Goals

• Discuss clues that can be used in analysis by looking at context of an article(ads/table of contents).
• Discuss conclusions drawn from student analyses.
• Practice providing evidence to support conclusions.
• Compare conclusions with those of other academic text analysis.

Assignment for Day 27
Reading - [Assign the fourth article from your course packet, the one that students will be using as the primary focus for their Text Analysis Reports.] WritingText analysis of this article, using handout. [You might tell students that they don't need to have the entire analysis done by next class, but that they will need to have the analysis and the report (a rough draft) completed for Friday's take-home workshop.]

Activities
Daily - Take another look at the context of the article you read for today. Based on clues that you find in the table of contents and advertisements, what conclusions can you draw about the readers/audience of this magazine in terms of a) political affiliations, b) interests/hobbies, c) socioeconomic status, d) level of education, and e) age?

Discussion of Daily. - The purpose of the following discussion is to practice using contextual clues that can be found outside a text in order to learn something about the text , its audience, and the values that surround it. Students might come up with a variety of responses to the daily questions. Or they might come up with none. You will want to come to class prepared to prompt students to come up with a few of the observations that you yourself have made. What follows is a list of observations that Laura and Stephanie brought to class for this discussion during the summer: [They were using an article from the Utne Reader.]

Additional Clues for Utne Reader Using Ads and Table of Contents:

Political Affiliations?

• * liberal (Working Assets; article on Burma called "Slave Nation", on "politics of soccer", video sex)

Interests/Hobbies?

• * health (vitamins)
• * health of planet (Aveda, Working Assets)

Socioeconomic Status?

Level of Education?

• * fairly high (professional w/degree)--retirement plan ad, articles on Jack Kerouac's meditation tips, assumes familiarity with Eastern philosophy (Tao of the dumpster, kabbalah)

Age?

• * mature adult, 25 - middle age (vitamins, retirement plan, articles)

Conclusions From Students' Analyses - Expand the discussion to include the conclusions students arrived at in analysis of the article itself. They are likely to have had some trouble withtheir first attempt at text analysis on their own. You will want to field questions that they had in conducting their analyses (questions about the article, about the text analysis handout, etc.). However, the main purposes of this discussion are 1) pushing students to yield the kind of conclusions you will be expecting in their papers. [It is best to come into class having done the analysis yourself, with a clear idea of the kinds of conclusions that can be made about this particular text. That way, you can challenge students to complicate and expand their (typically) general or vague conclusions.] and 2) encouraging them to demonstrate how they arrived at their conclusions by offering examples/evidence from their analysis. [Therefore, you will want to be constantly prompting them to give specific examples of their observations.] This discussion will also be helping them to write their Text Analysis Reports since it works BACKWARDS from their conclusions (the same way that their essays will focus on conclusions, with specific examples from the analysis used as support).

Comparison of Texts From Different Disciplines.Once you have established some conclusions for this text analysis, compare it with those you arrived at in the analysis done as a group (last class). Try to turn this into a comparison not only of the texts themselves, but of the different academic disciplines which yielded these texts. [Why do these two academic texts look at the same general topic so differently (or similarly, as the case may be)? What do your conclusions in the analyses of these texts tell you about what each of these academic disciplines value and assume (in relation to one another)?]