For this activity, you can choose one of artifacts (pieces of writing/genre) that you will be analyzing for your paper. This might be an email, memo, sketch, field note, video, academic journal article, blue-print, drawing, political cartoon, etc. Keep in mind, you are choosing a sample from a particular genre in your discourse community (field) and analyzing that sample piece of writing. Ideally, choose one that you will use for writing your paper. We are going to practice analyzing it.
Second, you will answer the following questions about it (also, keep in mind, for the major assignment due in a few weeks this will be in essay/paragraph form– here it can just be raw notes).
QUESTIONS TO ANSWER:
Analyzing the Genre in general:
Who is the audience(s) for the genre (type of writing you are analyzing), and how does audience shape the genre?
What social actions does the genre achieve for the dis- course community?
What are the conventions of the genre?
How much flexibility do authors have to vary the conventions of the genre?
Have the conventions of the genre changed over time? In what ways and why?
To what extent does the genre empower members of the discourse community to speak, and to what extent does the genre marginalize or silence members of the discourse community?
Where can a new discourse community member find models of the genre?
Rhetorical Analysis of the actual piece of “writing” that you are looking at.
• Structure
How is the text organized, and how is that structure made apparent to readers?
How are sections and sub-sections labeled?
What is the thesis and where is it located? What expectations does it set up? How does the text deliver on those expectations?
How does the structure guide and support the thesis?
How is the structure used to develop the argument?
When and how are terms defined?
• Audience
◦ Where and how is the audience indicated?
◦ Is it clear what the audience can be expected to already know or believe? ◦ How does the text engage with its target audience?
• Purpose
Where and how is the overall purpose indicated?
Identify moves in the introduction.
▪ Where and how is the scope of the research indicated?
▪ Where and how is the writer’s position established? How is the research gap indicated? ▪ Where and how does the writer indicate how the gap will be filled by this research
Identify moves in other sections of the paper. What is the author doing (as opposed to saying)?
• Support (Data & Literature)
◦ How are claims stated and supported?
◦ How much context or background is provided?
◦ Is data presented using charts, tables, figures, etc.?
◦ What type and amount of evidence is used, and how is it used? ◦ How is the credibility of the evidence indicated?
