PB2A

Today we will be looking at two articles, of similar genre. To put the articles into context, one is a random science article generated by a computer science genre generator while the other is an actual scientific publication from an online science journal called Science AAAS. The random computer science generated article is simply an attempt to recreate the actual genre that the online journal conforms to, so it my lack some conventions present in true scientific articles. I will analyze the real published article and then compare the generated one to it for similarities and differences.

            The actual published article, titled Cognitive Control Signals for Neural Prosthetics, includes many conventions and rhetorical devices that conform to the genre of “scholarly article” and that cater to the audience. The audience of this piece are likely to be scientists, doctors and engineers, specifically medical researchers. Since the purpose of articles like this is to share results of a study, many of the conventions used here are aimed at improving the clarity and effectiveness of transferring information. It has an abstract at the beginning, which is consists of a well written paragraph to introduce and summarize the contents of the article. This allows the audience to sort through articles that may be of interest to them as they are looking through the online science journal. It also has graphs and charts to visually represent the data in a way that proves some important relationship between the data collected. Each chart has its own analysis that is broken into parts separated by alphabetized subsection. Towards the end of the article, there are paragraphs on analysis of the data and what it could mean for the medical field, and then a section comparing the work in this study to other studies to put the work into perspective. At the very end of the article the authors also includes references at the end in a list form and cites the references within the article by including the reference number in parentheses after the sentence.

            The Cognitive Control Signals for Neural Prosthetics article employed a style that was very formal, informative and detailed. The tone was formal and scientific. The tone was largely influenced by the diction which was extremely technical and scientific. For example, the authors write about how the “Recordings were made at points along a major pathway for visually guided movement which begins in the extrastriate visual cortex (6) and passes through the parietal reach region (PRR) and area 5 to the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) and then to the primary motor cortex” (Musallam, Corneil, Greger, Scherberger, Anderson). As you can see the diction is highly specialized (This also hints at audience).

            The “SCIgen” computer science article generator follows many of the conventions that the real published article does, but lacks a couple of aspects that would make it a more believable emulation. The style, tone and purpose are essentially the same as the published article, but the audience, while still geared towards the scientific community, may be less medically focused than the published article, since it was specifically about technology in the medical field. This should not affect the overall use of conventions but the diction may not be as medically relevant. The generator creates articles that have conventions like the abstract, graphs and charts, and references. Among these, the abstract and the graphs, while included, are lackluster when compared to the real article. The abstract in the generated article is short and brief. Although it does give information on what the article will contain, it is not nearly as in depth as the actual article. The graphs are also lacking information. The generated article’s graphs are only graphs or charts, a figure number, and a title. It tried to follow the conventions of using graphs but they failed to include a detailed analysis explaining what exactly the graph was displaying. Another thing that was different was the use of titles to divide each subsection –introduction, framework, implementation, results…etc. This isn’t necessarily wrong use of a convention as for longer more detailed works, it may helpful to divide the article into subsections, but the actual article did not have subsections.

            While both articles come from the same broad genre of scholarly article, they have a few subtle differences. The generated articles conformed for the most part to the conventions of the genre, and produced a believable “table of contents” for a scholarly article, but when compared to the actual published article, it is evident that the generator did not fully take into account the level of detail that real scientists include in their writings.