Gulf Oil Well Permanently Closed

Finally, in the Gulf of Mexico today, the oil well that for months leaked oil was permanently closed today. This has prompted a positive reaction for many people across America. In the article I read that explained the success of closing the well, I found that the writer assumed that the average reader would make quite a few inferences. To begin with, the writer assumed that the reader knew about the BP oil spill. This was clearly because the writer's audience was primarily American's, where the oil spill has become common knowledge.

The writer chose quotes carefully, in order to really touch the reader's emotions associated with the oil spill. Many people felt that the response to the event took far too long, and as a result the author of this article chose the quote,"We can finally announce that the Macondo 252 well is effectively dead".The reason this quote was chosen was to really touch the emotion shared among many people in which it was believed that the oil spill took far to long to clean up.

Through the use of inferences and using writing techniques specifically to target a certain demographic, the writer was able to get his point across very effectively that this was a significant event. The inference in which the author assumes that the reader knows about the oil spill is interesting however, because he does still briefly describes the original cause of all the spilled oil later in the article. I find this particularly interesting because it is as if the author was hoping to reach an even broader audience in which there were people who were unaware of the situation at hand. He grabs the readers attention with an interesting headline and opening paragraph, but still makes it so others who are unaware of the situation to still understand the story.

In the end, it is how a news article is written that determines how effective it is at conveying a message. This article did a great job, and thanks to it, I know have the peace of mind knowing that the BP spill is no longer as much of a crisis and all efforts can be focused on cleaning up what is left. Now we can only hope that the marine life makes a full recovery from this awful disaster.

Read the original article here:
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N19215397.htm