Questions about your Medium

Medium Analysis Form

Questions about your Medium for the Feature Article assignment
For your feature article, you may decide to adopt the form of any one of a number of news sources: newspaper, newsmagazine, journal, etc. The questions below are designed to help you to assess the specific strategies of arrangement and style you will need to adopt in your argument to adapt it to your chosen medium. In order to fill out the chart, you should have in front of you an individual article from the news source that you are working with. For the questions themselves, refer to the specific example as appropriate, but also work on generalizing so that you can derive some basic principles of form to apply to your own project.
Please fill this form out on the computer and post it to your forum folder for Monday, October 17.

What news source are you working with? Be specific as possible: i.e., not just “newspaper” but New York Times, Stanford Daily, or San Francisco Chronicle.

Why? Explain why this particular news source is an appropriate choice for your topic.

Audience: For instance, is it an educated audience? A politically conservative one? A teen-age audience? A tech-savvy audience?

Paragraph structure: Are the paragraphs in the article you choice short? Are there any single sentence paragraphs? Are they well-developed?

Introduction: Does the sample article use a formal introduction? Where is the thesis statement? Is it right away? Is it at the end of the essay? Does the intro have a hook? What is this hook based on (pathos, logo, ethos?)?

Strategies of Persuasion: What strategies does the article rely upon? Narration? Comparison-contrast? Definition? Example? Cause and Effect? Process? Analogy? Classification/Division? What appeals does the article use? Pathos? Logos? Ethos? Which does it rely upon most heavily? How do these decisions relate to your understanding of the medium and the audience?

Evidence: Is the argument driven largely by opinion? By evidence? If the latter, are the sources cited? How?

Voice: Does the author of the article seem opinionated? “objective”? biased? Is the language formal or informal? How does this relate to the mandates of this particular medium?

Design; What is the layout of the piece? Are color and font used deliberately? Does it use visuals? How are those laid out? Are they referred to in the article itself or used as ornamentation? Are there captions for any images? What are the distinguishing characteristics of an article/text from this medium?

Conclusion: How does the piece close? Is there a well-developed conclusion? A call to action? A catchy example? A reference to the introduction? Is there an author bi-line or bio at the end? How do these features relate to the expectations of the medium itself?