Purpose: To allow you to gain a better understanding of the importance of genre and discourse community knowledge to writers

To allow you to better understand the ways writing differs among genres

To allow you to strengthen your skills in writing in the genre of a textual analysis (a form of academic essay)

Task:

• Locate and photocopy at least two texts on the same subject from different genres. For example, you could find an article within a scholarly journal (whose audience will be knowledgeable in the field) related to your major or field of interest and then find an article on the same topic that was written for a general audience. Alternatively, you could look at an editorial on a political issue, a government report on the issue, and several message board posts or letters to the editor in response to the editorial.

• After you have analyzed each text, do a comparison of the texts considering each of the four genre features we have been analyzing with sample genres. Once you have done the genre analysis, consider how you could generalize your findings about these genres in a five-to six-page academic essay. Include the two articles you are analyzing and bibliographic citations to these articles in your completed project.