PB2B: Navigating Genres vs Two Kinds of Thinking

When beginning to comprehend what a writer’s “moves” are, you can think about what meaning is accompanied by the word in our culture. “Wow, he sure put the moves on you!” or “Smooth move, man!” In each case, we are so familiar with the word “move(s)” that we know it represents some action or word choice specific to the subject. A move in text is the choices a writer makes that are specific to them and what point they are trying to establish in their writing. Kerry Dirk has quite a few eye-grabbing moves in her article “Navigating Genres”. Right from the beginning, her title is short and tells the reader exactly what they are getting themselves into, and this is her first move. The rest of the article follows this same to-the-point sort of speech. Another move of hers is that she speaks to her readers very informally, and by directly addressing them. For instance, the beginning of one of her paragraphs starts with this: “Let’s look into country music lyrics a bit more. Bear with me if you’re not a fan.” Here, she’s informally inviting the reader to continue to follow her train of thought, as well as jokingly addressing the readers’ musical preferences. This move makes the reader a bit more comfortable in their seats while keeping them interested in such a way that both fans of country music and those who dislike it are going to keep reading to discover just what idea she is going to get across to them. Another crucial move Dirk makes is her addition of multiple different kinds of examples to back up her work. Some are indented and bulleted points, others are simply indented blocks of text that are quotes from other scholars within her field of study. Not only does this move add credibility to the statements Dirk makes and the ideas she presents, but it keeps the reader following along and better establishes what is to be learned in reading the article. One more important move Dirk makes in this article is she gives a self-generated, extensive example to show visually what “navigating genres” really entails. She gives a scenario, specifically one that requires a ransom letter, and shows three different ways to write them after the example, Dirk analyzes the fact that the reader could pick out the most appropriate one without knowing that in doing that, they themselves were already navigating a genre. This move of Dirk’s is clever because it lets the reader see that they already had knowledge of the subject before they had ever read the piece.          

Peter elbow, author of the article “Teaching Two Kinds of Thinking by Teaching Writing”, utilizes some similar moves to Dirk as well as some uniquely his. For comparison’s sake, Elbow follows Dirk’s first move in keeping the title relatively short and to the point. After reading the title, I’m almost positive I know at least the basics of what the article will discuss. Elbow also shares the move with Dirk of having a light and somewhat informal tone throughout his piece. Elbow then begins to diverge off into his own pattern of writing with his next move, to include himself in his audience. What I mean by this is that instead of directly addressing his audience with words such as “you”, he includes himself by using “we” and “us”. For example, when discussing his first kind of thinking, one sentence reads, “We use it when we write fast without censoring and let the words lead us to associations and intuitions we hadn’t forseen.” As Elbow continues with his writing, the most apparent contrast between his moves and Dirks is that whereas Dirk’s tone was that of an informal friend enlightening one on what they already knew but were unaware of, Elbow’s tone is more that of a friendly teacher introducing his students to something they actually do without being conscious of it. This move of Elbow’s is seen within his diction and strict “Point A to Point B” organization of the article. Another huge contrast in the way these two authors move through their writing is that Elbow does not use examples in the same way Dirk does. Elbow’s examples are few and far between, and when he does include them, they are scattered throughout the paragraph rather than completely separated and emphasized like Dirk’s. This move allows Elbow’s article to flow smoothly from one learning objective to the next, and to swiftly arrive at a purposeful conclusion without taking any breaks.

              

  In my reading of these pieces, I could not find any unsuccessful moves from either writers.  Both of these writers had mostly successful and efficient moves throughout their works. I believe Dirk’s providing of very specific examples, specifically the three ransom letters and following analysis, was the most successful move of hers. It both provided a real world image of what navigating genres looked like and at the same time showed the reader how they themselves already knew the correct and appropriate answer. The most successful move of Elbow’s is his instructional tone, The objective of Elbow’s piece differed slightly from Dirk’s in that his was aimed at teaching a new idea whereas Dirk was bringing to light already attained knowledge. His tone kept the reader interested in discovering just what the “two kinds of thinking” were, and how they themselves could be conscious of them.  

PB2A: SCIgen vs Scholars

In an attempt to find a scholarly academic publication that would be readily comparable to the “SCIgen” generated papers, I chose a publication from the Statistics discipline that discussed the causality between exports and economic growth in South Africa. The two pieces of text had more in common than I was expecting, however most of these comparisons involve the layout of the paper. Both begin with a title, authors below, and an “abstract” section providing a brief synapsis of the ideas explored within the following text. Both continue on into their introductions and body paragraphs, tailoring their vocabularies to academic audiences who are familiar with the field of work discussed. They provide graphs, tables and data from whatever it is they’re studying or testing, and examine the results of those physical representations in the body paragraphs. To finish, both have a brief conclusion summarizing what the work set out to accomplish and whether or not it succeeded, followed by a series of references to support the claim.

The similarities between the “SCIgen” generated publications and the actual scholarly papers are uncanny, however when examined closer, the differences are crucial to the validity of the reports themselves. The glaring difference is the sheer length of the “SCIgen” generated papers. These are short, and have much less raw data than any of the actual scholarly publications. They have pictures and graphs, however the snippets below that are supposed to be explaining them simply restate what the graphs themselves say. These generated papers also lack any real citation throughout, unlike the scholarly papers, and therefore make it easy to question the references at the end of the work. Though they have similar language and format to the real papers, these generations are simply a skeleton of an actual academic paper, appealing to a general scholastic audience without any definite subject matter or purpose.

The actual scholastic publication I studied was very different in actual content. It starts off with an understandable title followed with many authors’ names and each of their credentials, already instilling confidence in the text that follows. In the abstract it does the same as the “SCIgen” papers in that it provides a paragraph or two telling what the paper will investigate, followed by the introduction that explains why. The difference here is that the main purpose of the paper stated here will be revisited multiple times throughout the work adding more and more data and explanation to elaborate on and support it. These body paragraphs are much longer than the generated papers and contain more than one type of experiment and data presentation.  It is appealing to its specific audience, those well-versed in the language used within the discipline of Statistics and interested in the topic stated by the title, and doesn’t stray from the clearly defined purpose it has. Another huge difference is the massive amount of citations throughout this type of publication, continually providing as much support possible to build the paper’s credibility in the academic community. Following the body paragraphs are lengthy conclusions restating the original purpose and explaining what the paper found within that purpose. They finish by including a reference to every single source used in the findings.

I believe that the most important aspects of the scholarly piece I chose are the many citations scattered throughout the text and the multiple experiments investigating the papers’ questions it presented in the introduction. The citations provide continuous credibility to every claim and statement made based off of the data it shows. This kind of credibility is valuable to an academic reader because they can see the citation and check the validity of the statement themselves outside of the actual paper. The multiple experiments assist the paper in elaborating on its initial claims as well as keeping the work interesting for its audience. Especially in an academic paper, visual representations are useful in both capturing the readers’ attention as well as giving a physical form to its verbal claims.