The Same, but NOT the Same

            Unlike myself, and what most people would imagine, all scholarly works and genres are exactly the same. After reading them for hours it may feel as though they are the exact same, acting as a written NyQuil, however not all scholarly and academic texts are exactly alike. The rhetorical features and some conventions in academic texts differ, like those in the article entitled Developing Multicast Applications and Access Points off of the SCIgen genre generator compared with the features of the article Theater and Therapy: How Improvisation Informs the Analytic Hour.

            First, let’s look at the article from SCIgen, a computer science research paper generator. Before anything else is said, it should be said that all the articles generated on the site are pointless and make no sense. The papers that are generated are complete gibberish, but aim to illustrate the rhetorical features and conventions of a research paper. The visual layout and structure of each generated paper was extremely similar. From a surface level view, they look exactly the same. The text font and sizes all matched up, the headings, the different layers, the main difference was the content. Each article displayed a boldfaced heading along with multiple bold sub headings. Every paper contained a table of contents, an intro, related works, references, and an abstract section to begin the article. The abstract gave a brief preview of what the rest of the article was going to be about. The papers all contained a heavy amount of academic vocabulary and didactic phrasing. Although the writing was heavily academic, it was just a scholarly form of gibberish. It is as though a bunch of different paragraphs were pasted together that don’t entirely talk about the same subjects. The aim of the SCIgen site is “amusement, rather than coherence”. It is just a fun way to view different scientific articles. Another convention seen throughout the papers are a series of many different figures. The figures can either be graphs, tables, or regular drawings. They also do not seem completely coherent to the whole work of the paper. Basically, the articles on the SCIgen website are a good way to look at the conventions and some of the rhetorical features of a highly academic research paper, as long as you disregard the lack of coherence in the article’s text.

            Next is yet another scholarly article written by obviously two fine scholars, Rosalind Chaplin Kindler, M.F.A. and Arthur A. Gray, Ph.D. It is apparent by their names just how damn smart these people are. The article talks about the connection between improvisation and acting with the brain and how the two affect each other. This article contained words and phrases that seemed like gibberish like in the SCIgen articles, but they were actual words and phrases. This article is filled with enough didactic and inflated language for the whole entire family! The text is broken up into short and sweet paragraphs. The writers also draw upon their own experiences and memories at times which can be very interesting. In terms of conventions, there are a few different headings, each of the same font and size. The article also contains a brief summary in the very beginning, explaining a bit about the article. There also footnotes present on each page, giving some more explanation to the text. Also, embedded in the text are quotes from people taken from interviews that were conducted. And finally, like most scholarly texts, there is a works cited or reference page at the very end. This article contains all the rhetorical features and conventions to make it a scholarly article, but it rings much differently than the SCIgen article.

            Besides the obvious fact that the SCIgen article is gibberish and the theater article is not, the two works are very different, yet very similar and of the same genre. Unlike the SCIgen article, the theater article contains small anecdotes from the authors. This makes for a more interesting read. The SCIgen articles also do not contain footnotes like the theater article. Both articles are broken up into small paragraphs and contain multiple headings and sections. The theater article is more fluid, with less breaks in the text, yet no figures. Both contain summaries before the article begins, or what could be called abstracts. The overall writing in both texts is very inflated and academic. The words used at times are incredibly hard to understand, I’m not sure Google would even know the definitions. The papers differ on many levels. Both are academic and aimed to teach, but the theater article becomes more personal at times. Some similarities between the texts exist, yet many differences are also present, but overall the articles are of the same genre because they both possess the perfect amount of rhetorical devices and conventions to make them scholarly articles.

Link to SCIgen article:  http://scigen.csail.mit.edu/scicache/154/scimakelatex.11892.Tyler+Reinhold.html

Link to Theater article: http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=948a1edf-05fe-44b7-b4d3-ab744f3d6388%40sessionmgr4002&vid=9&hid=4212