PB2B

Ting Pan

Writing 2 / MW 3PM

04/26/2015

PB2A

“Moves”

    “Moves” means decisions writers make when writing. Commonly, all writing consists of a series of choices and successful “moves” will make arguments more persuasive. For readers, paying attention to these “rhetorical moves” can help them work on their own writing. In this PB, I will revisit two of the articles that I have read this quarter. The first piece is “Finding Evidence,” and the second one is written by Dana Lynn Driscoll, “Introduction to Primary Research: Observations, Surveys, and Interviews.”

   First of all, I will analyze the purpose and intended audience of these two articles. “Find Evidence” help readers consider the rhetorical situations, find data and evidence from research sources or collect on their own. Dana Driscoll attempts to tell her audience how to plan, gather and organize information for a research project. Unlike “Find Evidence”, which just includes the ways of how to obtain evidence, Driscoll introduces a complete series of processes when making a primary research. Intended audience of both articles are college students because in “Find Evidence”, the author mentions how to explore college library resources, and the other piece is a chapter in a peer-reviewed open textbook series for the college writing classroom.

    “Find Evidence” is a textbook article. A textbook is mean to communicate established knowledge to students of a given subject. It provides a general introduction to the subject as well as relevant problems, concepts and theories. This article presents knowledge of collecting data and evidence, and explains how to do it. It informs and instructs. It does not argue for or against particular positions, but to present the existing views. “Introduction to Primary Research” is more likely to be a scholarly article. As mentioned before, this article is peer-reviewed. In addition, the author gives us an original guide of primary research and also explains them. Both of these two articles are instructive and informal. This is appropriate because they are both for college students, but they can be more interesting and attractive if containing a little bit of humor in language.

    Both of the authors apply transitions to move from one idea to another in the writings. In “Finding Evidence,” the author uses questions such as “how many sources should you consult for an academic argument?” and transitional sentences like “but that’s not the end of your choices”. The other piece also applies transitions effectively. For example, Driscoll writes that “Now that we have considered the ethical implications of research, we will examine how to formulate research questions and plan your primary research project.” Not only this sentence summarizes the content of this section, but it also indicates what will be introduced in the following section.

    These two articles use the same technique in writing. Both of these two articles contain many subheading. This technique makes the article well-constructed and makes authors much easier when revising the articles. For readers, each subheading is a summary of each section, so it helps readers know what the article section is about, no matter how complexly the article is written. Also, subheadings give the readers the chance to find and focus only on the parts of your article that he or she wishes to or needs to read. 

    There are also many different techniques between these two pieces. In “Finding Evidence,” we can see many bulleted or numbered lists, such as questions which can help readers understand rhetorical situation of a particular field, suggestions of searching online or in databases, and a lot of guidelines. These lists work well because they help organize information and make the article easy and clear to read. If these materials are written in a paragraph, it will be quite wordy and readers will be confused about so much information. However, compared to the other article, this piece does not have the part of conclusion. This is an important part of writing and the author should add it. “Suggested resources” is a special section in Driscoll’s article. It gives audience some related sources to acquire more information about this topic. What’s more, comparison is frequently used in “Introduction to Primary Research.” Driscoll compares two student projects throughout the whole piece and points out what things are good to do and what things aren't in each section.

    Additionally, we can also find many images in this article. In “Find Evidence”, there’s a screenshot of Google, which helps readers to learn “advanced search.” We can also see picture in the section of personal experience. What’s interesting is the two cartoon pictures. They are quite attractive for audience. Different from these images, Driscoll prefer to use charts and tables. This scientific figures make the article professional and credible.

   Overall, “moves” is a crucial part in writing. Analyzing these “moves” is an opportunity to for readers think and learn about writing.