A Plea for Assistance
...ble job of garnering support for intervention in this human disaster. One apparent flaw in the article is the fact that the actual information regarding the dilemma isn’t provided until the end of the third paragraph. By delaying the details of the crisis, the reader is left in the dark as to what the article is actually about. The information and tidbits that are written in the first three paragraphs mean nothing to the reader because they have nothing to relate the information to in terms of a subject. By the time the crisis is spelled out, the reader must reread the first three paragraphs in order to accentuate the knowledge and insight provided by the authors. Obviously, the reader will not like having to do this, and the early confusion is not needed. In spite of the organizational defect, the authors’ thesis statement is clear, succinct, and effectively previews the information that follows in the article. The main idea of the piece is obviously the humanitarian situation, so its order and clarity is fluent throughout because of the continuity of the authors’ viewpoints. The tone of the article is very sincere and formal. The authors relay facts and basically make pleas for help. After vividly describing the situation in Darfur for the six paragraphs, the authors finally convey the relevance of the African Union to the dilemma. Considering the fact that the African Union is the title of the article, one would think that this group would receive more than simple paragraph description. Corzine and Holbrooke use the example of Colin Powell and Kofi Annan’s support to let the reader know how important this case is. The authors use the rhetorical strategy of reiteration to completely push home their point of a need for more assistance in the region. The reader is bombarded several times throughout the article with requests for help from public officials. The article is written in a deductive manner, in that, the th...