Reading this academic article brought back memories of last semester when I sat in our library for hours and hours writing research papers for my two classes. I used a lot of academic writings I found online through our library OneSearch database, and they are very similar to Thonney's writing. What really stood out to me is the amount of in-text citation these academic writings include. Soo many parentheses with long names and numbers. I guess we really need to support our claims with sufficient evidence.
She assigned us to read the book They Say, I say, which I found helpful in my writing. This book really focuses on the need to introduce others' opinions and then responds to them in your writing, like the first standard in Thonney's writing: "Academic Writers Respond to What Others Have Written about Their Topic." What Thonney wrote really made sense to me, especially that by introducing what others said, it makes your topic seem relevant and important. I learned from the book that I should introduce what "they said," but I never really thought about why I should do that.
Another thing that is interesting to me is that all these academic writing, as Thonney pointed out, are mostly (19 out of her 24 samples) written in first person. I noticed that when I probably read around 20 articles from academic journal databases for my research papers. For some reason, now that I think about it, using the word "we" really made the writing seem more valid. Perhaps it's because "we" implies that the article was a collaboration of multiple experts, thus making it more trustworthy than a single author article (at least that's what I feel like). Of course, we won't have any group paper this semester (sadly) to write using "we", but just something I thought about as I read this article.
The last convention that Thonney mentioned, the emphasis of evidence in graphical form wasn't applicable to any of my previous writings, but I certainly saw plenty graphs while reading academic articles last semester. Even before I read this article, I believed that images are very influential to the audience, as Thonney proves in her article by citing a study from Gibson and Zillmann. For some reason, it has never come across to me that I should be putting graphs or images in my own paper for support. Maybe that's why I got a bad grade on my research paper for history last year... Nonetheless, now that I read about it I can start incorporating images to strengthen my papers in the future.
Reading this article wasn't too bad for me, as I didn't find it extremely boring. I've been through worse. Thonney wrote in a very organized fashion and transitioned smoothly from point to point. She used a lot of examples from her sample articles, which made the reading a lot easier in my opinion. For some reason, I found this article more easily understood than Chomsky. When I'm reading Chomsky I often have to reread a whole page to figure out what is Chomsky actually saying/what is he trying to convey to the readers.
Yeah, I've definitely read worse academic papers! Good synopsis. I'm glad you had noticed some of these things in your previous readings.
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