How do the texts differ in terms of vocabulary?

Audience Analysis Memo

Content • Introduction: This folder contains the read-only assignment sheet for the audience analysis and the link to discussion board to post the first draft of assignment #1 and two peer reviews • READ ME: One of the most difficult assignments of this course is the “Audience Analysis Memo” because some students confuse technical and non-technical websites and end up contrasting two non-technical websites. It is incredibly important, in your career, to know how to examine different audiences and speak back to members of each audience. In connection with nursing, when you talk with a patient, a quick five-minute conversation will let you know their communication ability, their educational level, and perhaps their preferred method of communication (verbal, textual, visual). When you are working with the first assignment, you do need to figure out how to tell the difference between a non-technical and technical website. Here are two examples with some questions to answer to yourself to get you started thinking about figuring out the difference: TEXT A: “People have been pulling freshwater out of the oceans for centuries using technologies that involve evaporation, which leaves the salts and other unwanted constituents behind. Salty source water is heated to speed evaporation, and the evaporated water is then trapped and distilled. This process works well but requires large quantities of heat energy, and costs have been far too high for nearly all but the wealthiest of nations, such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. (One exception is the island of Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles, which has provided continuous municipal supplies using desalination since 1928.) To make the process more affordable, modern distillation plants recycle heat from the evaporation step. A potentially cheaper technology called membrane desalination may expand the role of desalination worldwide, which today accounts for less than 0.2 percent of the water withdrawn from natural sources. Membrane desalination relies on reverse osmosis—a process in which a thin, semipermeable membrane is placed between a volume of saltwater and a volume of freshwater. The water on the salty side is highly pressurized to drive water molecules, bot salt and other impurities, to the pure side. In essence, this process pushes freshwater out of saltwater” (Martindale, 2001). TEXT B: “Reverse osmosis (RO) membrane systems are often used for seawater and brackish water desalination. The systems are typically installed as a network of modules that must be designed to meet the technical, environmental, and economic requirements of the separation process. The complete optimization of an RO network includes the optimal design of both the individual module structure and the network configuration. For a given application, the choice and design of a particular module geometry depends on a number of factors, including tendency, required recovery, and capital cost of auxiliary equipment. With suitable transport equations to predict the physical performance of the membrane module, it should be possible to obtain an optimal module structure of any given application” (Maskan et al., 2000). Answer these questions to yourself: • How do the texts differ in terms of vocabulary? • How do the texts differ in terms of detail? • Which is the non-technical text? Which is the technical text? How can you tell? •