PB#2 A The Art of Drinking in College

There are many different types of writing in today’s world.  We have magazines, newspapers, books, and also online articles.  However, no other genre of writing could be as informing, well thought out, and unfortunately more boring than all the others, as a scholarly academic article written by super smart students and professors.  As a regular student, I can see that these academic articles have a different set of conventions, and rhetorical features than other pieces of writing.

My scholarly article, is titled, “Parenting Style, Gender, Beer Drinking and Drinking Problems of College Students.”  This is an informative research based and academic journal about the different effects that alcohol has on the human body.  This type of written journal can also be compared to the SCIgen generator that I have used in the past.  There are many different conventions and rhetorical features that are similar and also dissimilar between these two pieces.  

First off, some of the similarities that these two papers hold is that they both yield to a higher educated audience.  These papers are not meant to be read by amateurs or uninterested students who do not know what they are even reading.  Also, there is not much content in these two examples that are meant to elicit an opinion or cause an argument.  These pieces are there to identify the facts and highlight what is going on within the area that the article surrounds.  In easier words, they are pretty much just research papers just to give information.  Another similarity between these papers, is that they do not have any constraints between them.  They are just here to establish a point through the use of information and data.  Both papers also use tables and charts so that they can give proof, and a more visual look at the information that the researchers have gathered.  The papers, are also listed in steps as to establish what they are going to talk about next, or what point they want to make.  Then finally, they both end with a conclusion that wraps up their hypothesis and states whether they were correct or not.  

However, these two different sources also have dissimilarities between them.  One of them is that the SCIgenerator is total bogus and none of it makes sense.  But we already know that.  But, a real dissimilarity, is that the drinking piece has a lot more information and statistics laid out for a person to read.  It also has many more quotes, and I mean like pretty much most of the paper is quotes.  These are the dissimilarities that can be found between the two different papers.  

After skimming through this publication about alcohol in college students, many things struck me as being very important.  To start off, I think that all the quotes that they include are very important because they are telling the reader that many studies have been done on this topic, but they are taking it to the next level by examining a parent's influence, and gender of the college students.  Another aspect that is important is that the authors describe the process that they took to find the outcomes of their experiments, and find out if their hypothesis was right or not.  Another aspect that strikes me as important in this work is that they lay out the plan that they are going to undertake to conduct their study.  They set up tables and charts and just go through the data little by little, calculating it all until they have their ratios and answers.  Also, I think that the discussion that is written down in the middle of the paper is important because it gives the authors the chance to maybe answer their readers questions.  If something wasn’t explained clearly, or if they want to clarify something then they have that discussion to answer it.  These are some of the aspects that I think are most important in the article and make it more understandable to their readers.

These are the rhetorical features and conventions that define what scholarly articles really represent and also describe what their genre is.  Even though these articles, are really boring and are meant for geniuses, they are still valuable because they give us facts and solutions that we would otherwise not even learn about.  These are the rhetorical features and conventions that are important in scholarly articles, and that make it different than other publications such as SCIgen.