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/)