PB3A & All That Stuff.....

Coming up with the different genres that would appeal to older and younger audiences was not the difficult part, per say. I had more difficulty trying to choose a topic that would appeal to both age groups, nothing too controversial but also nothing too “dumbed down”. In the end, I settled on a scholarly article that focused on the space race between the United States and Russia.

Space is one of those universal topics that can appeal to all ages. Children are fascinated with looking up at the night and seeing stars burning bright, as well as with big machines, like rockets. Adults are mesmerized and intrigued by the vastness that is space and all that it encompasses as well the politics behind the “space race”.

For the younger audience, I want to focus on a much younger age group than the typical seven to twelve year olds. My main focus will be toddlers between the ages of three and five. Thus, the first genre translation will be from scholarly article to bedtime story. There will a lot of pictures, big writing, and some possible rhymes here and there. At the moment, I am still unsure as to whether I will have a set storyline for this story or if it will the informative type that gives small children “fun facts” while still being mildly entertaining.

As for the older audience, my main focus will be those cute old people who read the newspaper while they’re having their morning cup of coffee. A convention of newspapers is the small “mind-games” like Sudoku, “Spot-the-Difference”, and my other choice of genre, crossword puzzles. My crossword puzzle will have a small blurb at the beginning filled with facts and general background information regarding the space race. It will also serve as a reference for the person who is completing the crossword puzzle. In addition to that, there will obviously be “fill-in-the-blank” and factual questions that are typical of newspaper crossword puzzles. 

PB2A & All That Stuff...

The topic I chose to research was the benefits of tea and thus, chose “Emerging evidence for tea benefits”, an article written by C. Ruxton. This article, despite being posted online, seems to have been written for the purpose of being posted on a Nutrition Bulletin, hence the bold, green letters at the top of the first page that spell out “Nutrition Bulletin”. As a result, this article is most likely geared towards an audience of health-conscious people who are considering tea as a way to better their weight health, oral health, and/or gut health. In other words, the writer’s main focus was to inform his audience of the benefits of tea, however, the author expected their reader to be someone who is not very familiar with tea in general. This can be inferred, for the author included basic background information on tea and it’s origin of growth, drying process, and how the different levels of oxidation affect what tea is formed. This is information that any avid tea drinker would know, but his article is not for those people. Like the majority of scholarly articles or journals, the author’s purpose is to inform or report back on findings. In this case, the author did both. Ruxton informed the naïve tea drinker about the health benefits of drinking tea as well as the experiments, which allowed Ruxton to arrive at said conclusions in terms of weight, oral health, and gut health. Also, the fact that Ruxton is reporting back on the health benefits and findings of consuming tea definitely shows his stance on tea. Ruxton believes that drinking tea is beneficial and despite his best attempts at remaining neutral, Ruxton has an underlying purpose, to convince others to drink tea in order to better their health. The style of the article is very scholarly. The tone of the paper is definitely not conversational but informative as well as slightly persuasive. In regards to conventions, there is an evident summary, introduction, and conclusion. Furthermore, the way the article is set-up, is almost like a newspaper. There are two columns on each page with each new topic having a bold title. Ruxton cites his sources as he uses them throughout the paper, at the end of the sentence in which the quote or fact is being used. He cites by using the author’s last name as well as the year said author published their work. Ruxton’s citations make it easier for the reader to find the citations at the end of the article under “References”. Lastly, Ruxton incorporates graphs and tables, along with brief explanations, throughout the article as Ruxton sees fit.

            Moving on to SCIgen, although it is an online generator of academic journals, it still has many differences from Ruxton’s paper. In my opinion, SCIgen has no real audience as it was created as a genre generator. In other words, it is solely used as an example of reference for how an academic journal is commonly structured, which coincidentally can also be seen as it’s purpose. Realistically speaking, how can an article have an author’s purpose when there is no real author? Recall that before generating the journal, SCIgen asks the user to write who the author(s) is/are in order to “spit out” an article. The papers found on SCIgen often possess vast amounts of scientific jargon making their tone and context very scholarly. In terms of conventions, they are very obvious to the naked eye. The title has a large, bolded font. There is also an abstract, introduction, and conclusion. However, new sections and topics are numbered and bolded. Unlike the tea article, the pages are not divided into two columns. Instead, in the article, there are paragraphs that go straight across the page. As opposed to using indentions in new paragraphs, SCIgen simply skips a line. SCIgen also incorporates tables and graphs with brief descriptions. Also noteworthy, SCIgen does not cite its sources at the end of a sentence with the author’s last name and year of publication, but simply with a number that the reader can look up at the end of the article under “Sources”.