[Analyze] Use the basic features.

A Focused Explanation: Excluding Other Topics

In writing about a concept as broad as love, Toufexis has to find a way to narrow her focus. Writers choose a focus in part by considering the rhetorical situation—the purpose, audience, and genre—in which they are writing. Student Patricia Lyu is limited by the fact that she is writing in response to her instructor’s assignment. As a science writer for Time magazine, Toufexis probably also had an assignment to report on current scientific research. The question is, though, how does she make the science interesting to her readers?

A Clear, Logical Organization: Cueing the Reader

Experienced writers know that readers often have trouble making their way through new and difficult material. To avoid having them give up in frustration, writers strive to construct a reader-friendly organization: They include a thesis statement that asserts the focus or main point—the answer to the “So what?” question. In addition writers sometimes include a forecasting statement, which alerts readers to the main topics to be discussed, and include transitional words and phrases to guide readers from topic to topic.

Appropriate Explanatory Strategies: Using Visuals

Patricia Lyu, like Toufexis, uses a flowchart to show the stages of a process she is describing in her essay. In Lyu’s case, the visual comes from one of her sources. In contrast, Toufexis’s visual was most likely created after her article was written, by the magazine’s art editor, Nigel Holmes. Notice also that whereas Lyu, following a convention of academic writing, refers in the text of her essay to her visuals, labels them “Fig. 1” and “Fig. 2,” and includes captions, Toufexis does not refer to the visual in her text, and the visual does not have a caption.

Smooth Integration of Sources: Establishing Credibility

To establish their authority on the subject, writers need to convince readers that the information they are using is authoritative. They can do this in a number of ways, but giving the professional credentials of their sources is a conventional strategy.