Writing Assignment:

Document Analysis
Technical documents are written to convey specific information to a specific audience for a
specific purpose. Learning to identify the audience and purpose of a given document can provide
insight into your own writing. This assignment requires you analyze a short technical document
from your discpline to determine its audience and purpose and to explicate how its presentation
affects the readers interaction with the document.


Appearance
Single-spaced
1 margins
12 pt Times New Roman
Memo format (see pg. 2)
Use headings as presented on page 2 of this assignment sheet.

Source Document
Choose a white paper, journal article, product description, memo, or similar professional
document from your academic discipline. Your source document cannot be from a newspaper or
general-interest magazine (Time, People, Newsweek, etc.).

Content
Read the document several times, then describe who it was written for, why it was written and
why the audience might read it, and how the presentation/formatting affects the communication
of information. Be as specific as possible.

For each element, provide evidence in the form of specific examples from the document to
support your claim. Remember that claims are often presented like this: Claim Reason
Example/Evidence.

Memorandum

To:

From:

Subject:

Date:

In the first paragraph, describe the purpose of this memo (i.e. to analyze a specific document).
Include the title of the document and where you found it (dont use 1
st
person here). Explain,
briefly, what will be included in the memo: This memo will include a brief background on X-
topic, and an analysis of the documents audience, purpose.

Background
Contextual information which explains what the document is, where it was published, any
techincal terms the reader might not understand, etc.

Analysis
Audience
Purpose
Layout/Presentation