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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 advanceadvanced. 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 whatthat I have writtenwrote. Again due to the time allotted to the project I

didn’t have time to revise while writing, so after Monday I entereddid enter 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 oflayoutformat

of the scholarly journal genre is conserved in both disciplines, but subtle 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 that shall be detailed in this essay.

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 expectations 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. This satisfies thesatisfies to 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. 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. Much

greater care is written in the chemistry article about the sourcing of chemicals and the

instruments than the history article, satisfying the different situation the article is in compared to

the history article.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.general topic as articles are extremely specific in

their coverage of an idea. 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 paper was rather rare, compared to the chemistry article
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paper. 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)”

(Karpova et al. 2016). The chemistry text uses 5 in-text citations in the span of two sentences,

while the history text rarely infrequently 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 can be 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 4 sources were

used 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
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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 at other large topics that require more pages than an journal article

can contain. Here is where articles in history can be utilized as succinct and accurate sources to

use when writing about some large and complex historical event or series of events. The

difference between how journal articles are utilized by academic discourse communities affects

how information is spread to the greater population as a whole.This difference can affect the

discourse community’s ability to obtain their goals depending on what genres are being used.

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

format of information affect how widelywildly 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

how this jargon relates to the genres that they are used in is important as this can determine how

discourse communities exist and evolve. Understanding why these disparities within discourse

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

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general population from academia. are why analyzing genre and how it is utilized in

communities can be useful when understanding how information is spread.

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