Writing Homework Help

Please follow these instructions:

One way to better understand the kinds of writing and thinking valued in an academic environment is to compare them to more popular forms of writing and thinking you’re familiar with Toward this end, your task will be to find a mass media report or discussion about a scientific finding, and then trace it back to the original report from which it was taken, in order to analyze the differences between the two types of discourse.

object of study:

Find an interesting mass media report or discussion about science (e.g. headline, a blog entry, etc.) Trace the science back to the original research report from which it taken. Make some initial observations about how they’re different. Are there any obvious similarities?

Research and Analyzing:

As you analyze each text, consider these questions What is the rhetorical situation rhetors, audiences, context, constraints-for each text? What is the genre of each text? (For instance, is one a peer-reviewed research article and the other a two-minute news report? Is there a genre shift between the original presentation and the scientist’s work and its popularization? Why was one genre not appropriate or useful in the other rhetorical situation? How subtly or obviously are claims stated in each (and how accurate How do the scientists state the significance of their claims? How does t compare to how the media account states the significance of the scientific claims? How are non-specialists accommodated in the mass media piece through lang change, tone change, more statement of significance, the use of more claims (e.g., “the only kind” or “the first kind’), placement of information in the paragraph or sentence, removal of qualifiers or hedges (taking out “appears” or “suggests’), changes in phrasing that are more removed from the observed results of the study by leaping to results?

Planning:

Consider what you found by asking yourself the following:

What are the differences between the writing done by scientists and the writing done by those in the popular media?

What do these differences tell us about the values of academic writers?

What is hard or unfamiliar to you about the scientific writing?

How do scientists support their claims? How does this compare to how the media supports their claims? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each type of writing?

Format

1,400-1,600 words typed

Double-spaced

Pages numbered

12-point font

Times New Roman

1-inch margins

*Topics suggested: child killing.