There are hundreds of different genres, ranging from general to specific, from fantasy to political to horror and more. A genre is a specific category for different types of media including music, literature, art etct (Literary Devices), Literature genres are determined by multiple factors including length, literary technique, tone, and content. These factors make different forms of literature unique and unify groups of literature based on single factors or combinations of them For example the horror genre shares the same type of content with mystery and the comedy and satire genres share the same content sometimes While some genres overlap in multiple areas, the combination of these factors make each genre unique and different from each other, This paper will analyze the scientific discourse genre as well as the truth of this discourse community and how this relates to writing using a scientific article.
In the ecology discourse community, truth is created through multiple factors including the educational purpose, the factual data and research, the scientific method structure, and the technical linguistics. A discourse community is a group of people who share common goals and communicate about a certain topic, issue, orjob field, (University of Central Florida) The article “Substrate size mediates thermal stress in the rocky intertidal” by Gedan et al published in 2011 in the Ecology Society of America journal will be analyzed for the rhetorical purpose, content, structure, and linguistic features that are present in different types of genres and writing samples within the ecology discourse community t This article is about the rocky intertidal zone, which is the area where ocean waves reach the highest and lowest parts of the beach, and tests the effect of different sized rocks and its effects on the mortality of barnacles.
This article fits within the ecology discourse community and communicates new scientific data to other scientists as well as curious readers. Firstly, the rhetorical purpose of this article is quite complex and is aimed towards both professional and unprofessional people. The audience is geared towards those who have a higher education and who are interested in this type of content. Those in the ecology discourse community would make up the majority of the audience of this paper. The audience who are in this discourse community are likely to have basic knowledge in marine biology as well as coastal ecology. These readers who are both part of this community, and not part of this community are likely to know basic information about the intertidal community as well as the organisms that live within this tidal range to understand the full dynamics of this article.
The time that these readers would take to look through the article would most likely range from ten to fifteen minutes, due to the fact that this article is seven pages long and is filled with text and graphs that need to be analyzed to be understood. The purpose of this article is to communicate scientific findings to the scientific community and other readers about thermal dynamics, population ecology, barnacles survivability, living and nonliving relationships within the marine ecosystem. The author ultimately wants the readers to gain knowledge from the scientific experiment that they conducted. Because of the fact that this article is aimed towards educating scientists and readers on newly discovered information, this relates to the educational purpose in the ecology discourse community truths. Secondly, the content is extremely organized and uniform throughout the entirety of this article.
All scientific journals have specific guidelines to become published so they must adhere to them so they can convey their experiment to the scientific community. Some of the specific guidelines include using American Psychological Association (APA) format, restricting use of pronouns and contractions, forbidding use of opinions/bias, and must follow the scientific method, The APA format is used in almost all scientific papers and is used to cite outside sources. Along with the structure created by the APA format, the scientific method also creates rigid structure within scientific articles. This method follows the format of having sections including an abstract, introduction, method, results, discussion, and a conclusion in that order. All scientific articles‘ information must adhere to these specific structures. The entirety of this specific article is made up of all factual information except for a singular opinion.
That opinion states that “Substrate size is an additional and often-overlooked aspect of environmental heterogeneity.” Calling substrate size being often overlooked is an opinion which should not be in this experimental paper. This most likely was able to be in the article because of how minor this opinion was, and due to the fact that this was created by those associated with a college and perhaps don’t have much experience in creating scientific published articles, The content contains almost all factual data with some small exceptions and therefore follows the ecology discourse community truths. Thirdly, the structure of this article uses a specific scientific method format that is widely used in the scientific community and in many types of scientificjournals. The abstract in this format is a general summary that reviews every other section within the article and describes vaguely the experiment, its purpose, and its conclusion.
The introduction section focuses on introducing the topic to the reader by starting off describing general concepts and then getting more specific and tieing the experiment to these concepts. The methods section has the purpose of describing the exact steps in conducting the experiment, detailed enough for another person to replicate the experiment accurately and get the same results. The results section is filled with many graphs, tables, and figures as well as captions briefly explaining the figure in a way that the audience can understand. The discussion section analyzes the meaning of these results from the experiment and tries to explain different connections and explanations for the data they collected. Upon reviewing these results, the authors draws a final conclusion in the conclusion section. This structure must be reviewed by peers before submission, and if the content and structure match the requirements, the article will be submitted to the journal (as long as it matches the correct discourse community).
Lastly, the linguistics of this article are relatively clear and consistent in use of pronouns, use of facts and opinions, jargon, and the types of sources. This article uses only one first person pronoun, ‘we‘ consistently throughout the entirety of the essay to address the scientists that are performing the experiment. The use of pronouns in scientific articles is not encouraged and usually not allowed to be published but the use of pronouns in this article aids the scientists with enhancing their clarity of the article and on how to recreate it. This article’s language is definitely formal, even with the use of ‘we’ throughout the paper, due to the factual tone The lack of other pronouns, slang, and the precise use of grammar and sentence structure also support the formality of this article. Lightjargon (specific words for a particular field) is also used within this article such as ‘sessile’, ‘ectotherms’, ‘heterogeneity’, and ‘logarithmic’.
There aren’t too many words like this, and a reader could look up these terms quite easily and understand the entire essay without any knowledge in the ecology field. The linguistics in this article are easy to understand, simple, and formal, which support the truth of the ecology discourse community. In conclusion, the article “Substrate size mediates thermal stress in the rocky intertidal” by Gedan et al., is a perfect example of the ecology discourse communities truths. This article conveys the shared purpose of education and conveying information, which aid in the creation of facts and theories. The content follows the universal APA format and the scientific method creating a rigid structure that those in this discourse community must follow, All published journals in this discourse community share factual and formal linguistics as shown in this article. These four genre analysis components prove this article to be an exemplary example of the ecology discourse community truth.
