Alan Burdick's Articles And Progression Summary

Summary of Alan Burdick’s Articles and Progression Alan Burdick, a staff writer for The New Yorker. His focus is on mainly on writing about scientific discoveries and information. Of the eight articles analyzed, seven of the eight contained a large portion of scientific information. Burdick’s articles all had the general public as the audience and majority of the articles analyzed had scientific groups included in the article’s intended audience. This audience group was achieved by creating a balance between casual tones and formal tones. By balancing the two, the audience range increased from just scientific groups reading formal texts and the general public reading only casual texts. Using tone, sentence structure, and diction, Burdick

The genre of most of the articles was a scientific report or article. All eight articles analyzed contained scientific evidence as either the majority of the text or as evidence for another claim. Nearly all articles had a amalgamating of genres, usually a current event with the evidence written as a scientific article would be. The writing style in all the articles analyzed was a combination of an expository style and a persuasive style. Burdick’s articles have the perfect balance of an informative article with a hint of persuasion. This persuasion adds depth to the article, resulting in an effective writing style. Most of the articles contain an element of impartial tone, adding to the scientific report piece of the article. A casual to formal diction is used with alternating positive and negative diction to further persuade the reader in a gentle way. Burdick uses a variety of sentences lengths and structures, creating dimension in the text as well as an extra level of interest in the reader. Because of the varying sentence lengths, and lack of monochromatic tones, the interest level in the reader

The topics covered, scientifically, range from paleontology, archeology, psychology, the study of batteries, engineering, and astronomy. Other topics and areas covered include politics, the work place, the history of humans and their evolution, swearing, pain tolerance, the psychological effects of keeping secrets, sextortion, and the Earth. Burdick’s style, used consistently throughout the articles was one of light, concealed persuasion in combination of hard fact. This style is very effective. The reader is learning and digesting new information while being unknowingly manipulated by Burdick himself. By using positive diction in certain areas and negative diction in others, Burdick is nudging the reader into an opinion on the information displayed, while ensuring that the reader is forming the desired opinion through