Project Proposal Rhetorical Analysis

xxxxxxxxx
English
xxxxxxx

For this rhetorical analysis I have done research on two electronics engineering documents commonly referred to as project proposals. The first project proposal that was reviewed was for Security Guard Monitoring Systems by Group Engineering Solutions (GES). The second proposal is a business-oriented document for Multi-Robot Manipulation and Maintenance for Fault-Tolerant Systems by Shanghai International Conference Center (SICC). The purpose of this rhetorical analysis is to identify various similarities and differences within the specified texts using Anne Beaufort’s (a linguist in the field of writing) five-knowledge domains: genre, subject matter, rhetoric, writing process, and discourse community. The attention
Shanghai’s proposal was obviously written in response to a company’s request for improved multi-robot systems. This demand was recognized because of the frequently used term referring to problems, errors, and system malfunctions. More specifically, they used the term “failure” more consistently than others throughout the paper (from I INTRODUCTION to VI CONCLUSION). For instance, in part “a” of section five (V Multi- Robot Maintenance policy) the writer of this Shanghai proposal says “In this period…the failure rate of the robot is also increased.” Another aspect contained within the Shanghai proposal is on how they express time as an issue. The term “failure” also implies that there is a time limit for this project proposal. It is relevant to assume that this project proposal was in the process of being developed during the time that the multi-robot machines were failing to operate accordingly. One can also tell that demand for the proposal was growing by reading the maintenance policy section. They take previous robot failures into considerations and develop loop holes to overcome it. Although the company that the proposal was written for isn’t mentioned in the document, it is easy to see that this proposal was written in response to some company’s
The first similarity located in the proposals is often used in writing books such as literature, political science, and algebra. Both proposals use a wide range of bold letters, titles, and numbers. They also use titled numbers or subheadings, bullets, and roman numerals. Even though these writing style are incorporated in both project proposals, GES uses titled numbers, subheadings, and bullets (even checks) more frequently than Shanghai’s proposal. Shanghai’s proposal repeatedly uses roman numerals, and subheadings with starting letters (for example; B. Robot Failure). Both seem to be an effective approach to formatting project proposals. Moreover, abbreviations are also used quite frequently throughout the proposals. Like GES, Shanghai makes an effort to use abbreviations to make it less difficult for readers to comprehend. However, their attempt in doing so has obvious flaws that can potentially puzzle the reader and shorten the number of intended audiences. For example, “Weibull distribution depicts the decreasing-failure-rate (DFR)…period of the bathtub curve” (section B: Robot Failure). The proposal tells what each letter in the acronym stands for, but it does not define the abbreviation as a whole whereas, GES proposal doesn’t give an explicit description of each term, but defines it completely. Another method of