<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>The online article I read called “What Personality Tests Really Deliver” by Louis Menand is about the functions and history of personality tests, the most famous one being the MBTI test or “Myers-Briggs Type Indicator”. The article starts off with a lengthy background on how and why the MBTI test was created by mother-daughter partners, Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. The author then goes on to describe how the MBTI works and what the test is supposed to show about the person taking the test. The ninety-something question test gives a possibility of sixteen different four-letter acronyms at the end to tell the test-taker what personality type he or she is. The author then starts her argument on the test is not a good scientific measure of our personalities because of certain flaws. The first flaw the author states is that many of the users who take the test for the second time get a different result while another flaw is that the descriptions for these acronyms differ from source to source. All the flaws that the author lists build to the primary point the author is trying to make which is that the MBTI test is not a legitimate way to find our personalities because of how vague and subjective personalities can be. Of the three strategies of visual rhetoric that Hocks talks about in her writing, the two that I saw most prevalent were Audience Stance and Transparency. The text made me feel like I was listening to one side of an argument. Right off the bat, I felt this way when I read the little blurb underneath the title which was a very sarcastic rhetorical question, “</span><i><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>They’re a two-billion-dollar industry. But are assessments like the Myers-Briggs more self-help than science?”. </span></i><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Although the first couple paragraphs made the article seem like it was an informative piece on the MBTI test, I knew through this first blurb alone that this article was going to be a strong, and most likely negative, opinion on the topic of personality tests. The vast uses of quotation marks and italics that displayed sarcasm also showed how the author used punctuation and fonts for his argument against the scientific use of personality tests.</span>
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