A1 Business and Technical Animation Videos of Hydraulic Fracturing Analysis

This exercise asks you to apply what you learned about purpose and audience in the textbook chapters by analyzing two public documents – in particular, two videos that present information about hydraulic fracturing. After analyzing the purpose and audience of each document, you’ll compare the two videos to see how specific choices in content and design target reflect differences in the works’ purpose and audience.

Animation of Hydraulic Fracturing (fracking) (Links to an external site.)

How does fracking work? (Links to an external site.)

Instructions

Analyze each video and compare it to the other using the following guiding questions:

Note: As you answer these questions, think carefully about who made each of these videos, and why. Do research on the companies that produced them, if necessary. Keep in mind that it takes money to make a video like this; why do you thing the authors decided to spend this money?

For each video, analyze purpose:

1. What do you think the purpose is?
2. What specific aspects or elements of the video suggest the purpose you have identified?

For each video, analyze audience:

1. Identify primary/secondary audiences, as appropriate
2. Identify all relevant audience characteristics and categories for each audience (i.e., knowledge level, personality, biases, etc.)
3. Explain your reasons for characterizing the audience the way you do (i.e., What’s your evidence for your conclusions?).

Compare the two analyses:

1. Are the purposes the same for each video? Different? How do you know?
2. Are the audiences the same for each video? Different? How do you know?

Submit your answers in a Word document or PDF.