Comparing and Contrasting the Art of the Snobbish Article

Project Builder 2A: Comparing Genres: “SCIgen” and a Scholarly Source

The scholarly article is a noteworthy genre due to the rhetorical devices that it utilizes to become legitimate and reputable. The scholarly article must follow the rules of its genre or be rejected by its target audience, obviously not the laymen, the academic community. Through its rhetorical devices it must establish a hypothesis and the author(s) must prove the hypothesis using facts, all the while proving facts. The genre’s qualifications are quite stringent, therefore, it is important for a person who dabbles in the academic community to recognize the key features. Through the SCIgen model and the article Force Measurements with the Atomic Force Microscope: Technique, Interpretation, and Applications readers can identify the key conventions and rhetorical devices that become prevalent in both.

If we start in a chronological manner, we can see that the most obvious convention in both articles is the title. The title of this article is starkly different from titles of many other genres, especially common novels, because its objective is not to attract attention. The title of the article is used in a more clerical manner; it is what the introductory paragraph is to an essay. It categorizes the article and informs the reader, more likely researcher, using jargon specific to the field. Again, the target audience is not the average reader, rather those who have become experts in their field of study. Force Measurements with the Atomic Force Microscope: Technique, Interpretation, and Applications  is the title of the text - and it is quite a mouthful - but is not done to perturb the average reader. It does so to categorize the text and make it readily available for anyone looking to use it for their own work. The titles in both the SCIgen model and the article have put the article above the rest of the text in bold making it easy to view.

The organization of the genre is clerical too, as it separates the different sections of the essay using sub headings. Much like the title of the entire essay, the subheadings hover over the paragraph they relate to until challenged by another subheading. These subheadings help the reader find the aspects of the text that they need, like the abstract which informs the reader of the hypothesis and what they hope to achieve. In the text Force Measurements with the Atomic Force Microscope: Technique, Interpretation, and Applications, and the SCIgen model the abstract model appears at the beginning, followed by an explanation of what they hope to achieve and context. This fashion of writing is very blunt, especially considering the manner in which a rhetorical essay is written. Rhetorical essays organize themselves in a manner in which one paragraph slips into the other, creating a fluidity about the writing. The academic essay uses subheadings, eradicating completely the need to be clever about writing and facilitating the transition from idea to idea using subheadings. The reader’s mental strain is also eased as the author’s will often add a subheading indicating the symbols they will be using. Such a use of subheading is representative of its use; not only are they used for introducing ideas to the reader before they begin the reading, but they also work as a reference which makes it easy for someone to come back and find something they were looking for. In this manner the writers have followed the conventions of their genre and in doing so they have done away with clever closing sentences which conjoin one paragraph to the next, on the other hand they adhere to a basic, simplistic model which eases the reading for a person who already has to work through a sea of complicated jargon.

Both models have a series of charts and diagrams which further facilitate the text for a person who has the misfortune of having to journey through a mess of academic jargon. The diagrams vary from pictures of the experiment to graphs displaying aspects of the experiment. In the Force Measurements with the Atomic Force Microscope: Technique, Interpretation, and Applications text,  a picture is shown of the experiment displaying and titling aspects of the experiment. These picture resolve any confusion a reader may have had about the experiment.  Although the SCIgen model is not based on actual information, it display graphs and pictures just the same for the sake of the argument. Underneath the pictures or diagrams there is a title that explains the function of the picture. A major aspect of the text seems to be easing the text for the reader.

A very important aspect of both the texts is the objective tone all the authors adopt throughout the entire text. The objective tone is important because it displays a lack of passion for their craft. Although this sounds counter intuitive when attempting to convince others to believe what you believe, it is actually the more prudent alternative. By sounding objective they have created an atmosphere without pathos, an appeal to emotion, in a community that values facts and logic over emotions. Without pathos the article carries an atmosphere of logos, an appeal to reason. Because this paper is based on charts, statistics, and research, or in other words, empirical data, logos is the most logical approach (no pun intended)

Although the academic community may appear uppity, for lack of a better word that displays the great intellectual divide between them and the laymen, a lot of the conventions in the text serve to ease the reader through the text. The graphs, subheadings, and tone all serve to facilitate the reading. The genre is unique for its style and contrasts greatly a lot of the other genres.