Impact of Media

1. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA05/burnette/thesis/home.html
   http://www.warbirdforum.com/media.htm
   
2. The audience of the first website is a group of people who are researching about the Vietnam War in depth, such as students in college level. The website assumes the audience has a fairly good knowledge about the subject being talked about.  
   
   The .com website is a forum which is more directed towards those who want to know about the impact of media through soldier’s experience. The website provides more information in Vietnam veteran’s point of view. This is because the author’s father was a Vietnam veteran, and the author uses secondary sources to discuss about the impact of the media. Its audience is not only someone who’d like to specifically know more about the impact television had on the war and the soldiers but also someone who is a regular reader of war stories on this particular forum.

3. In the .edu website, we found that the graphics are very minimal, but we don’t think that it is necessary for this website to have many graphics. The audience of this website is mostly looking for information about the Vietnam War, not graphics. The color scheme that the website is green, white and black, and the website has a banner on the left side with pictures of helicopters. This clearly shows that the author’s main purpose is to provide a comfortable reading canvas rather than attractive graphic imagery.
   
   In the .com website, the right pane of the window is loaded with images, moving objects, etc. which are basically advertisements about similar readings. In the middle there is just plain text and that’s where all the focus goes. At the bottom, there is an organized footer which makes navigation easy. It also invites the reader to explore more sections on war stories.
4. The .edu website is a branch of university of Virginia website. The author of the article cites all credible sources. The author of the website is part of graduate program in American Studies at the University of Virginia. The author studies the cultural role of the television during the Vietnam War. His voice is quite formal and informational. There is a seperate ‘works consulted’ page written in MLA style which also adds to the credibility of this website.
   
   The .com website is using quotes and pieces of statistics. The author uses quotes from her father and narrates accounts with specific time of the year. There is a certain amount of trust involved here because she doesn’t give any credible source that her father was actually a war veteran. But she also uses other sources and cites them after the conclusion for readers who are interested in researching more about the issue.
   
5. Both the Internet sources not only combine and amalgamate various credible sources not written by the author, but also provide a personal analysis of these sources which is written by the author himself. The analysis in the .edu website is more of paraphrasing and based on statistics whereas in the .com website the analysis is a lot more personal. There is clearly a greater effort to cite the sources in proper format in the .edu website than in the .com website.

6. Although usage of rhetoric for popular and professional websites are similar, there are some significant differences. First of all, the professional website is more informative, providing mostly facts using varied sources. However, the popular website used secondary sources to make an argument about the impact of media in Vietnam War. The rhetoric skills in the professional website are an attempt to critique some of the views of other authors on the same issue.