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Analyzing the Structure, Language, and Use of Scholarly Articles in the Fields of History

and Chemistry

Evan G. Smith

Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara

Writ 2: Academic Writing

Dr. Valentina Fahler

August 15, 2020

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Dear Valentina.

Due to the confined time allotted to writing the WP1 my writing process was condensed

to a level in which I will need to adjust. Usually with due dates in the weeks ahead I can freely

and sluggishly move between outlines and drafts. I do this with little organization and advanced

goals set in advance. This same disorganized and goalless approach happened to this essay,

which 6 days have elapsed to write it. My previous approach to writing is obviously suboptimal

as I backload the work towards the due date from the lack of personal goals and the threat of a

due date. I also never free-wrote as much as I did for this essay before, mostly motivated by

hitting the draft due date on Monday. I feel that I definitely require more structure in my process,

so this class should be a good lesson in that for me.

One thing that has certainly changed was my revising step. With the time I was allotted

before I constantly revised myself after some time. I was in a constant battle between actually

writing and revising what I have written. Again due to the time allotted to the project I didn’t

have time to revise while writing, so after Monday I entered an entirely complete state of

revision which I really haven’t done before in my writing process. My revision process mostly

stayed the same, looking over passages, making sure the paragraphs make sense and are relevant,

et etc. I will need to spend more time directly revising than before as I could be overestimating

the quality of the pre-revised paper.

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The use of scholarly articles across the entire academic spectrum is extremely important

as a standard of quality and consistency to build upon and depend upon. Without the established

norm of journal articles accessing information in a scholarly setting would be an arduous process

fraught with misinformation. Journal articles fall under the formal definition of genre that

Bickmore defines as “a typified utterance that appears in a recurrent situation. A genre evolves

through human use and activity to be a durable and usable for carrying out human

communicative intentions in fairly stable ways” (2016 p.59). To analyze the difference between

two disciplines’ discourse communities usage of the journal article genre two peer-reviewed

journal articles will be analyzed: Indigo Dye Production by Enzymatic Mimicking Based on an

Iron(III)porphyrin by Rebelo, Linhares, Simões, Silva Neves, Cavaleiro, and Freire with

Xiongnu burial complex: A study of ancient textiles from the 22nd Noin-Ula barrow (Mongolia,

first century AD) by Elena, Vasiliev, Mamatyuk, and Kundo. The general layout of the scholarly

journal genre is conserved in both disciplines, but changes in formatting display tailoring to the

respective discourse communities’ needs. Discourse communities as summarized by Melzer

require genres to further goals in the community while using specialized language to help

communication and learning (2020 p.102). The differences in formatting in journal articles in

chemistry and history sheds light on how the genre is utilized within discourse communities and

the general accessibility of information between the two disciplines.The requirements of

discourse communities and the situations journal articles are used in create the differences

between history and chemistry articles.

Small yet detectable changes in the formatting and writing of scholarly articles help

understand the academic situation journal articles are in for chemistry and history. Both articles

studied had nearly identical structuring, having all the necessary sections that compose the
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average requirements of the journal article genre. Both articles detailed what chemicals were

used in the process detailed within the paper. While the point of the section is the same, the

history paper used the word Experimental to describe with what and how the data was obtained.

Chemistry instead used Materials and Methods. The chemistry article also gave complete

information of which chemical manufacturer the chemicals were sourced from, and gave the

make and model of all equipment used in the procedure. Such details were not included in the

history article’s Experimental section. .This satisfies the requirement concept in chemistry that

experiments need to be accurately detailed so that they can be easily recreated by reviewers to

make sure that the authors are not faking procedures and results.

Citation was a notable difference in the structure of the two discipline’s articles. The in-

text citation in the history article includes the names of the authors and the date of publication.

Meanwhile the chemistry article uses bracketed numerals for the in-text citations with a

numeriated works-cited. Chemistry needs this form of citation from how specialized each journal

article is about some specific subject matter.. If the authors of the chemistry paper wanted to

source some general knowledge about a referenced concept, multiple journal articles would be

required to gather enough information for the citation. This difference in citation is because

using multiple sources for a statement in the history article was rather rare, compared to the

chemistry article . The difference caused by this form of citation can be easily understood by the

two following passages from the articles, “The actual consensus about the putative active species

involved in these processes was, in general, based on a reactivity pattern [23], [24], [25], [39] or

considering the parallelism with non-porphyrinic (non-heme) systems [40].” (Rebelo et al. 2014)

and “All finds have been restored and comprehensively studied. This burial complex is a subject

of the monograph and articles (Polosmak et al., 2011, Polosmak, 2012a, Polosmak, 2012b)”
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(Karpova et al. 2016). The chemistry text uses 5 in-text citations in the span of two sentences,

while the history text rarely used above 3 sources at one given time. If chemistry used history’s

citations, lines of texts in articles would be taken up by citations and become significantly harder

to read. History does require its type of citation for two main reasons, how in-depth sources can

be and potential subjectivity.

Differences in how journal articles are written offers insight to how discourse

communities in chemistry and history operate. Discourse communities in chemistry mainly use

journal articles as a primary source of information while history discourse communities use

books and journal articles. Chemistry relies utterly upon journal articles and the academic

journals that they are collected in, there is little other resources that exist at the same level of

academic rigor as scholarly articles. Chemistry is confined into the limits of an academic journal

from how precise each individual article is compared to the entire field. As seen in the example

quoted in the previous paragraph, the chemistry article uses 4 sources to describe how a

molecule behaves. Meanwhile in history journal articles take a more supporting position to larger

works. Unlike chemistry books play a central role in the spreading of historical knowledge in

history discourse communities. The main function of journal articles in history is to supply

information for larger works done after the articles. The history article writes about what dyes

were used in the textiles buried in 1st century Mongolian tombs. Such knowledge would be useful

to a future author writing a book about 1st century dyes, intercontinental trading, and other large

topics that require more pages than a journal article can contain. The difference between how

journal articles are utilized by academic discourse communities affects how information is

spread to the greater population as a whole.

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Accessibility between history and chemistry from specialized speech, jargon and format

of information affect how widely spread discourse communities are for the two disciplines. Due

to chemistry’s reliance upon journal articles, being able to read bleeding edge information is not

feasible for a reader outside of academia. The journals the articles are published in require large

monetary subscriptions for access to the articles within, causing a price barrier to some potential

readers. The jargon of the chemistry journal article is hard to initially understand due to

describing arbitrary and microscopic concepts using greek and latin roots, languages foreign to

the vast majority of people reading the articles. Historical information is easier to access due to

the function of books within discourse communities. Historical information can be described

using words and concepts more typical to an average reader’s life as the information presented

can be related to. These differences cause history to be a discipline studied readily by the average

population compared to disciplines like chemistry. . Understanding why these disparities within

discourse communities occur is important to understanding how knowledge is spread throughout

the general population from academia.

Differences between the two disciplines' usage of the journal article genre can be

attributed to the unique requirements set upon them from the discourse community using the

genre. These differences help illuminate how chemistry and history discourse communities

utilize journal articles within their communication and learning. The differences in utilization of

the genre causes effects to ripple throughout the greater population’s relationship between the

disciplines, causing history to be overall the more approachable and studied discipline than

chemistry outside of academia.

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References

Bickmore, Lisa. (2016). Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical

(eco)Systems. (SLCC English Department, Ed.). Open English @ SLCC

Karpova, E., Vasiliev, V., Mamatyuk, V., Polosmak, N., Kundo, L. (2016). Xiongnu burial

complex: A study of ancient textiles from the 22nd Noin-Ula barrow (Mongolia, first

century AD). Journal of Archaeological Science, (70), (15-22)

Rebelo, S., Linhares, M., Simões, M., Silva, A., Neves, G., Cavaleiro, J., Freire, C., (2014).

Indigo dye production by enzymatic mimicking based on an iron(III)porphyrin. Journal

of Catalysis, (315), 33-40

Melzer, D. (2020). Writing Spaces. Parlor Press and WAC Clearinghouse