Whole New Worlds: Music and the Disney Theme Park Experience

The ability to examine academic writing is a skill that college students struggle to achieve. Scholarly writing is often so dense students frequently dread the idea of analyzing the content. Mike Bunn and Karen Rosenberg created essays that aim to teach students how to rhetorically analyze scholarly articles. Each intend to teach a similar idea, but the advice combined is the key to success in any rhetorical analysis. Charles Carson explores Disney's use of music in their theme parks in his article, “'Whole New Worlds': Music and the Disney Theme Park Experience.” Throughout this piece Carson investigates Disney's use of live and recorded music in their theme parks and how the music enhances or detracts from the overall “Disney Experience”. Carson made conscious choices when he wrote this piece that can be rhetorically analyzed with the advice given by Bunn, and Rosenberg. To fully understand the purpose of the article, students can look at these aspects: audience, title, evidence, introduction, diction, and other writing techniques. The reader is able to analyze Carson's paper with these techniques in mind.
Karen Rosenberg discusses how the title is one of the most important things to look at when first approaching a scholarly article. When looking at the title of Carson's piece it brings a sense of nostalgia to the reader. The left part before the colon serves as a teaser to the reader according to Rosenberg. When looking at it, '”Whole New World,”' the reader immediately thinks of Aladdin and Jasmine imagines them singing “A Whole New World” in the classic Disney movie, Aladdin. By beginning with this teaser, Carson is already appealing to the reader's emotions, otherwise known as pathos. This use of pathos is important becaus...

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... not always in the best interest of all their guests, rather the interest of the majority of their guests. By applying the advice given via Bunn and Rosenberg, what seems to be an impossible task of analyzing a scholarly article becomes effortless and straightforward.

Works Cited

Bunn, Mike. "How to Read Like a Writer." Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. Comp. Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky. Vol. 1. Anderson, South Carolina.: Parlor, 2011. 71-86. Print.
Carson, Charles. ""Whole New Worlds": Music and the Disney Theme Park Experience." Ethnomusicology Forum 13.2 (2004): 228-35. JSTOR. Web. 15 Feb. 2014. .
Rosenberg, Karen. "Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources." Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. Comp. Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky. Vol. 1. Anderson, South Carolina.: Parlor, 2011. 210-20. Print.