Working Together: Analyze a Writing Situation

Work together with your classmates to analyze a writing situation. Generate a list of documents that members of the group have written recently. Then choose one and analyze its writing situation. To conduct your analysis, respond to the following prompts:

  1. What was written? Describe the document in enough detail to allow other members of the class to understand its main point.
  2. What were the writer’s purposes? List the purpose or purposes that drove the writer’s work on the document. Why did he or she write it? What did he or she hope to gain by writing it? How was the writer’s purpose shaped by his or her needs, interests, values, beliefs, knowledge, and experience?
  3. Who were the intended readers? Describe the people who might have been expected to read the document, and list their purpose or purposes for reading it. How would their reading of the document have been shaped by their needs, interests, values, beliefs, knowledge, and experience?
  4. What sources were used in the document? Identify the sources of information, ideas, and arguments used in the document. Indicate how the sources were used (for example, to support a point or to differentiate the writer’s ideas from those of another author).
  5. What contexts shaped the writing and reading of the document? Identify the physical, social, disciplinary, and cultural contexts that shaped the writer’s work on the document and the readers’ reading of it.