Describe your sense of the author’s audience (note: the audience cannot be “everyone” or “all people”—it has to be more specific than that!). To whom is the author speaking, primarily?
Describe the “rhetorical context” or larger, background situation in response to which the author has written the article: what is the situation (or the situations plural) that made the author’s article necessary? What is the “bigger picture” in which the author wrote her article?
Summarize for an uninformed audience the author’s overall purpose in the article: what is the author’s purpose, and what is the article “about”? Use at least two direct quotations from the article to support your summary.
State your own thesis clearly. One format that works well is to say
