Princesleah Aguilera ENGW 2326 – RARR 2 Dr. Drew Loewe 7 March 2017
Part I: Objective Summary
RARR #2
The text that I am analyzing is a book review from a blog that I follow on Tumblr. I chose this because I like to follow different sources that write about books, specifically dealing with the young adult genre. This helps me see how the authors of the pieces vary from medium to medium. Tumblr was the medium in this case and the author is a blogger under the name of, “paperbackd.” I’m not sure if I would categorize as an official book review, since it wasn’t professional but they do attempt to follow the format and use star-ranking as well. I found this article before reading the book and wasn’t sure if I should rely on it or not. I chose not to because I don’t have the time to be reading books for fun. However, I would like to critique the writer that almost convinced me to read the book but didn’t quite do the job. “Paperbackd” spoke casually about the book in some instances. They figured that since they were writing about a young adult novel, that their style would cater to a young adult audience. Their purpose was to inform the reader of a book and convince them to read it since that’s what the piece did for me, but overall it was to inform the reader and give an opinion about what they thought about the book. The author’s specific purpose, genre, audience, and tone reflect on what artifact she chose to critique as well. The purpose of the review was to inform the audience of her opinion on the artifact she was evaluating. The genre of the writing is a type of book review or an opinionated piece of writing with a rating system. The audience is young adults mostly since the artifact was classified to cater to young adults. The kairos of the book review allowed the author to present a bigger opportunity for the author of the “You’re Welcome, Universe” to gain publicity, but also set a platform and attract young adult readers for themselves. Lastly, the tone of the review was casual, relaxed, and adolescent-like for the sake of her audience. They met most of the criteria for a generic book review, but still lacked an opinion that readers would mostly want, which I will be explaining in the rhetorical analysis.
Part II: Rhetorical Analysis The text’s rhetoric relates to its intended audience because of its attempt to reach a specific group of people: young adult fiction readers. She successfully connects with her audience by publishing on a medium that young adults tend to use and chooses an artifact for young adults. The author’s main strength was that they didn’t critique how well the book was written, but how well the topic was about what was written. Rather than introducing the book and criticizing the way it was written, they use the content in the book and directly talk to the reader about it. The author makes it a habit to talk about the characters of the book like they are right in front of you and give the youngadult audience a relative and familiar piece of writing for the book review genre. However, in my opinion, her language could have related with her audience more, some phrases were too wordy, and given a more insightful opinion to the book rather than most of it being a summary. Her first stated opinion sentence arrives almost at the end of the full book review. In the last paragraph of the review she states that the views expressed were her own, but in my opinion to make a better generic book review, “paperbackd” should have expressed more opinion instead of making the review 75% summary and 25% opinion. However, just because I feel that way about the piece,