People are Innately Helpful!

Another rare occurrence in the newspaper! Today's article talked about people being nice, rather than people being corrupt, viscous, or worst of all dead. This article talked about a study showing people's inherent nature to be nice to one another. According to the article "the somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others."

The article did a good job keeping things simple, and reminded me a lot of the kind of writing style I would try to emulate if were writing a scientific article without using any scientific words. However, I think the article may have lost the attention of a lot of readers once it reached the second page. At the same time however, had a lot of very interesting information for a someone who is either very interested in the subject (me) or someone who is well-versed in this field. As a result if I were the editor of the newspaper I would continue to keep the length of the article, even if some readers wont be reading it the whole way through.

Article Tone

I think this article provided a lot of great information. Although there has been a lot of talk and analysis about Obama's new plan for troops in Afghanistan, very little has been said about the reactions from Afghanistan and Pakistan so far. I found this really interesting, especially when Obama addressed the Afghani people directly in his speech.

However, some things about this article seemed slightly more biased than usual. For example the first sentence on the front page of the website: "American diplomats scrambled to reassure the two countries at the center of President Obama’s war strategy that the U.S. would not cut and run." The use of the word scrambled seems a little unnecessary and biased to me. Thankfully this was fixed in the actual article and replaced with the word work.

The article had the tough job of analyzing a very subjective thing: the tone and feelings of the leaders and newspapers in Afghanistan. In my opinion they did a good job overall, but a couple of choice words worried me.