Analysis of Articles

For my final blog, I will be conducting a rhetorical analysis of my previous few journal blogs using Swale's Genre Model as a reference. Here we go.

For the past few weeks, I have been reading academic articles from my major, courtesy of Civil Engineering, The Magazine for the American Society of Engineers, and have tried to convert the technical data of the article in to a form that my target audience (you fine readers) can comprehend and appreciate.

In the first paragraph of my blogs, I would establish a territory and make some topic generalizations. I would usually put in what or where the building was or where it was located, and then continue to give some background information and imagry to get my readers familiar with the building before proceeding to the meat of the article. Since the buildings were typically large scale construction projects, I would typically provide dimentsions or illustrations to compare the buildings size to similar or regocnizable structures instead of dwelving on how many meters talll or thousands of cubic yards of concrete were in the building, because that is not a unit of measure the average citizen is familiar with. I always included the monetary value of the building or the project, so that the reader would understand and visualize how vast a project it was due to its price tag.

The second paragraph or so would be comprised of establishing a niche, or simply continue to portray the development of the building project in the article in a more in depth and technical detail since hopefully the reader was getting more and more exposure to the project. Major design features of a slightly more technical nature were discussed and portratyed, as well as possible design flaws that were incorporated into the design of the building.

I would then continue for the rest of the article to occuy this niche, and either build upon the technical data I had discussed in the previous few paragraphs, or continue onwards with new points and build upon them as I went. I tried to focus on the purpose of my article, which was to discuss design and construction methods used on the project without getting too involved in the technical details. I tened to cover many topics that are in the popular media, such as sustainable energy and effiecent or innovative building design to keep the audience intrigued and give them a slight base on which they could use to comprehend the reading. I felt this to be a more effective method of discussion than to simply list the different types of varous new widgets and how they are being made, being that the audience would not have a clue or reference point as to what I was talking about.

Overall, I feel that I was able to clearly, and effectively discuss technical building details and methods with my intended audience as was my goal with this blogging assignment, and hope that they took a little information away from this that perhaps can help them in the future.