Web Site Analysis Exercise

Read chapter 5: Analysis, and refer to it as you work with this exercise. This exercise gives you a chance to look more closely at the processes of analysis to get a sense of how it works. We'll talk about what you discovered and how you proceeded at our next class session.

The Exercise

Start a new page on your wiki name page titled WebSiteAnalysis?.

Use the classical rhetoric search model of chapter 9 to analyze the Experience Dynamics web site using the seven top-level web pages. (www.experiencedynamics.com). There is more to the site than seven pages, but confine your analysis to those seven listed in the top navigation bar.

You will need to consider not just the written text, but the common and changing elements of the pages, the page layout, and the text design (the use of headings, text, run-in subheadings, and so on). Draw on your experience with other web pages to help you identify these design elements and describe the pages.

Description

Record your thinking. As before, compose a set of notes under the heading Description:

• Description of the rhetorical context
• Description of the pages

Use a balcony view and neutral language: no evaluation here. Get in close enough that you can work your way to a solid one or two paragraph characterization of the seven pages, noting the rhetorically salient points and aspects you observe.

Analysis

When you have made enough notes that you can characterize the pages in a paragraph or two, move to a new heading: Analysis. This is where you apply the search model selectively to the pages, naming the parts of the message and looking for rhetorical patterns.

Re-read chapter 9. Then start with notes recording your analysis under the heading

• rhetorical properties (rhetorical affordances) of the site pages.

Draw on the classical model to locate, isolate, or see these properties, and to record them. Properties can be strategies; they can be the use of rhetorical devices such as arrangement or style; they can be the use of ethos, pathos, or logos ... It's up to you in analyzing to find a set of properties that will yield insight into how the message works.

You will need to use the technical concepts - and so the terminology - of the classical model to record the properties you see. Again, refer to chapter 9.

If you have a hard time seeing rhetorical properties in the site, return to your description. The act of describing tends to open into analysis.

Once you have notes on the rhetorical properties you're focusing on, look for patterns in those rhetorical properties, and make notes on those patterns. Refer to chap 5:

• patterns of repetition
• patterns of sequencing
• patterns of omission
• anomalies to patterns
• patterns of relationships

For this exercise, look for all five patterns. They may not all yield, but you need to look closely before you decide.

Summary

Finally, create a heading Summary. If you've created a close analysis, you are right on the edge of interpretation. So compose a few paragraphs drawing on your notes to summarize your analysis: presenting the rhetorical parts you have noticed, the relations between those parts you have noticed, and the patterns in the message you have noticed. End with a paragraph of speculative interpretation: a consideration of the effect of the patterns you have observed, their use, their arrangement.

Notes

• Keep your eye on the message. You're seeking to look at the message that reveals how it works, and reveal "relationships not apparent to the naked eye" (82).
• Neutral language, balcony view.
• A mark that analysis is taking place is the use of the search model's terminology, a technical vocabulary. It may be awkward at first, but you'll become comfortable with it with practice.