PB2A

Last year, I took Earth 10, which is a very interesting course with regard to climate changes in Antarctica. Thanks to this course, I got a chance to read through some research papers analyzing the effect of global warming on Antarctic. Therefore, I decide to pick an Antarctic-related paper to be the subject I am going to dissect and discuss later in this blog. I think it is easier for me to understand and also closer to our lives than any other dull and exhausting academic papers.

Testing Paradigms of Ecosystem Change under Climate Warming in Antarctica (Testing Paradigms) is the title of this scholarly peer reviewed academic paper. The title, as many other papers’ titles do, directly address the topic of this paper. Rather than making an ambiguous but inviting title, academic papers always be honest and direct to their audience about what they are going to mention. The authors of academic papers, undoubtedly, are those scholars in related fields, and so are the audience. Using jargons, such as “paradigms of change” in this case, can further a precise and concise communication between them, quickly distinguishing the paper itself from hundreds of thousands of other papers that address disparate themes. For laypeople, the secondary audience, words such as “Antarctica” and “Climate Warming” at least indicate and help them understand the content of such a highly scholarly article. Also, academic study is a very serious domain, where objectivity and scrupulousness are highly appreciated. Under such context, or constraint, a brief and clear title is more suitable than a fancy and word-playing one. The certain format is also a convention of academic papers. Each section is laid out one by one in a fixed order: abstract, introduction, materials and methods (experiments), and then results and discussions, and eventually reference. The exigence of paper is usually mentioned in abstract as well as introduction. In Testing Paradigms, the exigence is clearly stated in abstract—“large-scale mechanistic explanations…may not account for complex spatio-temporal processes…we suggest that our network approach to evaluating a recent and widely cited paradigm of change… could be broadly applied.” (Melbourne-Thomas, 1) The exigence is crucial to an academic paper because researchers have to respond to something they deem worth searching. If they are only echoing the same opinions or findings their predecessors had already discovered many years ago, the entire paper is going to be meaningless because there is nothing worth  researching. This is the reason why these scholars are very willing to mention the motivations of their research at the very beginning.

Another convention is the tone and diction. In Testing Paradigms, the first personal perspective, “we”, are employed throughout the paper. We can feel that the discourse to the audience is conveyed in a way like giving a presentation. The communication is one-sided and does not expect any replies but hearing. The tone is formal and objective, and words, such as “evaluate”, “formulate”, “model”, “confirm”, “examine” and “assume”, are broadly used contributing to an unbiased and meticulous expression. As I mentioned above, objectivity and scrupulousness will never be considered redundant or excessive in academic field; hence the tone and diction contributing to these two attributes become typical and repeatedly emphasized among academic pieces. I think they are the most important aspects of a scholarly piece.

Look back at Testing Paradigms, the question posed by this article is straightforward: is the current paradigms of changes accurate? And the approach to test the current established paradigms of changes is to use qualitative network modeling (figure below). As per the description of the authors, such approach is superior over the conventional one because it will account for the complexity and uncertainty which has been omitted by the old approach. The detailed process is very scientific and, well, awesome. By comparing the outcomes of the change of portion of each animal in the ecosystem obtained from different modeling approach, the paper demonstrates that “network models can be used to critically evaluate assumptions about the structure and function of ecological networks and to identify key hypotheses for testing in the future.”(Melbourne-Thomas, 1) In order to understand this paper, we must clearly know what aim of the research is and what the result of research has implied so far, which are all mentioned in abstract and introduction. Therefore, as a layperson, I think introduction and abstract are the most important parts of an academic paper.

Works Cited

Melbourne-Thomas, Jessica, et al. "Testing Paradigms Of Ecosystem Change Under Climate Warming In Antarctica." Plos ONE 8.2 (2013): 1-9. Academic Search Complete. Web. 31 Jan. 2016.

Thlog week 4

As usual, we had very cool and fun activities in this week’s class. The main focus of this week's activities revolved around WP1, and I learnt a lot from them about how to revise paper.

I really like highlight activity. We were asked to highlight different part of our paper in different colors. By separating different part visually, we could see a clear pattern of how we analyzing. Main idea of each paragraph is supported by multiple evidences. Then following every evidence are analyses. Mr. Zack said words “analysis” was originated from a Greek word meaning “loosen”. It is very interesting concept implying us that to analysis means to rip up open and see what is inside. Although I still have not thoroughly understood what exactly does analysis mean, I think the word “loosen” at least gives me some hints about how to make good analyses. Anyway, learning how to efficiently analyze takes time and effort and we keep writing and analyzing things to hone our analytical skills every day. During highlight activity, I also realized that I should put each main argument  to the very beginning of each paragraph so that the reader can readily follow the flow of my mind. Otherwise, the reader will easily get bored and confused about what I am arguing about.

Another activity I really enjoyed is poemifying our paper. Simply, we just press enter after each period, then we got a poem-formatted paper. Such activity taught me the importance of the sentence length. Only writing long and exhausting sentences makes reading very dull and difficult. Only writing short and quick sentences cannot precisely express writer’s thoughts and discourages the reader with a feeling of discontinuity. A monotonous pattern of sentence length is definitely a bad thing we should avoid. Using a good combination of both long and short sentence can make our paper more interesting.

thlog week 3

The third week only has one class, and in this class we worked very hard on our writing projects, which is very painstaking but fun. The first examined part of our essay is the introduction. Someone said she cannot start writing from the introduction. Very interesting. I always start writing the introduction then body paragraphs, but at the end struggle with the conclusion.  Anyway, writing the conclusion is very different from the introduction, and hopefully we will learn it in the future days. Go back to how to write an introduction. During the stage of peer review, I read some interesting and distinct introductions from other classmates. Someone starts with a hook, just like me, which I think it is the most traditional way to introduce your thesis. Someone just starts with her own mental struggle about choosing which genre to write about. Also, someone starts without any decorations or rhetoric and writes straight about his thesis. Reading these different introductions inspiring me with more ideas about how to write an inviting introduction. In addition to the styles of introduction, I also realized that a good introduction should answer two questions, as mentioned in our reading, “who care” and “so what”. The most common way to address “who care” is to talk to the intended audience. For instance, one of my group member’s topic is sports journal, and he wrote in his introduction that sports journal is the best way for sports fans to follow big events in sports. I think it is what my introduction lacks. ”so what”ness is often embodied by refuting other people’s opinion, in the examples of our reading. But I don’t think it is a very efficient way because we can hardly find a well-known opposite argument to counter every time we write our thesis. Rather than using contradiction, I would emphasis on the importance of thesis itself. In my article, I said knowing how an economic news article is structured will help people read it faster and more productively. I think it is a better way.

Thlog week 2

Over this week, we have learnt a lot of stuff spanning many aspects of writing. We learnt about rhetoric, rhetorical situation, rhetorical analysis, argument, oxford comma, dash and hyphens, and etc. Among them, personally, I found rhetorical situation and dash vs. hyphens are two interesting and meaningful topics, and thus I decide to mainly address them in this thlog.

Rhetoric is, according to our reading, “the way we use language and images to persuade” (pg.38 in reader). So the goal of rhetorical analysis is to dissect the approaches rhetors use to make their argument persuasive. In order to do so, we look at its rhetorical situation, or context. There are three elements constituting the context—namely, exigence, audience and constraints.  Exigence is the reason why we have to write. For instance, we see many charitable ads around us which advocate protecting environments and condemn the industry for releasing excessive CO2 into the atmosphere. Apparently, the appearance of these ads is attributed to the global warming and therefore it is the exigence, the circumstance or condition that asks for a response. Next component is audience—the recipients of the rhetorical message. I think this part shares the same idea of marketing in media, such as advertisements. The advertisement of a commodity always has its intended customers, and only can an advertisement finding and appealing to this certain population be productive and persuasive. The same principle is applied in writing as well. If we want to persuade someone, first of all, we have to know who is the someone. The last piece of rhetorical situation is the constraints. Constraints can be various thing, such as beliefs, attitudes or traditions. “The constraints will affect the way discourse is delivered or communicated.” (pg 41)In our PB1B, we are required to discuss three specific genres, and it is a constraint. I think, rhetorical situation is a core concept when we come to discuss a particular genre and its conventions because it helps you understand how conventions form and work.

In addition to conceptual knowledge, we were also taught some practical knowledge. It will help us clearly structure our sentence that knowing how to employ dashes and hyphen properly. Hyphens combine two single words into a new word, making the meaning understood more readily by readers. Dashes function in a sentence almost the same way as commas, which means breaking thoughts or adding details. However, dashes can invite a pause inside a single sentence separating the whole phrase into several parts. By doing so, dashes make the author’s primary idea flow more fluently. Moreover, if we only use commas, within one sentence, author’s secondary idea will be intertwined together with the main one; using dashes can effectively avoid such confusing situation.

PB1b

First, I want to compare and contrast the conventions of meme and comic because they both convey information not solely in the means of word but also image. The shared convention between comic and meme is that they both use pictures to help reader, the recipient of their arguments, receive more information than could they by just reading. In another words, they both use pictures to communicate with their audience. Although the use of visual literacy is beyond the scope of this article, it is one of the most essential conventions in both genres. In comic, funny images tell readers who is talking and under what context and what emotions. These information may cost a lot of words to explain, whereas, with visual elements, authors is capable of compressing a great amount of information into a few pictures so that readers can get them very quickly. In addition to this feature, comics are also very close to our daily lives. Usually, it just depicts a normal conversation going on between two characters. As an attempt to do so, characters talk in a very casual tone and their topics come from our real lives. However, different from trivial and routine conversations in the real world, the purpose of comics is always to create fun elements and therefore it must possess something unreal to make readers laugh at. For instance, in the comic generator I use, the way characters are drawn itself is funny. Big-eyed, triangle-nosed, characters with exaggerated expression are unreal but funny-looking and hence typical of comics. Similarly, memes use funny pictures for the same reason as comics; but the emphasis is mainly put on evoke a certain emotion or mood. The context and characters are less important factors in meme because meme is one picture, unlike a story-telling comics, pivoting on words it carries but not vice versa. You can see various memes share a same image but rarely a same text, so a certain type of image used to constitute a meme can be a unique convention of memes as long as it has a substantial population of fans. For example, I think many people would like to use the image of a baby holding tight his litter fist to make their meme. In general, there is no story in meme but a picture with one or two texts.  Memes enjoy more freedom on content than comics. Ranging from political satires to indecent jokes, no constraint, except being funny, is imposed on the content of meme.

In contrast to memes and comics, fictions and computer science research papers are more conventional literary genres and easier to dissect their conventions because they only (or mainly) deal with words. When it comes to computer science, what immediately emerges in our mind might be hundreds and thousands of unfathomable programming codes. However, none of them appears in a computer science research paper. Instead, abstract, introduction, process of proving, data and graphs, work related, and citations are conventions of such genre. An abstract is a summary of what researcher have achieved, always situated at the very front of the paper so that readers can determine if they have the need to finish reading the rest. An introduction is followed and addresses the question “who cares?” to its readers by stating their reason of starting this research as well as their approach. The part “work related” addresses the question “so what?” by demonstrating how this research can benefit other studies. Process of proving is accompanied with data and graphs because each time research put a plausible argument at least an evident supporting it must be provided. Besides, research papers never lack graphic evidences because they are more informative and visually appealing than plain numbers and therefore more persuasive. Citations are provided in text as well as at the end of paper in case of plagiarism. It is also worth noted that a formal tone and the first person pronouns such as “we” are employed throughout the paper. Compared to research paper, fictions are less rigid-structured but have more complicated conventions.  According to my mini-fictions generator, first, story took places at an imaginary world where the male protagonist runs into an unexpected adventure, in which he encounter the female protagonist. Afterwards, a villain appears and awaits for being defeated by them. At last, the story culminates in either a satisfying end or a cliffhanger for the sake of prompting a series. Magic, supernatural and high-tech elements are broadly introduced, characters are featured by their distinct personality and plots are fabricated suspenseful and novel. All in all, every convention of fiction serves a common purpose, which is to make story appeal to readers (usually youngsters).

(fiction generator: http://fictiongen.inky.me/)

PB1A

Syllabus is a very familiar genre to every college student, and we encounter it each time we are enrolled in a new course. A syllabus has its own format that helps its writer, the instructor, arrange information he wants to convey as well as helps its reader, students, quickly distill information of their interest. First, the course description is always included in a syllabus. In this part, information, such as instructor’s name and email address, where and when lecture takes place every week and what will we do in the lecture, is provided for the sake of instruction. Students need to be informed of when and how to prepare for the class. Second, there is a list of required material. Same reason as the previous one, this lesson can be better taught if students are better prepared. Third, there are policies of this course. Usually, grading policy is given the most concern of students. How to get an A or A+ in a class always has the highest priority to those top students and how to, at least, pass the class absolutely possesses the same level of importance to those struggling students as well. Aside from grading policy, attendance policy and integrity policy are also frequently-mentioned policies and it is obviously because no one wants their course severely subject to tardiness and cheating. At last, there are sub-titles for every entry I mentioned above. In order to clearly form the syllabus and make it convenient for students to look for information of their interest, it is divided by sub-titles, which are distinguished from its content by font size, bold or italicizing. Content is all dependent on its corresponding sub-title and may contain bullets and numbers making details even more organized. In addition to the format, a formal and somewhat stern tone is also a convention of the syllabus. Because instructor gives respect to students, and in return he demands the same respect students give back.

The context of a syllabus is straightforward: instructor writes a list of things that all students should know about. In such context, its intended audience is every student in the class, and sometimes instructor’s TAs. The purpose of writing a syllabus is to inform its audience of all the facts of this class, to encourage students to study assiduously and to help students have a better academic performance. As a means to accomplish these goals, syllabus is always formatted in a clear and concise way.  Facts about course are written under course description, so everyone can quickly find it and read through. Under grading policy, details, such as time and percentage, about homework, exams and etc. not only tell students what grade they can earn in proportion to their effort but also implies that there are a lot of work laying ahead and hence everyone should work hard and prepare early. Sometimes, instructor will also provide a schedule of the class to persuade students to pace their own study plan well. Besides, a stern tone in a syllabus persuades students to work hard as well because words like “should”, “have to”, and “must” really send out a strong suggestion to students so that they become more responsible and hard-working subconsciously.

In brief, a clean and concise format, course descriptions, policies in this course and a formal and stern tone makes a syllabus a syllabus.

Thlog week 1

First, during this week, we discussed genres in many aspects. Not only did we look at genres in writings but also in other field of art, where genres play an important role as well, such as music and movies. Then I gradually started to realize that how meaningful the concept of genres is. Actually, genres are established and called upon every day in our mind, albeit we do not notice their functions at all. As I was asked questions like what makes a country music a country music or what makes a horror film a horror film, I realized that everyone can name a few features of a country music or a horror film without listening or seeing one because we have already encountered these genres before. We have already know what elements make a music typical of country music and what elements make a horror film horrifying; however, what we do not know is how to use our knowledge about genres purposefully and effectively to work for our writing. According to our reading Navigating Genres, by Kerry Dirk, genres guide writers to write what should be written. In another word, we should write what our audience expects and therefore create an efficient communication between us. In reading, Kerry Dirk fabricated a scenario of kidnapping and writing ransom notes. In class, we went through examples of recommendation letters. Both of them demonstrate the importance of writing in accordance with the rhetorical situation. There are rules about a certain genre, whereas writing requires more than simply following rules and filling blanks. We need to adjust genres to our situation. Also, variations of genre must follow its conventions. These are usually restrictions we should not break. Otherwise, we cannot convey our ideas successfully.

Second, despite we did not spent the majority of time on this topic, it is still what I have learnt: two types of thinking. First-order thinking is what you think subconsciously, just without thinking twice. They are intuitive and creative but subject to unaware assumptions, unconscious prejudices and unexamined points of view. Second-order thinking is to examine what you think. It is to control your mind but not the other way around (like you do in first-order thinking). But the way you think about thinking also hinders your thinking and often induces foolishness. Hence, when write, we need to combine both type of thinking together.

About Me

About Me

Hi, I am Tianyi Ma. Second year and currently a math major student (I am attempting to transfer to computer science major). I am a Chinese international student but before I came here I lived in Boston for two years. So, first I decide to spend a few words on Boston. The downside about Boston is snow. Hugely different from Santa Barbara, winters in Boston are inhospitably cold (at least I think so) and therefore always snow a lot. Tons of snow bring snow days, which I like, but also endless shoveling, which I just hate as much. The upside about Boston is also snow because I can ski and snowboard as much as I want there during the winter. Skiing and snowboarding are both so fun that I have decided to do them every winter since I learnt them in Boston two years ago. So, thank Boston for introducing these two exhilarating sports to me.

Okay, let’s go back to myself and be relevant and really serious. I am black-haired as well as black-eyed, 5 feet 9 inches tall, 20 years old and weigh 143 pounds. I was born in Southern China. My hometown is Nanjing, 190 miles to the west of Shanghai (you must have awareness of where shanghai is approximately at in China). My favorite color is blue and favorite classic music is Pahelbel’s Canon in D (I realize that there are a lot of pop music I like and it is impossible to find out one I like the most, so I hence decide not to mention my favorite pop music). I am a guitar lover and have been playing guitar for 6 years. I started to learn playing classic guitar at first and got my level 10 proficiency certification 3 years ago. Afterwards, I gradually became interested in a disparate but budding style of guitar playing called fingerstyle which is performed by acoustic guitar but not classic guitar. So, if you play guitar also, either classic or acoustic, please feel free to get in touch with me, we can improve our skills together J.

At last, thank you for taking time reading my blog and hope we all have a good time in Writing 2.