Nathaniel Breier
ERH-303-01
Prompt 2
Word Count: 235 Words

In his essay, van Dijk discuss Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which he describes as a method of analyzing how things are talked about in public, to include an analysis of power structure and context. He gives several examples of where CDA is used, including feminist studies and gender inequalities, media and politics, and racism and ethnography. Of note, he mentions that CDA also relates to examinations of professional and intuitional discussions, such as in the courtroom, the medical field or even in scholarly articles and education.
These last two may be the most important, at the very least in the contexts of van Dijk’s article itself. Any article that seeks to add information to a discussion must be analyzed in terms of its Ethos, that credibility of which many students learn in their lower level English courses. As van Dijk notes in his article, if the basic premise of something, be it a scholarly article such as van Dijk’s or a chapter from a university textbook, does not conflict with a person’s belief systems, it tends to be accepted at face value.
This makes CDA all the more important, in that it must be performed on these scholarly articles, to include van Dijk’s, educational material, etc in order to evaluate what is being fed to the wider population, whom it will undoubtedly influence in their views of the society and culture in which they live.