart. For example, usually editorials use the key strategy of ethos to produce a successful text. What I think ethos means is that it relates to people morals or beliefs. Just like in chapter 13, editorials should be able to "respond to the value and beliefs of the audience." When an editor edits a newspaper he or she tries to make the context appeal to certain people and to make it so the paper will be appealing to those who are not the normal readers. As for opinion pieces, I think that it is some what more simplistic than an editorial and that it does not try to persuade anyone to agree (which is why it is called an opinion piece). I also notice that in most newspapers there is an Opinion Page dedicated to people's opinions. One website that reminds me of the ideas from chapter 13 is this opinion polling website . I think that all of these polls relate to the idea of opinions; basically I think of polls as short, minimum-word, answers to questions that people think affect the community.