Additional Exercises

Chapter 5, Additional Exercise 7: Two Audiences, One Subject

Form small groups for this project on audience. Choose two articles on the same subject, one from a general-audience periodical such as Time or Newsweek and one from a technical journal such as Science, the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, Management Science, or the Journal of Microcomputer Applications. (You can also find suitable articles on the web.) Working alone, each member of the group should study each article, focusing on the following questions:

What is the likely background of the article's audience? Does the article require that the reader have specialized knowledge?

What is the author's purpose? In other words, what is the article intended to accomplish?
How do the differences in audience and purpose affect the following elements in the article?
- scope and organization
- sentence length and structure
- vocabulary
- number and type of graphics
- references within the articles and at the end
- headings and white space

Meet with the other members of your group to discuss your analyses of the two articles. Do you agree more in your analyses of the general-audience article or of the technical article? What are the main areas of difference in your analyses? What do you think accounts for these differences? Write a 1,000-word memo to your instructor that does the following:

compares and contrasts the two articles in terms of the authors' assessment of the writing situation
describes and analyzes the differences in each group member's analysis

Submit the two articles (or photocopies) along with your memo. (See Chapter 7 for a discussion of comparison and contrast and Chapter 14 for a discussion of memos.)