Note: I apologize for my awkward English here, but these notes were more personal; so, I did not edit carefully my ideas here.

Questions/criteria Answers Comments/gloss

Size A letter page

Texture It seems to be old, and probably it is a stored document

Color The paper is white, most of the font is black and the two first lines were written in blue

Relationships among elements There is a central sentence in the top of the document The second sentence is written within quotation marks After lines of white spaces, some information (student and instructor name, student ID, and date) is presented aligned on the right and left extremes. After, a box includes information that is a reference and is written in bold and kept the formal style for citations

This box could indicate that for this writer starts with the reference is important. Additionally, I realized in this moment of the analysis that the author used the original title of the text she read as part of the headline of this assignment. It seems that using quotations marks is a strategy to highlight that the author is taking words from others.

The rest of the text is comprised by 5 blocks of information and with the same size of margins in both extremes. The 5 blocks are comprised by the following amount of lines, respectively : 4, 12, 9, 7, and 2. The latter seems to contain just 2 lines because there was not more space to write

In this point of the analysis I decided to start reading the content within the paragraphs in order to explore the differences in the amount of lines that every block of information comprised.

At this point of the analysis, I would like to called “paragraphs” every block of information I saw. Therefore, I guess I should be explicit upon what counts as paragraph to me: It is a block of content organized in order to make sense as part of the communicative intent pursued by someone while writing.

However, I am unsure if it is possible that there are “paragraphs” that do not make any sense???

Contextualizing the elements According to the description made so far, and the context (?) I knew about the text, this document addresses a teacher as a first audience…however, after analyzing the content from a rhetoric point of view could show other audiences build by the author efforts.

First paragraph: A sentence is written within quotation marks. The same sentence written in the second line of the headline of the text, which is the title of the chapter read by the student. After the sentence, there is an ellipsis (…). At the end of the utterance in the second line of the first block of information there is another punctuation mark (:), a colon.

It seems that the writer used the quotation marks and the ellipsis to start her dialogue with the chapter read. In doing so, the writer stated her stance, since in this first paragraph she introduced a critical point from which, probably, she will develop her argumentative perspective in the rest of the text. Since I knew the context of this writing sample, I think that I was able to make the prior inferences.

I think that at this point of the analysis I started doing a content analysis rather than a visual one? So, I decided to stop at this point.