Prompted Post 2 Audience And Purpose: Blog- Academic Article

This week I considered style and delivery of another biological engineering blog and an article written by a biological engineering professional. The goal of this exercise is to assess what the writer’s purpose and audience were. To begin I should define what is meant by the author’s style and delivery.  Style is pretty much the writer’s way of writing. A fiction writer would have a much different way of writing when put in contrast to the writer of a technical manual.  The delivery is how the piece of writing is presented. To use the same example as earlier, a fiction writer would most likely present their work in a book or perhaps an audio recording of some celebrity reading the book aloud. The technical manual would most likely be in a small flip book type setup or a brochure type setup.

Secondly, the author’s purpose and audience are also rather simple. The purpose is what the writer planned on accomplishing by writing what they wrote. The fiction writer published their work with the purpose of entertaining their audience. The manual writer put together his piece with the purpose of instructing the operator of whatever the manual was written for on how to properly use the object.
Now down to business for my blog I chose a random post from the front page of the forum. The blog is called “The Biomedical Blog: Engineering”. The post I chose was called “Are cancers a cellular ‘safe mode’? Why do these diseases exist?”.  This post outlined cancers and talked about how they were entirely different from most other diseases. It then got into a new theory about why the disease exists in the first place. This theory has its base in evolution. All life was once one celled and when something in an animal cell breaks it somehow reverts to a primal mode where it tries to outcompete the cells around it without the normal limitations of a normal cell (Simkus).

For the more professional article I decided to use one from my previous post because it fit what I was looking for perfectly. The article was called “Artificial Red Blood Cells” . This article began by describing the many stipulations that were put in place to make sure the “blood” was practical. For instance one requirement was for it to have a shelf life of one year at minimum. Then it described two different types of artificial bloods that engineers have produced. The first one is a chemical called perfluorocarbon. This chemical emulsifies blood and circulates it around the body. The second chemical is called a Hemoglobin-Based Oxygen Carrier. These chemicals bond to oxygen then break down after a relatively short time to release the oxygen to the body (Alberg).

The style of the blog was pretty laid back and used references to computers, obviously aimed at Generation X people. The delivery of this was in a very short blog post. This also implies that it was aimed at a younger crowd of internet savvy kids with short attention spans. I would think that the purpose of this piece was to give people a rundown of some interesting cancer research. I personally would like to know more about the topic.

The academic piece describing artificial red blood cells had a very scholarly style to it. The author liked to use big, sophisticated words to get his information out there. The delivery style was a relatively short report on what the scoop with these artificial blood substitutes were all about.I would wager that this article was for other academic people or other Biomedical engineers, based on the language used. The purpose seemed to be to describe what the capabilities and current drawbacks of these blood mimicking compounds.

Works Cited

Simkus, Glen.  “Are cancers a cellular “safe mode”? Why do these diseases exist?” The Biomedical Blog: Engineering. The Biomedical Blog. 18 July 2013. Web. 11 September 2013.

Alberg, Timothy. “Artificial Red Blood Cells” Biomedical Engineering Program. University of Rohde Island. Web. 11 September 2013