Blog Post 1/Academic Connections

What you’re doing here is breaking down the review you selected to its component parts to see how they work together/get at layers of meaning/note the reviewer’s intention for his/her audience. Technically, this is an analysis assignment (it falls under the “critical reading” portion of “Reading and Composition” (100). While you don’t need to worry about writing to a particular audience for the blog assignment, you may want to identify the audience for the review you’ve chosen (you can determine implied audience both by rhetorical choices the writer makes and by noting key characteristics of the publication/section in which the review appears. The Atlantic audience differs significantly from Slate or Salon’s audience, for instance.  Some publications even list stats about its target audience, the people to whom they’re writing (and marketing). Time Magazine identifies its target audience as later 30s  and up, generally educated (at the college level) and typically middle class (economically speaking). The publication has also identified its audience as more male and white than not. Time, like a lot of publications, devotes a lot of resources – and money – to finding out who’s reading, who’s subscribing, who’s Facebooking or Twittering about articles . . . and to gain personal information about you to tailor advertising. You'll need to identify the target audience very specifically in the rhetorical analysis paper, so beginning to think about target audience of a publication is very useful here.

 As you’ll be doing a lot of this kind of work come English 201 or 202, even Literature 120, all of this is good preparation, and this assignment (the review itself) gets you actively thinking about audience awareness, a key element of writing academically. You might start to see that we’re actually dealing with a number of academic skills via the review  -- effectively summarizing, making summative statements, making a “real-world” connection that establishes some greater significance, choosing an organizational strategy, coming up with an opening “hook” designed to, literally, “hook” the reader, writing within a specific genre and following the (usually unstated) rules of that genre, paying close attention to your tone and diction, even to sentence structure (syntax), and more. Essentially, the review is an academic assignment that usually doesn’t feel like one –  in writing your review, you’re dealing with informational and persuasive/opinionated writing, two meta-genres of writing that are central to English 100. The blog assignment itself is getting you started on analysis, another meta-genre (and one that’s absolutely key in 201/202/120). The next paper is all about analysis, so I really want you to begin noting the differences between informational writing (often called "expository" writing), providing an opinion of something, and analyzing content. Remember that you’ll write a reflection on the kinds of rhetorical choices YOU make in writing your own review. By doing so, you’re practicing analyzing someone else’s content (this blog assignment) as well as analyzing your own (the reflection). And yes, I will give you a prompt for the reflection.

***Remember to link the review you’re analyzing in your post so anyone can easily access that  review