iGod

               Nicholas Carr’s article “iGod” is a very informative piece of literature.  Throughout a majority of the article, Carr is providing facts and opinions from experts on artificial intelligence and related topics.  This helps Carr to develop a sense of authority and knowledge, even though he is just the presenter of knowledge. 

The use of authoritative and well known figures, such as Google’s founders not only builds credibility, but it also helps attract the attention of the reader.  When the reader recognizes a name or organization in an article, he or she will likely have some level of interest.  Also, the author uses dialogue at the beginning of the article to help bring the reader into the “discussion.”  He wants the reader to feel as if he or she is very involved.  Another way in which Carr engages the reader is through small sections of personal reactions.  Carr never voices his opinion for an extended period of time, but he does include a brief sentence or two of reactions.  Any sort of personal interaction between the author and the reader is beneficial for reader engagement.    

Although Carr is very effective in engaging the reader closer to the beginning of the article, Carr seems to be quite repetitive in the latter portions of the article.  The repetitiveness can easily lead the reader to become distract and/or stop reading.  One of the key things to keep in mind when writing a researched article is that the author is strapped for time.  Therefore, any repetition or useless information has the potential to disengage the reader.  Not only does Carr seem to repeat a lot of similar or closely related information, but he also appears to become a bit distracted in his purpose throughout the article.  Closer to the end of the article, he writes more than a page about George Dyson and an essay which he wrote.  While somewhat related to the main point of the article, this section takes away from the rest of the article because the information presented here does not build on the rest main point.  In my opinion, this section helped to disengage the reader.  The information was not particularly interesting (which isn’t necessarily that important), but more importantly, the information was not related to the primary topic.