FRANKENSTEEN PAPIER

Playing God: An Analysis
By Lydia Parker

In this article, Philip Ball uses sly journalistic strategies and suggestive diction in an attempt to persuade his reader of their own close-mindedness. He sneakily slips in the techniques in an attempt to convince his audience that they have formulated their own opinion about the subject, when truly the have been influence by his all along.

Ball tends to use very sophisticated and developed language when giving reasons for his own side, but then contrasts this with simple language used for the opposing side, as evidenced in this quote. “…sex in the biological sense (sperm meets egg) but in the anatomical sense (this bit goes in here).” Is this just journalistic habit, or intentional decrediting of the other side? We may never know. He also uses "nice" words in his article for invitro fertalization such as "assisted conception." Another example of his belittlement is the identification of the Catholic Church and anti-science groups as the common enemy on this issue. "...condemned by the Catholic Church, its censure by anti-science groups is merely a secularised version in which God is replace by a reified nature." In this article, the Catholic church plays the main scapegoat, the guy always in the way of what everyone else wants. He trys to convince the reader that anyone against his side is just using a set of "off-the-shelf prejudices", therefore making them just another mindless drone repeating what some authority figure has told them. He further proves his belief in this characterisitic by crediting authority figures in his paper, putting their job position in front of their name, as evidence by "surgeon Patrick Steptoe" and "Helmut Puff, historian." Throughout the piece, he peppers in "myth" with a certain conotation, a negative one. While "myth" doesnt always have this conotation, Ball uses it in such a way to make other's thoughts seem archaic and outdated. In this essay, a 'myth' is an old piece of knowledge greatly influencing our much superior modern ways. "...until we can recognize the origins of our preconceptions, and distinguish mythical fears from real and present dangers, we shall have little prospect of getting it right."
The author strategically places one paragraph in front of the next, with the main point of the first being "People are making much too big of a deal about this, they're just little balls of cells." and the jist of the second, "Don't you just feel so bad for poor invitro babies? No loves them or thinks that they can love others. Also, they don't have souls." He's playing on the readers pathos, getting their emotions all caught up in the issue. Who wouldnt feel bad for a baby rejected by all of society?

Another technique used by this clever man is to couch highly controversial issues inbetween widely accepted issues, like “…production of “artificial sperm” from stem cells, human-animal hybrid embryos, or cloning.” This is altogether deceivious, regardless of the context. How could you accept this man's opinion as the truth when convertly attempting to get the reader to sing on to radicalist issues he or she has no information about. He also attempts to persuade the reader by making up his own word, anthropoeia, "anthro-" with roots in human and "-poeia" deriving from creation . By inventing this word, he is intrinsically supporting his own position over the opposing. The creation of a new word is ok, right? Especially if it's coming from a well known journalist writing for an esteemed magazine?