Reflective commentary

The purpose of my article is to – comment, unambiguously commenting on disempowering language in emails and the app which was designed to correct these faults. The audience which my article was specifically aimed at was – women, the register is informal however also consist of Standard English.

In terms of graphology, I decided to position an enlarged image in the middle of the page of a computer screen with handwritten post-it notes scattered across the entire screen to emphasise the continuity of apologies that come across as weak in emails. Pragmatically, the fact I chose the post-it notes to be stuck on a computer screen accentuates and underlines that the article is about technology. The poor lexical choice of – ‘sorry’, repetitively and cyclically being demonstrated on the post-it notes shows a sign of weakness when written in emails. Therefore the recurrence of ‘sorry’, draws attention to the fact that it’s not the superlative word choice. Before I wrote the main fragment of my article, I composed a short sentence briefly explaining what the bulk of my article would consist of. This subdivided text is also in bold and enlarged to make this one of the first things people see when looking at the article, this would also give the women an idea of what to expect before reading. I also included conventions of a magazine in my article – page numbers were incorporated at the bottom left corner, also it was written in columns to emphasis the fact it was from an article.

I decided to incorporate some phonological features when writing my article, for example – lexical onomatopoeia: ‘pop-ups’, this associates with the semantic field of – technology, plus the audience would have to have an understanding of the topic to know what some of the specific jargon means. I also selected to use: alliteration, for example, ‘app alerts’

There is a semantic field of – technology, shown through the lexis, ‘message’, ‘emails’, and ‘Gmail’, also how the post-it notes are placed on a computer screen. The article uses referential language, for example – ‘emoji’s’, whereby meaning the reader will have to have some understanding of the jargon written to comprehend the article. The informality comes through in the lexis when I began to write about famous celebrities – ‘Jennifer Laurence’, the audience of: women, will know who she is; therefore making my article more applicable and they will be able to relate.

Grammatically, I encompassed various noun phrases in the article, ‘female scientist’, a noun phrase is a quintessential part of every sentence and in this case it also targets the particular audience – women. If I used the noun – ‘male’, this would not be as effective due to it being a female audience. I decided to implicate interrogatives within my article, ‘does this even make sense?’ this is a vague way of including the audience, it makes the reader feel as if they’re being questioned and gets them involved, this creates diverse thoughts in their mind when reading. I regularly used first person pronouns, ‘I’m’, and ‘my’, and therefore allows the reader to relate to my opinions stated in the article. It is also a frequent convention used when writing articles so the audience is able to share the same attitudes and beliefs. Furthermore, numerous exclamatories were used several times – ‘sorry!’ This was repeated on the image on the post-it notes to emphasise the importance of the meaning of the text – how people use disempowering language in emails, by unremittingly apologising.

The discourse structure is – a narrative account, I chose to write in this discourse as it was able to contain emotional links with the reader as well as rational justifications.