Elizabeth Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert's "Unchartered Territory" is an informative essay about Advantage Schools founded by Steven Wilson, a chain of company-owned charter schools. In this essay, she gives loads of information while using many other creative and personal elements in her writing at the same time. Her use of language by way of detail, diction, and point of view all help to institute credibility with the reader while supplying information about and criticizing charter schools--specifically Advantage Schools.

In the beginning of "Unchartered Territory," Kolbert writes as if she is describing the setting and main character of a fictional tale. Instead, she is familiarizing the reader with the owner of Advantage Schools as being a "...lanky forty-one-year-old with prominent cheekbones..." (Kolbert 136). Her way of describing Steven Wilson helps to give the reader some further understanding of the subject matter by forming images. She not only uses specific details to give images to the audience, but also to keep the reader's attention and to bias the subject matter just slightly enough to impress her opinion of the subject onto her audience.

Kolbert also uses many techniques to establish credibility, or ethos. Though there are no formal citations in her essay, she does utilize many other ways to back up her facts and details. Throughout the essay she mentions meeting and speaking with Steven Wilson (Advantage Schools' founder) and visiting a charter school in Jersey City, meeting both teachers and students. She also gives credit where it is due directly in the body of her essay instead of pushing citations onto a works cited page or by listing footnotes (which can prove to be most annoying). One example of Kolbert using an in-paragraph citation is when she says, "[Direct Instruction] was developed some thirty-five years ago at the University of Illinois by Siegfried Engelmann" (Kolbert 139). Using these techniques, she institutes a type of ethos that is difficult to deny.

Another technique that Kolbert employs in "Unchartered Territory" is her intelligent use of diction in order to reveal her own opinion or bias on the subject of Steven Wilson's charter schools. Throughout her essay, she is choosing specific words and phrases to hold either a positive or negative connotation. As a criticism, Kolbert suggests that, "Charter schools are, in effect, a series of social-science experiments for which no control groups have been established" (Kolbert 140). Here she uses the metaphor of charter schools being a badly-organized science experiment to carry negative weight so that the reader will agree with her view that charter schools are an impersonal form of education. Though powerful in the way of swaying bias, she does not use the most credible statement to put into an informative essay.

In "Unchartered Territory" Kolbert uses her critical diction to describe how Advantage Schools holds its charter. She declares "Most states do not allow commercial enterprises to hold charters directly, but Advantage gets around this by finding local groups that will run a school on paper while in practice turning operations over to the

company" (Kolbert 140). Kolbert's quote not only reveals Advantage's way of getting around state law, but it also holds a negative light to its charter. The fact that the local groups step in is quite an advantage to Advantage, but it is not in all ways ethical.

Kolbert's choice of diction, though colorful, is not always the best for all readers. An author must always consider the intended audience while writing any piece of literature, and Kolbert did not succeed one hundred percent. After a break, she states, "...an Advantage School comes as a package,