Find an article out of Popular Mechanics magazine. Compare the first two or three paragraphs of that article with a passage from one of your favorite novels using the following categories: Content, Organization, Layout, Intended Audience, Purpose, Tone.
You should notice a distinct difference in each of the categories, leading to how each is distinct in its clarity, coherence, and conciseness.
*******************************************************************************Article: The Ingredients for Lifehttp://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/deep/ingredients-for-life-nasa-arsenic-extremeophiles
Novel: Regeneration by Pat Barkerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_(novel)Passage: 37 and 38"Up, up, until his way was barred by a fence whose wire twitched in the wind. A tuft of grey wool had caught on one of the barbs. Burns blinked the rain out of his eyes. He pressed two strands of wire apart and eased himself through, catching his sleeve, and breaking into a sweat as he struggled to free it.
Trembling now, he began to scramble along the edge of the ploughed field, slipping and stumbling, his mud-encumbered boots like lead weights pulling on the muscles of his thighs. His body was cold inside the stiff khaki, except for a burning round the knees where the tight cloth chafed the skin.
He was walking up the slope of a hill, tensing himself against the wind that seemed to be trying to scrape him off it side. As he reached the crest, a fiercer gust snatched his breath. After that he kept his head bent, sometimes stopping to draw a deeper breath through the steeple of his cupped hands. Rain beat on his head, dripping from the peak of his cap, the small bones of nose and jaw had started to sing. He stopped and looked across the field. The distance had vanished in a veil of rain. He didn't know where he was going, or why, but he thought he ought to take shelter, and began to run clumsily along the brow of a hill towards a distant clump of trees. The mud dragged him, he had to slow to a walk. Every step was a separate effort, hauling his mud-clogged boots out of the sucking earth. His mind was incapable of making comparisons, but his aching things remembered, and he listened for the whine of shells."
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Content
Article: The general content in the first 2 paragraphs are informative. There is a lot of defining of terms that are not usually known by those who do not study or are familiar with scientific terms and the purposes of those terms, such as the purpose of lipids and the components of DNA and RNA (phosphorus and ribose).
Novel: The general contene in the passage I chose from my favorite novel describes a particular instance of personal struggle of one of the main characters of the novel. It shows that in his walk around the grounds of a mental institution, he is overcome by a storm and it shows that though he has been coping from his experiences in the war, he is still suffering and reminded of his fears that he experienced. This passage is more descriptive than informational.
Organization
Article: The article is organized in outline format. Since the article is informing the reader, it breaks down the important terms, their meaning and function and then quickly proceeds to the main point for the article, the discovery of a substitute for phosphours, an ingredient to the building blocks of DNA and RNA. It is a short one page article, that relays exciting and important information in a succinct way.
Novel: The novel is organized in a story line format. It seeks to entice the reader and draw the reader into the psyche and personal dilemmas soliders endured during World War I. It decides to focus on the soldiers that did not return from war heroes, soldiers that returned with decapitation of the legs or arms, soldiers that returned not completely sane. This dark sector of the war and its impact on the human mind is the focal point versus an informatinal, succinct format that the article portrayed.
Layout
Article: The layout was a simple, Intro, body and conclusion. Its layout was a traditional hard news article outline, in which an expert was interviewed and quoted as support to the information written.
Novel: The layout was consistent with a noval format.
Intended Audience
Article: I believe the intended audience are those who are interested but may not work or study within the science field. The magazine website is called popular mechanics, so I believe the writing was geared towards those who take in interest in the technical aspect of things: how and why things work the way they do. The article was definitely organized in a way to help those who are technical in thinking understand the scientific information in the article they may or may not be familiar with.
Novel: I believe the novel's intended audience are those who are interested in the human psyche: psychologists, students in the psycology field. I also believe that current military members, veterans of the military or family of military members may also be an intended audience because of the similar experiences and interactions those closely associated with any military group have.
Purpose
I feel like I am repeating my self, but the purpose of the article is to inform and share new information. The purpose of the novel was artistic expression and exploration of human interaction, specifically veterans of war.
Tone
Article: The tone of the article is very professional. However, as the article is informing the audience of information in the science field, there is a conversational tone to engage the reader. For example,the title of the artile "The Ingredients for Life," is what made me first interested in reading the article.
Novel: I personally felt the tone of the novel was a little dark. It was sad yet there were a couple of humourous lines. In the specific passage, it is a dark tone. The descriptive words to describe the storm and his struggle to some kind of shelter were very moving.
