Restaurants use menus to describe the available dishes customers can order, yet the variety of rhetorical appeals (e.g. ethos, pathos, and logos) used among different restaurant menus maintain unique relationships between patrons (readers) and company owners (writers) and/or cooks. A genre analysis involves the close and careful reading of people’s patterns of communication within a scene or setting, so to analyze restaurant menus as genres would require an exploration of how menus work to persuade and appeal to patrons of a particular demographic. For your second major writing assignment this term, you’ll research, write, and analyze in groups. You’re tasked with observing the atmosphere of two chosen restaurants and collecting menus to critically examine and compare how the atmospheres reveal: 1) the different role the menus play in setting the restaurants’ feel or impression, 2) the way the menus relatively shape how people behave and communicate, and 3) what the menus conclude about the restaurants’ values, linguistic and rhetorical patterns, and differences in customer base. To identify the linguistic and rhetorical patterns of a genre we must read the menus closely, looking for recurrent features that move us from general observations to specific interpretations on what the genres tell us. As you brainstorm, consider the following questions: How would you describe the atmosphere where the menus are used? Identity the cultural traditions that seem to permeate the menus. What’s included or excluded from the menus? Is there anything particularly interesting or strange about the menus or how you observed its usage during your restaurant visits? In what ways do the menus appeal to a particular audience where race, class, ethnicity, or other human groupings are concerned? Consider price points and desсrіptions of dishes. How are the food on the menus described? How are the menus organized or structured?
