For this project, you must analyze the two articles (one an article from a trade journal and one an essay from a scholarly journal) you identified in the First Research Exercise. Your goal is to consider them as rhetorical documents, which means identifying their audience, purpose, and thesis.
An essay in an academic journal is written for people who devote their time and effort to understanding as much as possible and as deeply as possible about a particular field. The essay might present the results of new research or advocate specific interpretations of established facts, but rarely do they propose particular actions. Its fundamental approach and purpose are analytical. Articles in trade journals typically exist to provide readers with information or recommend a particular course of action. To the extent that they provide analysis, it is usually in service to those other two goals.
Among the elements of the articles you must consider to get a clear sense of audience and purpose are the following:
Use of sources: Analyse how both of the articles use sources. Formal academic writing always employs one of the common systems of source documentation, usually MLA, APA, or Chicago, though others exist, and some journals adopt a more idiosyncratic house-style. Beyond that, essays in academic journals typically use quotations more consistently and quote other academic articles. Trade publications may employ quotations, but they are almost always in a less formally documented form, and they are seldom from prior articles on the topic; rather, they tend to quote the people involved. If they quote experts, they usually (though not always) quote them from interviews rather than from publications.
Structure: Examine both articles’s structure. Scholarly essays tend to follow certain structural models. They typically establish the topic by referencing prior academic work. A thesis may appear in the introduction, but does not necessarily do so; sometimes the introduction simply establishes the issue that the thesis will ultimately settle, in which case the thesis typically appears in the essay’s conclusion. Key points are made throughout the essay. In contrast, articles in trade journals more often follow the journalistic convention of front-loading the most important information so that a reader who does not finish reading an article is still likely to absorb the key points. Latter portions of the article provide more detail or commentary, but are unilkely to be essential to understanding the article as a whole.
The writer’s style: Consider the authors’ writing style. Some writers employ a highly formal voice, while others have one that is more relaxed. Highly formal writing, common to academic journals, tends to be denser. Sentences and paragraphs are usually longer and more complex. The vocabulary used is often demanding. In trade journals, the writing — while still grammtically correct, of course, and while it may employ specialized vocabulary unfamiliar to a general audience — is typically less challenging. Also, formal academic writing tends to avoid stylistic elements that other forms of writing employ often, such as contractions and first-person pronouns. In short, highly formal academic writing is the kind that demands a significant amount of concentration and effort, while articles in trade journals are intended for the reader to absorb fully on a single reading.
Thesis or Main Idea: I am using these terms interchangeably here, although technically a thesis is a specific kind of main idea. A thesis must be a statement with which one could conceivably disagree. Virtually every scholarly essay has a thesis. Articles in trade journals may not have a thesis, but they still have a main idea. A trade journal article may simply aim to inform the reader of something, for example. For both articles, you must identify and state the main point as you see it.