Surrogate Motherhood: Comparing Two Articles

“Time to Ban Surrogate Motherhood,” written by Lynda Hurst and “Surrogate Motherhood: Why it Should Be Permitted,” written by Allan C. Hutchinson, are persuasive texts where the authors’ attempts to influence the audience to agree with their side of the argument on surrogate motherhood. According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, surrogate motherhood is defined as, “a woman who bears a child for another person, often for pay, either through artificial insemination or by carrying until birth another woman's surgically implanted fertilized egg.” Since the persuasive works are published in different newspapers, one being The Toronto Star and the other being The Globe and Mail, the works are written for different target audiences. Comparing the articles of Lynda Hurst and Allan C. Hutchinson, numerous differences between the elements of tone and the types of structure define the target audience.

The first difference that defines the target audience in each paper is the elements of tone, which include diction, literary devices and emotional appeal. By comparing the elements of tone, a target audience can be chosen for each article. To begin, diction is defined as the vocabulary choices and the style of expression. The vocabulary choices in Hutchinson’s work are more complex than the vocabulary found in Hurst’s writing. This is seen in “Surrogate Motherhood: Why it Should Be Permitted” as clandestine is used to describe agreement while grim is used to describe transaction in “Time to Ban Surrogate Motherhood.” By using more complex vocabulary, only people of higher intelligence are able to understand the article. In contrast, when using simple vocabulary, people of all intelligence and of all re...

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... they do not need to be lead through his work. Evidently, the last dissimilarity that defines the target audience in Hurst’s and Hutchinson’s articles is the types of structure.

Contrasting “Time to Ban Surrogate Motherhood” and “Surrogate Motherhood: Why it Should Be Permitted,” many distinctions between the elements of tone and the types of structure define the target audience. Elements of tone which include diction, literary devices and emotional appeal differentiate the groups of readers. In combination with dissimilar types of structure such as: essay structure, paragraph structure, and narrative structure, it further defines the target audience. In conclusion, through numerous differences, Hurst’s audience is defined as less intelligent, less mature, less independent and ‘female’ compared to Hutchinson’s readers who are described as the opposite.