Samantha Bickley

RC 2000

Professor Kane

8 October 2020

Week 8 Reflection

The article I chose to read from The Appalachian discusses the decision making from

Chancellor Sheri Everts when it comes to keeping students on campus and the consequences that

have followed these actions. Financially, students are paying tuition by credit hour along with

meal plans, parking passes, etc. The death of a student from coronavirus complications still did

not change any decision making from the Chancellor. The other article I chose to look at was an

article from USA Today discussing how the United States has reported more than 50,000 new

coronavirus cases for three consecutive days, the first time since mid August. The article

continues on to warn people to be careful now that flu season is arriving, as well as to avoid large

gatherings even with extended family for holidays. Both of these articles are discussing the most

prevalent topic in today’s world, coronavirus, and things that can be done to help stop the spread

of this virus and to limit exposure. The article from The Appalachian mainly targets an audience

that is centered around families and students at Appalachian State as well as mentioning

administration and the UNC Board of Educators. USA Today maintains a very general and

broad audience seeing as it is a national news outlet whose main job is to inform people about

what is going on all around the country. The Appalachian article is more appealing to me

personally because of my connection to the university as well as having many personal

disagreements with the Chancellor here. I have personally been affected by the coronavirus and

I think the lack of leadership the university and Chancellor Everts are showing is a major setback

when it comes to limiting the exposure of this deadly virus. This article should be eye opening

to those who do not go to school here and let them know how poorly things are actually going.

The article makes the assumption that the readers will be somewhat informed about the poor

leadership and the death of an Appalachian student. The article from USA Today makes the

assumption that the reader is informed of the growing pandemic going on and then continues on

to fill the reader in about the statistics going on with the spread of the virus. These two articles

are both very different from the articles I came across when reading for my discourse analysis

project. When reading articles for the project, all of my findings were very long and used

language that only someone in that discourse would know about while these two articles both

kept their information broad and simple for the reader to understand. My articles for my

discourse analysis project were also mainly scholarly articles or academic journals from people

in the specified computer science field. The topics that I was reading were also both very

different; computer information systems versus coronavirus. All of the articles I read were very

informative, just in different manners.