Comparison of Academic and Informal Writing

Audience
     Azuma’s article aimed novice or prospective graduate students, especially students who major in computer science, as audience. Their concerns are how to survive the severe graduate school life for getting Ph.D. They already know that completing Ph.D. is a long and hard road. But, Ph.D. is rewardable for some kinds of students despite its difficulty. So, they expect to comprehend its demerits and merits from this article, obtaining useful information so as to achieve success in graduate school without wasting time. The author mentions the indicate audience by himself in the introduction of the article.
     On the other hand, Dahl’s article aimed people who relate to academic field, especially economics, linguistics and education, as audience although she doesn’t refer to that in the article. Aware of the general notion of knowledge claims, these readers are more concered wth the differences between the concept of knowledge claims in economics and linguistics. They already have general information of knowledge claim. So, they want to get the detailed information about knowledge claim.

-ing
adj.
passive form

Hoping to understand more about this, these people...
Unaware of ...., these people ....
Disgusted by the lack of government action, the citizens have ....

These people, unaware of the dangers of global warming, claim that
These students, hoping to understand more about...., came to the lecture...

Tone
     Azuma’s article uses easy and informal words or expressions in order to make young readers understand easily and encouraged. The tone of the article is private, optimistic and subjective because he discuss about school life and he mostly uses his or a few others’ experience as basis instead of his research. For example, the article starts like this: “In February 1995, on a beautiful sunny day with clear Carolina blue skies……..”, and ends like this way: “Good luck.”
     On the contrary, Dahl’s article uses many academic words and data which belong to both her and others. The tone of the article is official and objective. For instance, the article starts like this way:”Disciplines differ in what they see as constituting knowledge within their domain in how new knowledge is produced.”

Authority
     Azuma did dissertation work in interactive computer graphics in the Computer Science department of the University North Carolina. He got Ph.D. from UNC in 1995. Those are showed in Introduction of the article.
     Dahl is associate professor of English linguistics at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration in Bergen. Her current research interests include academic discourse, text linguistics, the language of economics and international communication. This information is added to the end of the paper.

Rhetorical Structure
     Azuma’s article is a kind of private essay which doesn’t have an academic structure while Dahl’s article is an academic paper which is consisted of Abstract, Introduction, Method, Findings, Discussion and Conclusion.

Argument
     Azuma made his opinion by his experiences which he got during his graduate school days. One experience is a kind of proof. However, it is the weakest evidence because it is only one example. On the other hand, Dahl made his opinion and discussion about topic using results of research. Well organized research provides us more accurate information that can be strong evidence for the argument. Azuma doesn’t position his argument with the previous discourses although Dahl exposes hers to some discourses such as computer science and biochemistry.

Scope
     Azuma’s article deals with a wider, more general topic whereas Dahl deals with more focused topic. The differences of main topic and research methods are responsible for the difference in scope.

Sentence Mechanics and Grammar
     Azuma’s article often uses the first person and the second person although Dahl’s article uses the third person. For example, Azuma often uses “you” and “I” while Dahl often uses “study” and “claim” as the subject.

Style
     Azuma’s article includes many colloquialisms and casual expressions. His article includes many interrogative sentences, exclamation marks and dialogues. For example, he wrote “Why get a Ph.D. ?” , and “Read on!”.

Reference to Others’ Ideas
     Azuma provides proverbs, words from big names and books which have tendency to be based on not research but their experiences. On the other hand, Dahl uses many more reliable resources such as papers and data which relates to her topic. Azuma uses the citations mainly to attract readers while Dahl uses citation to extract useful data to support her opinions and to evaluate her arguments objectively. Azuma merely extracts some sentences themselves from references although Dahl often interprets references and rewrite by her words.

Vocabulary
     Azuma uses nonacademic and informal vocabulary. In contrast, Dahl uses academic and formal vocabulary. Dahl uses linguistic technical term such as “lexical” and “corpus”.