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Sarah Polo, Disc 200: The Tech Enterprise, Spring ’15 1
Critical Discourse Analysis Essay
Unit 2: How is power communicated through language?
Weight: 15% of final grade
SLOs:
Interpret and analyze discourse that deals with issues of cultural and/or global diversity in a variety of
forms.
Develop an advanced understanding of critical discourse analysis and critical language awareness.
Use written and oral discourse to develop and present meaningful and interesting ideas that show the
students’ voices, a willingness to take intellectual risks, and an ability to enter an academic
conversation.
Communicate competently in several genres and in response to the needs of different audiences.
Create discourse through a more sophisticated process that includes editing, proofreading, and
revising multiple drafts.
Critique their own and others' works and assess their own development as producers of discourse.
Appropriately cite sources using a consistent professional style (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.) at an
intermediate level.
Assignment:
In this essay, you will create an argument to answer the questions: How do different authors use
language, rhetorical strategies, and power to persuade their intended audiences? What does an
author’s use of language, rhetorical strategies, and power say about the values of their respective
discourse communities?
Begin your work by selecting 2 articles related to the field of technology. You will have to use the
library’s databases, as demonstrated in class, to locate the articles. I encourage you to try and find a
niche of the broad technology subject that interests you, so as to make your analysis more meaningful
to you. Once you have read through each article, you are ready to begin analyzing them. Questions you
should investigate for each article include:
Who is the author? What can you find out about them?
What “discourse group” does this author belong to?
Who is the intended audience (Who did the author intend to persuade/speak to when writing this
article)? How do you know?
What discourse group would members of the intended audience belong to? Is it a different group
than the one the author belongs to? If so, did the author make adjustments to better persuade
someone outside their group?
Where/when was the article published? What does that tell you about the intended audience?
What is the author’s thesis? What did he/she intend to convince readers of?
How is jargon being used/not used in the article?