Discourse Analysis

Akbari (ENGW 3315 Unit 1 Assignment) 3

Final Draft Assignment: Analysis of Writing in the Discourse

Your final draft will build directly from your bloggy. Introduce your text by tersely describing it, noting where you found it, and from what field it emerged. Try to orient your audience to this text and why you find it significant and worthy of study. You should identify the author or authors, their institution, the title of the work (including the name of the journal from which it may have come), the date of publication. Then, in your analysis, consider the questions below, which are separated by bullets. You need not address all of these questions; it is unlikely that you will. These questions are meant to guide you to consider very specific, interdisciplinary elements of your text. You must decide which of these questions, or others your formulate yourself, are most important to your specific analysis and understanding of writing in your discipline. As you write, you will develop your own judgment on what is salient in your text and worth analyzing. Your analysis will be driven by your close reading, which consists of specific observations you offer of your text and the judgments you make on those observations. The development of this analytical judgment is at the heart of what this assignment aims to test. How do you close read? Select a key passage--a paragraph, or one sentence, or several sentences, several passages--from your sample document. This passage may be especially interesting and/or representative of writing in your field because of its specialized vocabulary, its way of presenting information or knowledge, its provocative thought, its debatable nature. Copy the passage, and cite your source properly (citation is described below on page 4, “Citation Style”). Point out what you think is worth observing in your chosen passage. Then offer a judgment on why this observation is significant. How does this passage work? Why does it work that way? The set of questions and concerns listed below can help you choose which phenomena to observe. They can help you in making judgments on how and why those phenomena are significant, how they are meaningful to the text and to the way the text serves its discipline. These questions are aligned in certain ways with our reading from Schneider, which may also inspire your specific close reading of scientific discourse in your document. Again, you need not address all of these questions below; it is highly unlikely that you will if you follow your most precise and discriminating judgment on what is important to analyze. These questions are meant to guide you to consider very specific elements of your text. You must decide which of these questions, or others you formulate yourself, are most important to your specific analysis and understanding of writing in your profession.

In close reading, as your judgment becomes keener, you should turn your analysis into a coherent and lucid essay demonstrating penetrating understanding of the writing in your field, rather than a disjointed series of answers to questions.

Be sure to illustrate your observations and judgments on what you observe by quoting from your text. Again, if quoting, you must cite sources properly. And remember, your readers are interested in your penetrating, debatable, arguable analytical judgment. This is more than mere summary or description. We’ll need focused description of elements of the document, of course—but we can’t argue with a description. We want your judgment. • What does this text tell you about the kinds of matters, problems, or challenges across

disciplines that concern professionals in your field? What is the purpose of the text? Does the text pass on information? Knowledge? Instructions? What knowledge does it assume the reader has already? How is this text to be used? By whom--that is, who is the reader? How

Akbari (ENGW 3315 Unit 1 Assignment) 4

does this text function in the day-to-day or longer-term activities of the company, agency, department, or discipline at which it is aimed?

• Does this text show characteristics of a specific discourse in the way the term is described by Schneider? Does it show characteristics of more than one discourse, discourse across or between disciplines?

• Consider elements of overall presentation in this text: organization of sections and subsections (if any); formatting, including headers and sub-headers; paragraph length; illustrations, diagrams, tables, graphs, photographs, drawings, or other visual content, including captions (if any). What are your observations about this text in terms of one or more of these elements? What strategies does the text follow in arranging these elements? Does it favor one kind of element over another? Does it balance elements? How? Why? Does it bring together, or “batch,” certain kinds of information, knowledge, materials? How does overall format and organization relate to purpose, or the way this text is meant to be used?

• If your text cites other sources, what citation style does the text follow? Does your text quote other sources?

• Who is the reader? How do you know? How are specific appeals to the interests, needs, desires, or concerns of this audience made? Is it clear what the audience should know, feel, and/or be able to do upon reading this document? How is this clarity put into place?

• Consider the stance of the author/authors. Does the author make her or his presence or identity known? Why or why not? Does the author forward and defend a point of view or report facts or findings as an objective observer (or possibly both)? Quote examples from the text.

• Consider elements of style at the sentence level. What is the diction, or word choice, used in this document? Is it technical/semi-technical/non-technical? Journalistic? Does the writer use specialized terminology or everyday language? How would you describe the tone or feeling of this text? Quote examples of how the author uses language to achieve his or her aim in this particular piece of writing.

• Is this document successful, in your judgment, at achieving its aims? What are its strengths? What, if any, are its weaknesses? Would you propose to change anything in the document, improve it? How? Why?

• Note this element, which you are required to address (and may do so, if you wish, in a separate paragraph): How does this text, based on your specific analysis, match your expectations of your field? How does it match what you encountered in your field during a co-op experience? How is your education and experience preparing you to write such documents? How do your current writing skills match what is presented in this document? What, if anything, does your text reveal that you must do to be able to write with authority in a specific discipline or across disciplines, as a member of a specific discourse community?

Guidelines and Learning Goals (used in evaluation)

A satisfactory paper will • Quote specific, carefully chosen, and sufficient evidence from text in analysis; • Offer detailed observations of evidence; • Offer specific judgments, in analysis, on those observations and how knowledge is ordered

and transmitted in the chosen text;

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• Offer specific connections between text, as analyzed, and student’s own career interests, preparation, and current writing skills;

• Show understanding of paragraph focus and development; • Follow proper in-text citation conventions; • Display proper grammar, punctuation, and syntax.

Note: to excel, a paper must surpass these expectations.

Requirements

Length: 1000 words (approximately; writing more than this isn’t necessary to articulate penetrating judgment on select evidence) Bloggy 1.2, Bloggy 1.2 responses, Final Draft.

Assessment (Assessment Form at the end of this document) A passing project will satisfactorily address the elements listed as “Guidelines.” Work in Revision Club, which must be on time, is also considered. See the assessment sheet at the end of this document.

Submission Please submit your Final Drafts to the Unit 1 Final Draft File Exchange under the Journal

of Advanced Writing in the Disciplines link on Blackboard, following instructions on the syllabus.

Paper Format The final draft is double-spaced with one-inch margins. Use a serif font; Times or Times New Roman, 12-point, is by far the most common font expected by college teachers. Follow CSE style (see description below) for in text and bibliographic citations. Number pages in the upper right hand corner after the first page, with your last name preceding the page number. No separate title page is necessary; a format for heading your paper is partially suggested at the top of this assignment. Be sure to include the instructor’s name and list “Unit 1 Final Draft.” Save your work to disc frequently as you write it so that you always have a copy. Suggested appearance for the start of your essay:

Rosalind Franklin English 3315 Tom Akbari Unit 1 Final Draft 11 July 2016 (or July 11, 2016)

Here’s My Title, Which Informs and Provokes My Audience

Here I begin my essay, which brilliantly examines a technical document, observing a

select sample of its specific features, offering precise judgments on the significance of those very

features, and articulating with thick logic why and how those judgments were formulated….

Citation Style

For our first assignment, we’ll follow Council of Scientific Editors (CSE) style, a common citation style used by research publications in the life sciences. We can refer to the CSE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers website: http://www.scientificstyleandformat.org/Tools/SSF-Citation-Quick-Guide.html. Please consult the guidelines listed under the “Citation-Sequence and Citation-Name” tab. Note questions you have and raise them in class.

Here is a description of what you need to do for this assignment, to supplement this reference. We’ll follow the CSE citation sequence system for listing references at the end of your document. This means that your “Reference” section at the end of your document will have a numbered list of references. As you’ll likely have only one reference, the document you’re studying, you’ll have only a single entry listed after “1.”

You’ll be offering quotations of your source in your text. The following suggests a way to offer “in-text” citations necessary when quoting. This is from the Diane Hacker online guide:

Sometimes you will refer to a specific part of a source (such as a figure or

a table) or will quote the exact words of a source. CSE does not provide guidelines for citing a specific part of a source, but your instructor will probably expect you to include an exact reference. The following style is consistent with CSE's other guidelines.

My data thus differ markedly from Markam's study on the same species in

New York 5(Figs. 2,7).

Researchers observed an immune response in "19 of 20 people who ate a

potato vaccine aimed at the Norwalk virus," according to Langridge 3(p. 68).

As you can see, to cite a source in CSE for our purposes, you’ll need to provide a superscript reference number (in our case, 1), and, in parentheses, supply the proper page number for the

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source of your quotation. If you’re using an online document or other unpaginated document, you may provide a paragraph number instead of page number, and put this in parentheses, also in superscript, after your reference number: (par. 10). The period in CSE style, as you’ll note, follows all this citation matter.

Below is my own bibliographic entry for composing this note on citation. Please note that this sample entry is aimed specifically at the text I used. The bibliographic note you offer for the text you’re examining will be completely different.

Reference 1. Research and Documentation Online 5th Edition [Internet]. Sciences: CSE in-text citations; no

date [cited 5 January 2012]. Available from:

http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/resdoc5e/RES5e_ch11_s1-0002.html

Assessment Sheet Unit 1: Analyzing Interdisciplinary Discourse

Fa il

L ow

A t s

ta nd

ar d

G oo

d

E xc

el le

nt

Quotes specific, carefully chosen, and sufficient evidence from chosen text

Offers detailed observations of evidence Offer specific judgments, in analysis, on those observations and how knowledge is ordered and transmitted in the chosen text

Offers specific connections between text, as analyzed, and student’s own career interests, preparation, and current writing skills

Shows understanding of paragraph focus and development Follows proper in-text citation conventions Displays proper grammar, punctuation, and syntax Grade: