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.

PB1B: Generators

The SCIgen generator creates random research papers that make no actual sense but nonetheless look impressive.  Their looking impressive stems from the proper use and application of the conventions of a proper research paper.  For starters, the generator included a table of contents that divided the paper into sections that were identified by large, bolded headers (ex. Introduction).  This contributed to the overall professional quality of the paper.  The paper itself was rather long, consisting of mostly text but also a few graphs and diagrams for added effect.  What really makes the paper appear legitimate, however, is the list of references at the end of the paper.  The references are numbered and are cited in the body of the paper according to those numbers.  The sources themselves are no doubt fake or irrelevant (as is most of the information in the generated papers).  However, at a glance the paper appears legitimate because it contains all the key visual components of an actual research paper. 

The comic strip generator was, in my opinion, hilarious.  Like the SCIgen generator, the resulting product usually made little to no sense, but it was nonetheless amusing (I’ve included my favorite generated comic below.)  Also like the SCIgen generator, the comics were convincing at a glance because they applied the conventions of the comic genre.  Firstly, the comics consisted of images of illustrated cartoons that were separated into individual square frames.   Next, the characters in the comic would interact with one another—dialogue was written in a speech bubble, with the tail end facing the speaker (the characters’ mouths would usually be open in conjunction with this, to further indicate which character was speaker.)  Typically, each frame would represent a development in the scene at hand, even if that development made no actual sense.  All of these conventions combined form the foundation for a basic comic.  The fact that, without even having to make sense, these comics can still be recognized as comics demonstrates that the present conventions are those that make up the comic genre.  

Memes are a much more contemporary genre as they’ve only really risen to prominence in the past five or six years.  As a genre whose origins stem solely from the internet, memes are highly unique and possess easily recognizable traits.  From observing and toying with the meme generator, there are some obvious recurring themes and characteristics that can be classified as meme conventions.  Firstly, each meme is a square image accompanied by white bolded text.  Each image has its own recurring joke or pun: for example, the Philosoraptor is a meme consisting of the image of a velociraptor lost in thought, accompanied by philosophical questions about life, the universe, and existence in general.  The image of the Philosoraptor, like many memes, is placed against a color wheel background.  However, there are many memes that are simply a cropped image, with no real editing aside from the inclusion of the white text and the meme generator watermark in the corner.  Unfortunately, memes are also regularly incredibly ignorant and prejudiced, often falling back onto sexist, homophobic, and racist stereotypes and slurs for a punchline.  While not necessarily a convention of memes, it is important to note that a large part of the meme genre is taken up by such ignorance and that it is common enough to be considered at the very least associated with the genre.  The rise of the meme genre is an incredibly fascinating display of how genres begin and develop into functioning, recognizable categories of work.  

These generators are excellent tools for mastering genre.  They demonstrate how, without having to make sense, one can recognize and process the genre that they are encountering.  In order to understand the conventions that make up these genres, one must simply ask how they know that the work they are viewing is what it is.  What makes a meme a meme, or a research paper a research paper, or a comic a comic?  The content can be very important, but these generators prove that a genre’s conventions go beyond content alone and encompass layout, appearance, diction, and tone. 

 

PB1A: Syllabi

There is a plethora of textual genres to be found within the sphere of a university, but none quite as omnipresent or essential as the course syllabus.  Every quarter, in every class, students are provided with this handy sheet of paper as a guide to survival in the course.  It’s discarded, retrieved, reexamined, and discarded again multiple times throughout the quarter.  Despite the informality with which students handle the syllabus, it is without a doubt an absolutely crucial resource for passing a course.  It contains information that cannot be found anywhere else except perhaps by asking one’s instructor, a risky move that is more often than not met with the response, “It’s on the syllabus.”  Syllabi are easily recognizable and identifiable, not just on UCSB’s campus but at colleges and universities nationwide.  This indicates that the syllabus is a widely used and fundamental genre.  But what is a syllabus, really?  What makes this genre so important and useful? 

In regards to context, a syllabus is written out by an instructor for a course and is then distributed to or provided for students entering into that course.  The students, in this context, are the audience for the syllabus.  Syllabi are typically composed of a number of dates, titles of readings, the instructor’s contact information and office hours, and other information vital to the course.  They usually also include the information of any teaching assistants for the course, as well as the time and location of the class meetings themselves.  The syllabus is designed as an introduction to the workload and guidelines of the course, usually containing a calendar or list of dates and assignments.  They also include the dates of the major exams, typically the midterm and the final.  Syllabi usually include their respective professor’s own rules and guidelines in regards to late work, make-up exams, attendance, etc.  The conventions of a syllabus discussed here are relatively constant and basic, but the content of these conventions varies widely from syllabus to syllabus.  Funnily enough, this notion of the variability of course content is itself the purpose of a syllabus.  Courses at UCSB are diverse and ever-changing—to assume that any two classes are the same is simply irrational.  The syllabus acts as a guide to assist the struggling college student by breaking the course down and laying out its basic structure on paper.  This course template provides all the tools and information one needs in order to successfully navigate a foreign course.  

Without the syllabus, instructors and professors would be bombarded the entirety of the term with basic questions about their course.  This is no doubt how it once was, before the introduction of the syllabus.  The conventions of the syllabus were probably developed over time, as whoever created the very first syllabus surely forgot to include certain details and guidelines.  But today, we have a constant, effective template for introducing a new course to students.   Its prevalence and endurance in the realm of academics is indicative of its effectiveness in fulfilling its purpose as an abridged summary of the course material.