Academic Discourse and Genre

Pirates010, "Academic Plaza" via wikimedia, 5/23/07. Public Domain.

Looking deeper into my previous posts insight on an academic in my journal for my major Aerospace Engineering, I can gather information about the type of writing that professionals in my field participate within. Instead of indentifying parts about the situation the writing is found in though, I spent 15 minutes familiarizing myself with the journal, and discovered a shocking realization.

Different but the Same

Even reading every single article within the journal, I could not find a completely different traditional genre, every article follows the format of a formal research paper. Looking into the content of the articles though, there a few nuanced differences.

Theory Research Paper

The "Theory" research paper is a formal research paper that has all of the correct marking of an experiment, an introduction, abstract theory, equations, results and data. What makes this slightly different "Theory" paper is that the design team for the experiment is trying to compare tested result against a formulated idea that they have conceived to generalize a variable or the change of a system. Therefore, testing this theory is key to the naming of this variation of research paper that is commonly found within this journal. A few key differences to set it apart from other research papers is that it focused on the abstract theory and the conclusions sections, wrapping up and comparing or contrasting their theory against evidence they found to be true. This type of paper is designed to be focused towards professors and other researchers in the field, in order to create a new ideas or new train of thought towards solving or understanding a variety of problems.

An example of this type of article can be found here. Reading the first section of the paper which focuses on the history and development of piston theory highlights the extensive coverage of abstract theory that is common to this genre.

Effect Research Paper

Following along the ideas of the last research paper, this type of formal research paper will have all of the similar quality of research, abstract ideas, introduction, data, experimental procedures, tables of results, conclusions, but this type of paper focuses more on finding data and results that might later be used as evidence to support a conclusion or as the starting point for further research. Quite often these papers have many calculations of statistics and will have lots of data but not as much in depth analysis of what is happening with the research, compared to a normal research paper with fairly even amount of both, or even a bit more analysis than data. This type of paper is intended towards both researchers and businesses, as research can use this to create models and new predictions, while businesses may use this in research on efficiency or as a basis for the development of new projects.

An example of this type of article is found here. It can be seen clearly that this type of paper has more graphs and examples compared to other papers with paragraphs of explanation and analysis.

Effectiveness Research Paper

As the other two papers, this paper also has the basics of a research paper, with data and results, procedures of experiment, and the like, but it focused on the efficiency or effectiveness of a certain type of design, procedure, or theory, trying to analyze and compare the experiment to other experiments of the same type. Often these papers have a large amount of statistics but also a strong conclusion to construct a comparison of various ideas, but combining this with the backing of experimental facts. This means articles like this one, on the performance of NASA's common model, often included sections such as a results and discussion portion that will not only present the results of the experiment, but come up with an idea about what happened and why that happened. These types of experiments are meant more for businesses or professionals in the field to test design and prepare the best or most efficient products with little error.