Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Textual Rhetorical Analysis


            I am going to be textually analyzing the article, Helping Severely Injured Children Make a Recovery. I will be looking at what the context tells us about the writer, how the organization of the text helps the writer get their point across, and how the delivery of the information aids in helping the reader understand.

            The context of this article helps us learn a lot about this author which helps us to understand the article. Going by the article as a whole you can tell that the doctor probably has a lot of experience in her field. This could also lead to the possibility that the woman is older and has a different view of things then a younger doctor might which could affect how she plans things and ideas that she might come up with. She might be more likely to stick with a method that is known to work than to try a new method that she was not taught in medical school. The writer is also clearly writing for others in the medical field which is fairly obvious since she uses words that the average person might not understand. For example when she is talking about procedures she uses works like hypotensive, oximeter, and Glasgow coma scale which are all words that are only used in a medical field. The author assumes that the people who will most likely be reading this article will have a basic medical knowledge and will understand these words and know what they mean. The words also help the writer get their point across without having to add in long descriptions about what each medical term was which would have complicated and detracted from the point of the article.

            The organization of the article helped a lot in the understanding of the article. The title article tells you right away what you will be reading about. The article is further separated into three parts which allow the information to be organized chronologically and by importance. The order of the paper makes it easy to understand the order in which things should be done when a child comes into a hospital who has experience trauma. A checklist could probably be made from this article for other doctors to use when treating a child due to the neatness of the organization within the article. The separate subheadings also help you to understand when exactly the author is changing the topic. The first subheading “Oxygen, Airway, Fluids”, tells you exactly what you will be reading about in the next couple of paragraphs and the second subheading, “Outcomes”, tells you that the final paragraph is about what happens to children after they have been successfully treated for these symptoms. Putting all these things together leads to a much better understanding of the topic that the author is writing on.

            The delivery of the article was helpful in understanding it. The use of subtitles aided greatly in understanding the topic the author was writing about. The spacing also helped as it allowed you time to switch to a different topic without confusing the information you just read and the information you are about to read. The lack of pictures or diagrams did detract some from the article. A diagram or picture would have been useful to help with understanding how to accomplish the procedures mentioned such as the intraosseous needle insertion and it could have helped give direction to a doctor who was reading the article and needed assistance in how to complete a needle insertion. The pictures or diagrams would need to be picked carefully though or though could lead to distracting people from the point of the article.

            Overall the organization, delivery, and context of the paper assists in helping the author make their point. Without these things the reader could be confused and end up not understanding the point of the article.

No comments:

Post a Comment