LEC2

Review

• ”Instrumental” discourse.
  • Discourse that accomplishes something.
• Hard news v soft news.
  • Hard news: important, fact based.
  • Soft news is less important but could be interesting.
• Advertisement vs advertorial.
  • Advertisement promotes product through media, obviously.
  • Advertorial is ideology that promotes the product.
  • Advertorial promotes stuff under a facade of a review.

Citations for Reading Analysis

• We use IEEE.
• For citations with missing information, write a note about that.
• Evidence can be description, paraphrasing etc.
• Evidence should be cited.
• We are not to review the work’s quality.
• We are to focus on the content and form.

Example:

• Recipe’s form is the bullet points and short concise instructions.
• Content is the actual instructions themselves.

Genre Sets: Analyzing New Genres

• Genres have certain structural and rhetorical conventions.
• Genre conveys the presentation, goal and functions of text.
• Genres like fiction, non-fic are too broad to convey meaningful information.

Analyzing Guide:

• Focus on style.

  • sentence length, complexity, word choice, paragraph length.
  • sentence type: declarative, imperative, interrogative.

• Focus on structure.

  • content organization, divs of sections, content in each section.
  • org patterns: chronological, reverse chrono, general info to specific info, specific to general, hourglass (general to specific to general).
  • organizational markers:
  • Topic sentences; their explicitness, location;
    • transitional elements (signposting). How are they transitioning? Using “furthermore, thus, hence”, or using headings.
    • Introductory elements (abstract, summary, intro).
    • Summary elements (conclusion, list of key points, summary).

• Focus on register (diction, tone, voice).

  • formality of language, use of contractions like “isn’t” and the use of “I”.
  • Calculate percentage of contractions vs total words.
  • Level of language (count the technical jargon, normal words, academic words and calculate percentages).
  • When is jargon used.
  • Register tells us the target audience

• For technical writing, “user” is a more accurate term rather than audience.

• Types of users and what kind of information does each user type need.

  • basic, novice, experienced, advanced, expert.

How to know your primary user group:

• Inventory of your user group.
• Create a profile of characteristics.
• Interview people
• Observe people.
• Analyze earlier versions.

Info about user group:

• Level of exp.
• Edu background.
• Experience, attitude towards learning new things.