Project #1 - Analysis Paper
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The term “genre” has begun to develop an understanding of how different works function in practical terms. Genre works in relation to other key rhetorical concepts such as context, ethos, pathos, logos, exigence, audience, and constraints.
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For Project #1, please choose from 2 to 3 artifacts (or texts) to analyze. One artifact should be a peer-reviewed journal article in the field of interest. The other artifacts you analyze for this project are genres of your choice. Please compare a peer-reviewed article with artifacts in any genre that address the same subject or topic. They are possibly written by the same author but with contrastingly different tone, voice, style, ethos, logos, or pathos in order to address different types of audiences with distinctive purposes. For example, you can find and examine the list of publications by a professor in the field of your interest; let's say, a professor whose research interests include global warming. She might have written an article to submit to Nature to publish her groundbreaking discovery, while at the same time she wrote an article for The New York Times about the same discovery. For the assignment, you can analyze these two different artifacts (or simply texts) in terms of their rhetorical situations. In other words, you will examine your artifacts and think about why and how this specific genre is used to achieve a rhetorical end for a specific audience in a specific context.
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You will develop a 1500-word essay (that is typically around 5, double-spaced, 12-point font pages) in which you analyze your artifacts. Your analysis should define the concept of genre (or "discourse" if we borrow Foucault's term), and then explain how you see the rhetorical terms we have discussed operating within your artifacts specifically and the genre you have chosen, in general.