Academic Discourse and Genre

In this post, I will write about academic discourse and genre.

Pixabay, "Journal." Public Domain. 

There doesn’t seem to be that many different kinds of genres in this particular issue of the journal. It is mostly scientifically formatted articles. For example, most articles are presenting research and use scientific graphs and tables to do so. I guess if I had to identify differences among them, some articles use drawings of certain mazes that they constructed for their experiments, other articles use only tables to present their research, whereas some articles also use photographs.

If I were to come up with names for these different “genres,” I would call the articles with scientific graphs “Graphical Articles,” the articles with drawings, “Artistic Scientific Articles,” and the articles with photographs, “Photographical Scientific Articles.” I chose these names because they are pretty self-explanatory and easy for the reader to understand.

My own definition for each genre:

Graphical Scientific Articles: Articles that present their scientific research in the form of graphs and tables. The purpose of this genre is to provide numerical data to support whatever claim is being made.

Artistic Scientific Articles: Articles that use drawn out models of the tools or systems they use for their experiments. The purpose of this genre is to give the reader a better idea of how the experiment is being conducted. For example, if a certain maze is created to determine intelligence or memory levels of mice, it would be best to use this genre to show how complex the maze was.

Photographical Scientific Articles: Articles that include photographs such as x-rays or brain scans to support their scientific research. The purpose of this genre is to prove a claim being made about the physical difference of a being. An example might be the growth of activity in a certain lobe or cortex in the brain after doing a specific experiment.