Author's Tone and Style Analysis

                  The author, Fiona Shoop, has a somewhat pitiful tone in her article.  The first sentence of the entire article says “I’m disabled.”  This immediately grabs the reader’s attention and causes the audience to have sympathy for her.  She continues this sort of tone until about the third paragraph where I believe her tone changes.  She goes from a kind of sad tone, to a more inspirational and happy tone.  Shoop talks about how she is an author, publisher, editor, and book reviewer, and how her disablement of her left hand has made her job a more difficult task.  She says that while she may love hard copies of book, the eBook allows her to still actually read instead of nothing.  I think this tone is more uplifting and continues to keep the audience’s attention because she changes tones.  She talks about how grateful she is to the eBook and how much it helped her, as well as how much it could help others.  This is where I think the main point of her article comes into play.  Shoop argues that eBooks make it possible for the disabled, older population, and perhaps people in hospitals to read.  She uses paragraph breaks where she would like to end a point and begin a new one.  Also, she inserts many facts into parenthesis to add examples or extra information.  For instance, she says “It’s actually changed how I produce eBooks, limiting how many links we normally have because it’s awkward for people with hand issues (arthritis or loos of fingers for example) to click back and forth.”  She inserts this information as part of her style of writing.  Shoop’s goal, in my opinion, is to strengthen her argument with this extra tidbit or information.  It gives the reader a visual example of what she means when she says “people with hand issues…”   Towards the end of her article, Shoop inserts one paragraph that briefly talks about the negatives on eBooks.  This changes her tone yet again to show that she sees both sides of the debate.  She talks about this issues as almost small annoyances instead of real problems.  For example, she says “My main problem with eBooks are bad conversions, especially the dreaded hyphen, which is either missing, so two words are joined….”  While this is a negative thing about eBooks, she specifically inserts an argument that isn’t very strong, to make her point look more valid.  This tactic is very effective I believe because the audience reads this, and thinks that there may not be as many bad things about eBooks that people may think.  A combination of Shoop’s tone and style helps to convey her point, even if the audience is not older, disabled, or homebound.  Her strongest points are when she uses sympathy to draw the audience in, they a more uplifting tone to show how she overcame this “heartbreaking” disability in her life.  The style she uses helps her argument because she shows both sides (although her opposing argument was weak) to show how much stronger her point was.  With all of these factors, Shoop constructs a convincing article.