This analysis attempts to examine the two extracts, based upon the readership, structure, and style. The non-academic extract is written by Sam Anderson ‘French Twist: How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read proves its own point’ to review the work of Pierre Bayard, and the academic extract The Rudiments of a Theory of Aesthetic Response is excerpted from The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response by Wolfgang Iser. The differences between two extracts will be analysed below.
The difference between the two extracts is the readership that includes the content, audience, and reader’s prior knowledge of a topic. The contents of two extracts address a similar subject matter on how the audiences read and absorb their reading when “reading is no longer a passive going over what has already been composed, but rather an active process in which the audience participates” (Crosman,1978). In the non-academic extract (journalistic style) Anderson appeals to the general audience-those are interested or supposed to discuss about books they have or have not read. Iser’s academic extract, on the other hand, provides the aesthetic theory for intended audiences who may be interested in the reading process or in the literary criticism. If we think of the differences between these two extracts in term of the audience’s prior knowledge of a topic, it is possible to see audiences who are both supposed to maintain a sense of professionalism with a clear awareness of responding to the reading.
The structures determined for analysis are sentence and paragraph structures. Anderson’s non-academic article contains most short or conversational sentences which connect audiences to his thoughtful viewpoint. Each non-academic paragraph begins with an idea that is too satire to build the whole humour article. In contrast, Iser’s academic sentences are most structured with a range of long preposition phrases (e.g. ) or verb phrases (e.g. and , uses some details of grammar...