Genre Analysis of www.susanorlean.com

Overview:

For my Genre Analysis project I looked into the websites of different writers and authors and finally settled on Susan Orlean’s personal website. Her site is a fun and informative site that allows her to communicate with her fans and showcase her articles written for the New Yorker as well as promote her books and other writings.

The author of www.susanorlean.com is Miss Susan Orlean herself. Managing and updating her site allows her voice to speak directly to her fans and critics. There is quite a bit of personal dialogue within her site introducing herself, as well as several links to her published articles and books.

Susan Orlean’s site also includes links to personal interviews as well as book reviews. The authors of the reviews are given credit through their own pages.

Although there are others contributing to her page through the form of reviews and such, Susan Orlean is the main author of her site. This is shown by the copyright line at the bottom of the page showing All content copyright © 2002-2004 Susan Orlean.

Susan Orlean’s site is geared toward her fans and readers (primary user group), as well as potential fans and readers (perhaps secondary user group). There are several links that are meant to appeal to these groups such as the About Me link, Articles, Books and News & Reviews.

Susan Orlean’s fans and readers can learn about their favorite author, scan through her articles, and learn about upcoming appearances, interviews and releases while navigating through her website. They will be able to bookmark her page, print out their favorite pieces and scroll through her writings with ease thanks to her navigational links at the top of her site that make it easy to find what you are looking for.

Susanorlean.com has a simple layout and format that has a nice balance between text, visuals and white space. Although it seems to be a fairly simple site, it does have links to all sorts of articles, audio recordings of interviews, websites and such. It is well organized in a logical manner and is an easily navigated site.

Level of Formality:

Susan Orlean's website has a fairly low level of formality. The tone of the text is very conversational and upbeat, similar to her writing. As previously mentioned, Susan Orlean’s site is geared toward her fans and readers, with the main goal of the site to keep them informed and up to date on appearances, interviews and releases, so the language has a very friendly and casual tone.

Visual Cues & Images:

The majority of the images on Susan Orlean's site are pictures of her books that also double as links to other sites such as Amazon.com for readers to purchase her work. Other than these links there are very few images, the majority of the site is the text which is broken up and organized quite nicely with the use of white space.

Range of Variation:

Forecast:

My dream is to write for or edit magazines someday. This site helped me to see how writers can showcase their writing on a website as well as promote yourself and your writing. Susan Orlean’s website gave me ideas for my personal page and hopefully in the future I will be able to add links to some of my writing and perhaps include an online portfolio someday.