PB3A

            For my writing project, I will be taking a scholarly article and transforming it into two separate genres while still keeping the subject and information discussed intact.  The academic publication I’ve chosen is an article reviewing the book, “Science, Religion and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” by David Wilkinson, which explores the potential for extraterrestrial life and the foreseeable effects on both science and religion if it is discovered. 

To translate this article and its information into a genre fit for younger audiences, I will most likely be creating a rhyming children’s book story, reminiscent of Dr. Seuss, explaining what scientists do, the evidence for extraterrestrial life, and the opinions of the religious in easy-to-understand terms.  I think simplifying this information and presenting it in this way will not only make the article easier for children to understand, but will make it fun and interesting to learn about science.  When I was growing up, I remember reading Dr. Seuss books and thoroughly enjoying the way that the story rhymed and almost had a rhythm to the flow of words.  The entertainment of reading this kind of writing will contribute to the overall experience of my extraterrestrial intelligence children’s book, as it will not only encourage young audiences to continue reading but will also ensure that they enjoy reading the material, which could very well result in better absorption and retention of the information presented.  The only real concern I have about creating this piece is that I will have to read and simplify all the information presented in the original article, and then somehow make the storyline rhyme will still maintaining flow.  

On the other hand, in order to convert this article into a genre designed for older audiences, I will probably rewrite the piece as an article from a newspaper.  Even when not written in rhymes and accompanied by pleasant illustrations, the information presented in the original article is quite fascinating and would not be difficult to translate into a newspaper article.  Newspapers today are read almost exclusively by older adults, as the rise of technology and the enduring reign of the internet have given younger audiences a new platform on which to receive worldwide updates and breaking news.  Due to this, the extraterrestrial life newspaper article will be tailored to specifically older adults—I intend to incorporate more artful diction, more facts and specifics, and definitely less rhyming.  I think that writing this piece will be significantly more challenging than the Dr. Seuss story, as I will be forced to write much more formally and less entertainingly. 

I intend to refine and improve my thoughts and ideas for my writing project as time goes on.  Currently, I have a very rough outline of the process of creating these two new genre pieces that I would very much like to improve upon.  With more brainstorming and mapping out ideas, I think I will be able to pull together all my thoughts and create two convincing and (hopefully) entertaining pieces from the original article.  Hopefully, the subject of the article will help ease the frustration of writing.  After all, who doesn’t love aliens?

Journal Q&A 5/6/15

1. I think my paper was okay.  I enjoyed the topic I chose to write about, and I was really happy I was able to find a lot of academic pieces written on the subject across multiple disciplines.  I found it a bit difficult to tie in the course readings, though, and I feel like it was a little hard to analyze the two academic pieces I chose because, while they were good examples, they were incredibly long and it was hard to pull out important details from the blocks of text. 
2. One of the people in my group told me my thesis could be more arguable, so I changed the wording around a bit and I’m much happier with it now.  The other commented on one of my sentences saying that it was a little confusing and that I should maybe try rewording it.  I completely rewrote the sentence and now it’s easier to read and actually helps transition into the next paragraph.
3. I actually enjoyed the digital Peer/Reader review more than the “old school” one.  I thought it was easier to edit my own paper because I had the comments right next to the document.  I thought the whole highlighting/commenting thing was really efficient and helpful.

PB2B

A writer’s “moves” are the deliberate choices they make in their writing to have a certain effect on their audience.  They can be as subtle as using a single word or as large as the overall organization of their information.  When one encounters a particularly effective move in a piece of writing, one can take it and apply it to one’s own writing, making thorough knowledge and understanding of moves incredibly rewarding to possess. 

In the reading “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking),” Boyd employs a variety of moves, many of which are evident in the structure of the piece.  These moves include her use of bullet points, bolded titles, and italicized terms.  There are multiple instances in the piece where Boyd separates her information into bullet points, making them easier to read and comprehend than if her audience had just been reading a block of text.  The bolded titles aid in this as well, as they organize the different examples she uses and indicates the example that each section is analyzing.  Throughout the reading, there are certain key terms Boyd uses that are italicized (ex. diction, tone).  This choice communicates to the audience that the italicized words are important and formal rhetorical terms that should be remembered.  Towards the beginning of the reading, she relays the five simple facts that she provided her students, separating them into categories of Who, What, Where, When, and How.  This organization of information is not only simple and easy to understand, it contributes to the point she is trying to make through her proposed writing exercise.  This writing exercise is a move itself, as she directly and personally invites the reader to participate in her experiment and prove her argument.  This particular move is incredibly effective, as it allows the audience to witness Boyd’s argument in action and understand more fully what she’s trying to say about rhetoric.  

A broader move that Boyd employs would be the informal tone she uses throughout the piece.  She writes in the first person and often speaks directly to the audience, asking them to partake in writing exercises and, at times, almost having a conversation with them.  She begins with a personal anecdote, a very effective move that helps writers hook the reader and then segue into their argument.  The overall tone of the reading is very informal and personal, which is helpful at certain points in the piece but, at others, excessively conversational.  For example, towards the beginning of the reading, Boyd invites the audience to participate in the murder scene writing exercise.  After given all the necessary details, she drags the introduction on by including, “Go ahead.  Get started on writing your report of the murder scene. Then come back and read the next section” (Boyd 88).  Naturally, she begins the next section with the sentence “Welcome back.”  As a whole, the conversational tone is effective and helpful; there are just a few instances where she goes a little too far. 

 In the reading “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis,” Laura Carroll uses many of the same moves that Boyd included in her piece.  She, too, begins her piece with a story—however, Carroll’s opening anecdote is hypothetical, as she invites the audience to delve into their memories and conjure up the image of their first day of composition class at their university.  Directly inviting the reader to participate in and prove the argument is yet another move that Carroll and Boyd share.  Though not written in the first person as Boyd’s was, Carroll’s piece is incredibly informal and personal, speaking directly to the audience and carrying a very conversational tone.  Like Boyd, Carroll uses bullet points to organize her information, including questions that the audience can pose as they are analyzing a work and a list of different types of rhetoric that one might encounter.  

However, Carroll also employs a number of different moves than Boyd that achieve different effects on the overall work.  Firstly, the overall structure of Carroll’s reading is much more paragraph-oriented than Boyd’s.  She uses bullet points more sparingly, which actually contributes to their effectiveness as they indicate particularly important information.  Carroll also doesn’t italicize or bold any important terms in the body of her piece, which took away slightly from the overall learning experience from this reading.  There is a lot of important information to be found in this reading, particularly in the section “The Rhetorical Situation, Or Discerning Context” (Carroll 48).  In this section, Carroll defines and explains the three parts to understanding the context of a rhetorical moment, as well as context itself, audience, and constraints.  These are important terms to know and are focal points for the reading, but are tucked away into a blocks of text without any indicator of their significance.  If these terms had been bolded or italicized, their importance would have been more visually evident and they would have been more easily recognized, understood, and remembered.  

Moves, like genre, can be found everywhere.  Also like genre, we recognize them and use them all the time, just without completely understanding them or knowing what they are.  Having a fuller understanding of moves and how they work can be endlessly beneficial and can help one become not just a better reader, but a better writer.

PB2A

The SCIgen generator creates research papers that appear genuine but don’t make any actual sense.  By pulling and incorporating different key elements of the research paper genre, the generator produces pieces that can pass as legitimate scholarly academic publications.  This assertion can be proved further by juxtaposing a SCIgen generated research paper (in this case, Cooperative Symmetries by Wagner, Vasquez, and DeMarco) with a real, peer-reviewed scholarly article (Generalizing the self-healing diffusion Monte Carlo approach to finite temperature: A path for the optimization of low-energy many-body bases by Reboredo and Kim) and observing the parallels present between the two. 

For starters, both papers are divided into sections, beginning with an abstract that summarizes what the purpose of the piece and what it will be discussing (in the case of the SCIgen piece, the abstract fails to provide much clarity as, like the rest of the paper, it was randomly generated and can’t offer any relevant or comprehendible information) and then separating their argument and evidence into numbered sections.  However, the SCIgen piece includes a Results section and Conclusion section to list its findings, whereas the real research paper had its findings more deeply integrated into the body of the paper and therefore more difficult to locate and extract.  Also, the individual sections of the real research paper are much more specific than those of the SCIgen paper (ex: A. Upper bound property of the truncated Helmholtz free energy.) Both papers integrate graphs and tables into the body of their arguments, contributing to the overall academic quality of the works.  In actual scholarly works, these graphs and tables would no doubt be included in order to clarify or visually demonstrate certain processes or statistics relevant to the topic of the work.  In this case, their main function is to make the papers appear more legitimate.

Despite the fact that one is a legitimate academic publication and the other was randomly generated by a computer, these works are both equally incomprehensible.  It’s genuinely difficult to read and understand a single sentence from either of these papers.  This has a great deal to do with the jargon that the two employ, another incredibly important convention of scholarly articles.  The wording the two papers use to explain their points is so specific and advanced that, at a glance, both papers appear to be genuine simply because people can’t be bothered to actually comprehend what is being written.  This suggests that the audience for papers such as these is composed of professionals and scholars in the same field as the author who have enough education and skill in their field to actually understand what is being written here.  The fact that the SCIgen article is composed of randomized academic jargon and still resembles real scholarly publications speaks volumes about the nature of language in scholarly writing.  It also establishes that one of the conventions of scholarly articles is that one can’t fully understand or process what is being discussed or proven. 

Another major convention that these two works share is the inclusion of academic sources following the conclusion and citations referring back to these sources throughout the actual body of the paper.  This aspect of these kinds of papers is absolutely crucial, as it is what convinces the audience to take the information presented seriously.  Essentially, the inclusion of sources and evidence legitimizes the papers, making them appear to have been well-researched and supported. 

In the scholarly publication, the most important aspects seemed to be the presence of graphs, tables, and formulas and the inclusion and use of academic sources.  The graphs and tables in the scholarly work were quite large and in color, indicating that they were of considerable importance.  The scholarly work also included a long list of sources, citations of which were integrated all throughout the body of the paper.  This aspect makes the paper appear more researched and supported by evidence, as well as more trustworthy.  These two specific characteristics of the paper were also found in the SCIgen generator’s research papers, indicating that they are crucial conventions of scholarly publications.