ELC 501 (ENGLISH FOR CRITICAL ACADEMIC READING)

E-PJJ STUDENTS OF
BACHELOR IN OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY (HS245)

LECTURER: SIR MUHAMMAD AIZAT BIN AZHARI

WRITTEN ANALYSIS

STUDENT’S NAME STUDENT’S CARD NUMBER

Debra Stephanie Kasalian 2018292328

Siti Fatihah Binti Abdul Kadir 2018625208

 Should Parents Be Held Responsible for the Crimes of Their Children?

The authors go ahead to highlight the issue whether parent should be responsible for
the crimes committed by their children. He criticized on the attitude of individuals that
irresponsible towards theirs crime. Above all, the author argues that parents should not be
point and account for the crimes of their children. The argument in this article is not
objective as the author only stress on it without giving a definite fact or other
pertinent evidence. The author takes a personal stand and gives his own opinion on the
topic. Thus conclude the article presented a weak support. His personal opinion can be
clearly seen through the language used in constructing the article. The author used word that
express recommendations repetitively for example “should”.

i. “a parent should not be held responsible for the child because it is the child
committing the crime”

In addition, the author also appeared use word to express possibility such as “can”

i. “a child can still steal a pretty piece of jewelry”

There are several flaws in reasoning can be capture in this article. Example can be
seen in paragraph 2 where the author make a hasty generalization, in which he draw an
inference from insufficient evidence.

“They do it, most of the time because they anticipate getting away with it. This is no
reflection of one’s upbringing – only the way that person views right from wrong.”

The author also presented equivocation during giving his opinion. This can be clearly seen
through 2 irreconcilable ideas in this article.

“Some may argue how a child’s sense of right and wrong derives from the way their parents
raised them – which is true” which is antithetical with his initial stand “They do it, most of
the time because they anticipate getting away with it. This is no reflection of one’s upbringing
– only the way that person views right from wrong.”
 In this article, the author does not fulfills the aspect of relevance, objectivity,
completeness, credibility and validity of the support used. His supporting details generally
related to the main idea of his article, nevertheless, the support used does not consists fact and
clear evidence thus proved the author’s argument does not have objectivity. The thoughts and
beliefs of an author should be based on his lectures, reading, discussion or research which is
important to make the article clear, however he failed to present it. Meanwhile, reader also
failed to discern the background of the author, thus his credibility to use his opinions as the
support in this article is controversial. The arguments in this article is non persuasive. The
statement such as “..because any person of sound mind is a rational being.” and “This is no
reflection of one’s upbringing…” can be questioned by the reader. The author employs an
unsupported assertion in defence of the statements and wrote inappropriately attempt to
persuade his readers by appealing to emotions instead of composing a careful, reasoned
argument. Through the whole article, the author does not presents his counter argument. The
article has low credibility and validity as all the argument stated cannot be verified and not
well supported.

From the article, the author’s purpose to persuade the reader to accept his claim that
parents should not be blamed or held responsibility over the crimes committed by their
children. The author use words such as insane, crazy, manic- depressive which reflect bias
language use to describe the inferiority of the children, however in the meantime, he still
convinced that, there is no reason for the children to escape from their responsibility on the
crime they have done.

The author possess self-righteous tone, in which the author fully believes that his
argument is tiptop and cannot be countered in any way. The tone also evasive, he did not give
a direct elaboration with clear support. The author represent as biased writer, in which he not
present an equal amount of discussion. He presented much on the opinions for the one he
favors in order to convince readers to agree with him. The author intended this article to the
general public in which, the overall appearance of this publication specifically on the content
and language is general. Besides, the nature of advertising this article which easily to be find
in the internet defined that the author is trying to reach the public.
 Apparently, the author repeatedly underline that parents should not be blamed for the
mistakes made by their children and their parent should never be held responsible unless the
parent assisted in the crime. Yet, the author failed to assure reader on the dependability of his
article. The reader may doubted on the author point of view due to deficiency of supporting
data from other resources such as statistic, , expert opinion or testimony and research finding.

(829 words)