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Jennifer Tackett Professor Ramey WTNG 102. November 17, 2015 Genre Analysis Before delving into a genre analysis, one must wonder what genre really means. According to the editors of LiteraryDevices.org, a genre means “the type of art, literature or music characterized by a specific form, content, and style.” In literature alone there are thousands of genres ranging from the illustrative picture books of one’s childhood to the epics of Grecian heroes. There are how-to books to arrange one’s furniture to align a person’s energy or mystery novels with just enough clues to allow the reader to guess “whodunnit.” This paper focuses on analyzing a genre of scientific research intent on sharing the discoveries of its authors. This paper will analyze a scientific research article titled “Morphology, swimming performance and propulsive mode of six co-occurring hydromedusae” written by Sean P. Colin and John H. Costello and published in 2001 in The Journal of Experimental Biology. They present the effect of different morphologies on swimming ability for six different species of jellyfish. Colin and Costello’s article adheres to the four major characteristics of any genre: a clear rhetorical purpose, content, structure, and linguistic features. First is an analysis of the authors’ intended audience as members of the same discourse community. A discourse community “identifies a grouping of people who share common language norms, characteristics, patterns, or practices as consequence of their ongoing communications and identification with each other” (Bazerman 2009). Fellow marine scientists or invertebrate biologists would be quite interested in this piece. The target audience for this journal entry is greatly limited, as it has highly specialized language predominantly understood
by the marine science community. One would have to be very familiar with the subject, as the author does not provide definitions for esoteric terms. An individual may read this article once or twice and then keep it for reference. The purpose of this article is to analyze different morphologies in jellyfish (physical characteristics) and how that affects propulsion (how they swim). Colin and Costello wrote this article to share this information with other scientists so they can use this to better their own research. Secondly, Colin and Costello make sure to adhere to the content submission requirements of The Journal of Experimental Biology, found as the journal’s “aims and scope.” When an author wishes to submit an article to the journal, the authors must first have their writings reviewed by their peers. This usually happens when an author submits an article for consideration. The article is given to one person for review, and if the reviewer believes the article is not fit for submission, it is reviewed by an editor of the journal. In this situation, the article may be considered for resubmission if the author makes the appropriate changes. Colin and Costello cite articles within their article to provide background information that might be needed to understand the experiment as well as other articles that are related to the experiment being done to illustrate their proficiency with the subject. In - text citations use the Harvard (name, date) citation method. The submission requirements do not state the type of format used to present citations in the reference list, but the journal editors do give examples for various text styles. For example, a journal article would be cited in this style: “ Rivera, A. R. V., Wyneken, J. and Blob, R. W. (2011). Forelimb kinematics and motor patterns of swimming loggerhead sea turtles ( Caretta caretta ): are motor patterns conserved in the evolution of new locomotor strategies? J. Exp. Biol. 214 , 3314-3323.”(Journal of Experimental Biology). In general, most scientific papers use the American Psychological Association (APA) citation style, as shown in
article as the example has shown. The results section is used to present only the data and results - not to offer an explanation why. The results section is where the graphs are found. The results section is broken into subheadings of similar name to the ones used in the methods section because the two are related. The results section states the outcomes of the steps listed in the methods section. The discussion is the second section in which citations are used. This section is the place where it is appropriate to speculate reasons why the scientists got the results that they did by incorporating previous experiments done by others. The acknowledgement and reference sections are exactly as they sound. Finally, the authors keep a matter of fact, constant, factual voice. They use formal language appropriate for a scientific article. Usually, scientific articles are strictly third person; no “I”, “you”, or “we” are used in most cases, but in the article “we” (427,429) is used. This does not detract from the overall tone of this paper, which is formal. The use of formal language is to uphold the integrity of their work, but also the organization in which they published their research. The authors use jargon - packed language which would only be used by members of the same discourse community. Case in point is their use of the words “prolate” and “oblate” (430) without any indication as to what these words mean. Also, the authors use the scientific names of all of the organisms they worked with. This included names such as “ Proboscidactyla flavicirrata ” (428). The only way for the audience to understand what organism this references is the provided drawings of the organisms used in the experiment. All in all, in the article “Morphology, swimming performance and propulsive mode of six co-occurring hydromedusae” by Sean Colin and John Costello effectively demonstrates the marine biology discourse community’s truth through clear rhetorical purpose, controlled content, strict structuring, and formal language as a scientific research article. The information in this
article challenges the belief that large - belled jellyfish have better jet propulsion than oblong small jellyfish. In this article, Colin and Costello demonstrate the truth of the discourse community through experimental data, clear and concise information, and through following the scientific method. The most important part of writing a scientific article is sharing information. Sharing information strengthens collaboration between scientists to verify results so that they become truths.
