Rhetorical Genre Analysis Part 1

Engineering and Development Manager at Comcast

Genre: Emails

• Purpose: Quick communication to get across information about specific project details
• Primary Audience: Individual subordinates, rest of team
• Secondary Audience: His bosses that might check up
• Context surrounding this text: Updates on the progress of their part of the project or guidance on how to complete their part
• Surface-level conventions: Words of encouragement, semi-professional, technical terms
• Content included: Specific advice
• Organization/structure: Greeting, touching bases, advice, appreciation
• Affordances: Personal and personalized communication, convenient communication to be able to keep the project running smoothly
• Constraints: Employees need to read their emails in a timely fashion to be able to adapt their parts of the project according to needs

Genre: Reports

• Purpose: To provide an update on the project, to be able to map out the timeline of the project
• Primary Audience: The boss
• Secondary Audience: Rest of the team
• Context surrounding this text: Updates on the progress of the project and state of communication/collaboration between team members
• Surface-level conventions: Proper grammar, sophisticated vocabulary, less technical terms
• Content included: Measurable statistics such as percentage of progress, rate of success for different managing strategies
• Organization/structure: Formal greeting, main body, graphs, charts, timeline
• Affordances: Keeps progresses organized and trackable for all people related to the project
• Constraints: Possibility of not being able to speak to the specific technical knowledge like the employees assigned to specific tasks