Rhetorical Analysis of Academic Journal

In this blog post I will examine a specific journal that I found. This journal is called ASCE which is a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Society for Civil Engineers. The journal is still published, however the U of A library system is completely antiquated and features only journals that were published over 10 years ago. Nevertheless they are the most recent journals in physical stock at the system of University libraries.

The authors of all of the journal articles in the December 2001 issue of ASCE are all experts in the civil engineering field, many of whom have worked in the field for years. These are the people involved in writing this journal: Dale Buckner, A. Dutta, J.B. Mander, Michelle Brocca, Zdenek Bazant, W.P. Kwan, S.L. Billington, Mohamad Mansour, Jung-Yoon Lee, Thomas Hsu, Beatrice Belletti, Roberto Cerioni, Ivo Iori, Alessandra Aprile, Andrea Benedetti, Hyo-Gyoung Kwak, Sun-Pil Kim, Enrico Spacone, Suchart Limkatanyu, M.S. Lee, Deric Oehlers, Mark Bradford, Jennifer Durham, Frank Lam, Helmut Prion, Xinzhong Chen, Ahsan Kareem, R.A. Cook, D Bloomquist, D.S. Richards, M.A. Kalajian, David Gromala, Lip Teh, Kuo-Mo Hsiao, Donald White, Ronald Ziemian. This in total is 36 different authors in this one journal issue. All of or most of these people are members of ASCE and are professional engineers. Thus they are all portrayed as knowledgeable people and as prominent engineers to watch out for in the future. Most of these people talk about projects which they had been working on and are showing their findings.

The intended audience of this specific journal is the members of ASCE first and foremost but then in extension the general Civil Engineering community. This is a pretty obvious audience as the journal is specifically written for people who are paying members of ASCE. These people get first access to the journal. Again though the secondary audience of the journal is the general Civil Engineering community, this is because of the content of the journal which focuses exclusively on ongoing developments in the Civil Engineering fields. This subject matter is intended for people that are familiar with the concepts in civil.

This journal has the context of being published in December of 2001 very shortly after the September 11 attacks on the United States in which a major infrastructure icon was attacked by terrorists. The journal is typically presented in a format of a formal report or presentation. The journal is a monthly publication that focuses on different publications of papers by different civil engineers across the country. Many of the people that are published in this journal have other papers that have been published in other ASCE journals or other Civil Engineering journals.

The overall message of the journal is progress. I concluded this because everything in the journal focuses on advancements in engineering practice or the advancement of concepts in the civil field. Only a small minority of the articles mention negative things, despite being only months after the September 11th attacks. Almost all articles focus on topics such as improving building materials or changing construction techniques.

I've really already stated the purpose of this journal several times, the largest purpose of this journal is to inform the reader of advancements in the civil engineering field as well as to inform the reader of technique advancements or the work in improving the materials that are used in construction. The reason why this is the purpose is because that is all the journal talks about.

Jason Boley, "ASCE 2001", Public Domain

Jason Boley, "ASCE 2001 Cover", Public Domain