In my quest to find the perfect article to analyze, I stumbled upon an interesting piece written by CynthiaLou Coleman. Being both a teacher and a researcher in Communications at Portland State University, as well a blogger on science communication at nativescience. wordpress.com, she seemed like a reliable source for her topic in her article, “Should Science be Censored?” Ms. Coleman wrote about specific situations when the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity asked two scientific journals,
Science and Nature, to censor sensitive information about developments in the study of H5N1 (a disease that killed roughly half of it’s victims) and a new ‘airborne’ strain of the disease that had been created in an unnamed lab. As I read the first, and then second half of the article, I found myself confused on her opinion. In the first half, she wrote as though was pro censorship. In the second half, she appeared to be be against it. I could see that she was trying to explain the difficulty in deciding if government censorship was necessary, but I believe she could of clarified her objective better.
As I read the article, I found myself asking a lot of questions about the credibility of the author, Ms. Coleman. Her writing style was not very clear, and her grammar was amateur at best. She continuously voiced the statements of outside sources, but did not name them, or where their information could be found. She only named one source in her article, but like all of the other references, she did not give any information on where the quote could be found. I found this extremely frustrating because there was almost no way to check the credibility of her sources, and whether purposeful or not, it left me doubting her statements, regardless of how convincing her arguments appeared. As an example, Ms. Coleman wrote, “Scientist argue that the new “airborne” strain can help them jump one step ahead of the virus by developing drugs and other defenses to starve off the...