Academic Discourse and Genre

 This is a continuation of blog post 6.5 where I talk about the nitty-gritty of the academic journal.

"Legal-Researcher.jpg", 10/2013; wp-content; Public Domain.

• How many different kinds of genres seem to be published in this particular issue of the journal you selected? (Remember, genres are usually identifiable by their form, content, techniques and/or social function.)

If you don't know the 'official' names for these different genres, come up with names for the yourself. Identify at least three different genres within the journal issue and describe the significant formal differences between the three genres (that is, what are the key differences or characteristics that seem to be unique and distinguish them from other kinds of texts?). If you made up your own name, explain why you chose the name you invented. If you'd like, provide snapshots of the different genres (clearly labelled) to help your reader see how they look different (or are organized differently, with different conventions) on the page.

This might come across as kind of stupid, but bear with me.

I'm going to make this as simple as possible.

1) The first type of genre is what I will call the "Text Wall."

We all know what this looks like. A barrage of text, usually extremely dense, full of big words, complex ideas, compound/complex sentences to go along with them.

"What is the appropriate feature to be used in scene matching, vertices or edges? For convenience of
comparison an edge segmented image and a vertex segmented image are used for correlation computation."

This is the meat and potatoes of the document. It's essential for laying the foundation so that archetypes can be made later on.

2) The second type of genre is what I will call "Pictures!".

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words! Instead of talking about vertices, edges, and complex 3-dimensional graphical shapes, it's much easier when you can just show a picture of a box with some angles to go along with it.

The purpose is to break down these text walls and make the document "scannable".

3) The third type of genre is what I will call "Equations".

This is genre-specific to mathematics and scientific journals, where equations are the foundation for the analyses. In order to find specific variables and their relations to other variables, we need to see the logic behind how to manipulate certain equations to isolate the variables.

This is important because it points exactly to how the outcome relates to the inputs.