Textual analysis
Analysis of a newspaper article

The article I decided to analyze is titled “He's behind you!”, subtitled “Shark and humans” and it's taken from the online version of The Economist. The whole article can be found here. The author of the article is not specified.
In the article the author says (and proofs) that sharks are conscious of attacking humans because they attack them from behind: they are able to recognize where a man is looking.

The analysis will be based on the identification of the rhetorical strategies the author used in order to make the reader interested in the article.

The title immediately attracts the reader. The big font (and the bright color of the subheading) draws the attention of the reader on the words “He's behind you!”: the reader wants to know what exactly is behind him. This lack of knowledge makes the reader feel uncomfortable and the red word “shark” alarms him: sharks are dangerous animals, predators, and the sentence ends with an exclamation mark. The heading is effective because the title creates expectations in the reader and the subtitle gives to him a provable answer to his question: "what is standing behind me?". The reader can now suppose that it is a shark which is standing behind him.
The title increases the curiosity in the reader because it doesn't explain why a shark is told to be behind the reader: is the reader in danger? This rhetorical strategy attracts the reader who wants to read the article in order to find out more information and answers.

Using these strategy the author has stroke the reader's curiosity and must keep high attention and interest.

The opening paragraph should have the function to provide the most important information, exposing the topic of the article. In order to keep high interest it shouldn't provide all information.
The paragraph starts with the words “Human being” so every human should be interested in what the article is going to deal with. The section provides the topic: sharks attack humans and they know exactly what they are doing. This statement goes against the general idea of sharks misunderstanding human shape and attacking him as a fish. The reader is now baffled and even more curious to know more about this problem. The text supplies details about the man who thinks this, Erich Ritter, of the Shark Research Institute, in America. He's an expert so the reader trusts him.
Furthermore the paragraph ends with the sentence “he has the data to prove it”. This strategy creates a great curiosity: the reader could hardly believe the statement and he wants proves to convince himself.

In the further paragraphs the author provides those data: an experiment seems to confirm Ritter hypothesis. The author decides not to immediately show those data. He chooses to describe the experiment. This section doesn't provides any information so the attention/curiosity of the reader starts to decrease. The author knows this and so, after such descriptive paragraph, he provides the outcome (as a statistic) of the experiment. The result confirms this hypothesis: sharks know exactly which is the front side of a man, so they can attack him from behind.

The reader has all the answers he wanted to have and now he doesn't need anything else, so the article ends, reconfirming the thesis.

The ideal reader of this article is the average man. The article is not hard to understand and it is not a biology essay. Everyone could read it and could be interested in the argument. The language is used in order to increase curiosity so you will read the article even if you are not particularly interested in sharks.

The average reader might read the article because the title draws his attention and immediately increases his curiosity. If the reader starts reading he will go on because the first paragraph keeps high the interest.