Analysis Essay:
Purpose: To analyze why the writing in your genre is structured the way it is.
For your third assignment in this class, you will analyze the genre you’ve been studying. You will choose two more articles from the genre to examine, giving you a total of five articles that you’ve read in this genre. Because Assignment 2 made you familiar with the essential attributes of your genre, when you read these two new articles you’ll see how they use or omit those essential attributes and how the articles interact with their audiences.
You’ll be developing your analysis in this paper as you try to determine why the essential attributes you’ve discovered are so essential to the genre. If a text that omits these attributes will fail, what are the ramifications of that failure? If a text that includes these attributes will succeed, what are the ramifications of that success? I’m asking you to think about this genre in larger terms now.
Some questions to get you started:
Choose an essential attribute in one of your texts. What results did you notice this essential attribute had? How did it affect its audience?
Why is it important for the text to affect its audience in that way? How does affecting the audience in this way help the text achieve its purpose?
Repeat this exercise for the essential attributes you’ve discovered and for each text. Seems like a lot, I know!
When you’ve compiled this information, start grouping your observations by “results”. Which attributes affected the audience in similar ways? Which texts used attributes that affected the audience in similar ways?
Looking at your grouped results, start asking why: Why do these attributes all have similar effects on the audience? Why might authors want to create these effects on the audience?
As you revise your draft, consider the “big picture”:
What is the main purpose of the genre?
How have the texts you’ve looked at accomplished this purpose?
How have the essential attributes helped the texts accomplish this purpose?
Do you understand the strategy behind the style choices typical for texts in this genre? Try to explain that strategy.