Writing Project #1 Reflection

Justin Renaud

Original Article Link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1532673X14566811

For my Writing Project I chose to translate an academic article written by Donald

Micheal Gooch titled, “Ideological Polarization on the Supreme Court: Trends in the Court’s

Institutional Environment and Across Regimes, 1937-2008”. This academic article discussed the

increasing polarization in American society and political ideology. The research of this study,

involving increased polarization, came from analyzing a variety of different Supreme Court cases

over the past few decades. Donald Gooch looked at the decisions made by the Supreme Court

and focused on the way in which the Justices voted based on their ideological leaning. He then

compared the decisions and looked to see if there was any clear trend of decisions being more or

less split over time, and if they aligned with the ideological leaning of the justices. What he

eventually found was that over the past few decades, Supreme Court decisions have become

increasingly more polarized with split votes along ideological affiliation becoming commonplace

among the Supreme Court. While there were still many decisions where justices flipped sides or

all voted unanimously, the tendency of justices to vote along ideological lines on major cases has

drastically increased over the decades. He then extrapolated these findings and compared them to

the political and social polarization we see in America today. He further explained that it’s

sometimes difficult to know if American society is more polarized now or if certain political

actors are simply more vocal, giving us the impression of polarization. However, from analyzing

the Supreme Court decision data, we can see that Washington has become more polarized in their
decision making on major political issues, offering us a window of reflection to American

society.

When I worked on my translation of this academic article, one of the main aspects of my

translation was shifting the audience. In the original piece, Dr. Gooch’s intended audience is

academia, students, professors, and other educated individuals with a good understanding of the

American political and electoral system. Throughout his work, he references many different

Supreme Court cases, elaborating on how they reflect his general research findings. The way in

which he describes his research and analysis is geared heavily toward those in higher academia

and thus, requires prior knowledge of political studies. In my translation, I wanted to take the

research information from the article and transform it into something more easily digestible for

your average person who might be interested in understanding politics and political

phenomenons. In addition, as more youth are getting involved and vocal about political issues, I

wanted to take something related to important research and translate it into a form which anyone

could more easily understand regardless of prior academic knowledge.

To make this research information coherent and interesting to my intended audience, I

chose to translate the academic article into a Reddit post under the “r/politics” forum. The reason

I chose this genre was because I felt that such a translation would keep readers engaged as it

embodies a comments section style forum. This choice was greatly influenced by Shelley Reid

writing in which she discusses how writers should, “Adapt to the audience and purpose you’re

writing for”. By using a Reddit post I could make the writing style easy for readers to understand

and also entertaining by adding small joking comments that you might find on a post such as

Reddit. Moreover, It would allow me to translate the information of the academic article to

something more easily digestible for my intended audience. I believed that by using this genre
for my translation, I could keep my audience effectively engaged in the writing topic while also

getting the general research ideas across in a way that wouldn’t feel boring or too formal.

The main strategy I used to incorporate the academic article information into my

translation was using subsequent comments to build my main ideas over the course of the reddit

post. I accomplished this by having each comment leave a bit of ambiguity or openness to the

end, allowing for subsequent comments or responses to either add more information or clarify

the previous idea. I thought this would be an effective strategy for the reader, as it would slowly

introduce the main ideas from the academic article and further elaborate on the details as you

read through the comments. The main ideas which I kept in my translation were the highlighted

points from the article. This included the idea of using Supreme Court polarization research, the

historical change or progression of Supreme Court decisions, and how this research could be

used to view political polarization in American society. I felt that keeping these main ideas

would effectively illustrate the research in Dr. Gooch’s article, without boring the reader of

making the translation too content heavy. Some information which I excluded from my

translation were the many references of different Supreme Court cases and methods of data

analysis involved in the research. While these are also important aspects, I felt that they wouldn’t

have much bearing on the understanding of the general idea toward my intended audience.

Furthermore, I felt that by incorporating these pieces of information, I would lose the reader's

attention and therefore not make the main ideas easily and effectively understandable for the

intended audience. Some things I added that weren’t in the original article were comments

involving political banter that you would most likely see on a political post. The purpose of

adding these additional comments was to make the translation feel genuine and realistic for the

audience.
 One of the biggest challenges I faced in this genre translation was taking extremely

academic based content, and expressing the ideas in a causal text like form. This was a challenge

because many of the ideas from the academic article were difficult to express without using

certain language or terminology. Another challenge was making sure I was consistent with the

type of language I used in the genre. When I wrote the first few comments it was easy to make

the conversation feel very text-like. However, as I progressed through the translation, I found

myself writing in a style that felt out of character for a Reddit post comments section. The words

I used and the language style started to feel more academic than conversational. Going back over

and rethinking the way I could express the same idea just as effectively, while also using casual

language was a significant challenge I came across. I pulled from Giles' writing about the value

of reflection as, “Reflection helps you to develop your intentions (purpose), figure out your

relation to your audience, uncover possible problems with your individual writing processes for

reflection…”, in order to notice some of the flaws in my work. One of the main ways I overcame

these challenges was writing out the idea I was trying to share and pretending like I was

explaining the idea to someone who has zero prior knowledge or understanding of the American

political system. This method helps me more effectively write the content of my translation for

the intended audience.

In reference to the content of this class, I utilized the course readings to help build my

genre translation. I definitely use many of the textbook examples of genre translations to better

craft my writing project. One of the main concepts I derived from the course readings was

making the content non synonymous with a peer-reviewed academic article. When studying the

examples from the textbook, one thing I noticed was that after reading the translations I often

forgot it was originally something else while still taking away the main ideas. I thought this was
extremely effective for translating information in an engaging way. Therefore, I sought to mimic

this tactic in my writing project. I aimed to make the content understandable while making the

reader forget that the ideas they were taking in were originally derived from an academic article.

Personally I very much enjoyed this writing project as it involved two elements which I

find extremely interesting! Being a Political Science major I am very passionate about politics as

well as sharing important political information and phenomenons with people who might not be

as up to date with the latest on politics. In addition, creating this writing project in the form of a

reddit post allowed me to embrace my creativity. I had fun attempting to imitate a reddit post and

exploring ways to create elements in google docs that would clearly illustrate the reddit post

genre translation to my audience. This writing project was very interesting for me as not only did

it combine two aspects of things I enjoy and am very passionate about, but it also allowed me to

have a lot of freedom in the creation process.

 Work Cited

Gooch, Donald Michael. “Ideological Polarization on the Supreme Court.” American

Politics Research, vol. 43, no. 6, 2015, pp. 999–1040.,

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673x14566811.

Reid, Shelley E. “Ten Ways To Think About Writing: Metaphoric Musings for College

Writing Student.” Writing Space, 2011.

Giles, Sandra L. “Reflective Writing and the Revision Process: What Were You Thinking?”

Writingspace, 2010.