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Ashley Grinstead

Dr. Jennifer Johnson

Writing 2

22 May 2019

Dystopian Short Story Analysis

Genre is a helpful tool that allows people to communicate important and underlying

messages. You may not notice it, but you use genre everyday: at school, at work, even at home.

Notice that each category has a different vibe to it: when with friends, you talk in the most casual

way possible that reveals your true self; when you’re at work, you talk to your boss in a

completely different way. This is relevant to genre since the use of genre varies in different types

of groups. In Ann Johns article, “Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice:

Membership, Conflict, and Diversity,” she talks about how academic discourse communities can

change. She states that “individuals often affiliate with several communities at the same time,

with varying levels of involvement and interest. People may join a group because they agree

politically, because they want to socialize, or because they are interested in a particular sport or

pastime” (Johns, 502). In these groups, people have different ways of communicating. In each

type of community, a variety of ideas and concepts are shared with each other but are portrayed

in different ways.

In this writing project, I played with genre and translated an academic journal into a

dystopian short story. I chose a topic that interested me; in this case, it was nuclear energy. I

searched for a peer-reviewed journal on the UCSB Library website about nuclear energy and

found an article titled, “Effect of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster on Global Public Acceptance

of Nuclear Energy” written by Younghwan Kim, Minki Kim, and Wonjoon Kim. The main ideas
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of this scholarly article were that the global acceptance of nuclear energy decreased after

Fukushima happened and that nuclear energy isn’t the best source of energy because it’s not

fully researched yet. In my story, I tried to portray these messages by emphasizing the negative

response to the disaster of Fukushima. The ending of my story also puts emphasis on how

nuclear energy can still be untrustworthy even after the character’s thirty years of research.

To effectively translate between genres, I learned that an immense amount of research

goes into the translation. You have to understand what the authors of the original piece are trying

to say first before even trying to translate the piece. After the main idea is understood, you have

to identify your new audience in your translation. For example, if you’re planning to translate a

news article about climate change to a children’s book, you must identify that the new audience

will be children and will have to appeal to them. You wouldn’t be able to use statistics or words

too hard for them to understand, so instead you would use pictures and language that’s simple

enough for them to understand. Since I translated an academic journal into a dystopian short

story, I cherry-picked the information I wanted to use from the journal and incorporated it into

my story. I left out the methods and statistics part of the journal and only used the conclusions

made about the study. I had to come up with the overall story and make up a hypothetical nuclear

reactor. Because my new audience ranged from young adults to adults, I didn’t have to worry

about totally breaking down the idea of the journal so that my new audience could understand.

Also, since the genre of the short story was science fiction, my vocabulary contained many

scientific terms.

Of course, I’m no expert on nuclear energy or nuclear engineering. To make my story

more accurate and believable, I watched many videos about the three major nuclear disasters;

Three Mile Island, Fukushima, and Chernobyl. I learned what the general idea is behind nuclear
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energy and began to understand it more. In addition, I read a bunch of dystopian short stories on

the Internet to make the genre translation more accurate. I studied the components of what makes

up science fiction dystopian short stories, and I discovered that the main factors short stories

contain are a setting, conflict, plot, characters, theme, and point of view. I realized that each type

of dystopian short story had some sort of twist at the end, so I decided to put one of my own

twist in my story as well. While reading those short stories, I followed the advice of Mike Bunn,

an author who wrote an article about a different way to read content, titled “How to Read Like a

Writer.” He states that “when you read like a writer, you are trying to figure out how the text you

are reading was constructed so that you learn how to “build” one for yourself” (Bunn, 74). This

advice helped me in that it allowed me to not just read for content, but to figure out the structure

of the short story genre as well so that I could create my own.

I chose to translate the journal into a short story because I felt that it would effectively

portray how dangerous nuclear energy is and how many risks are taken when nuclear energy is

used. A dystopian short story would be able to captivate a variety of people from different

backgrounds and would hopefully reevaluate their perspective on nuclear energy. The hardest

part about this translation was trying not to cite things from the journal directly in the short story.

I’m so used to citing sources and building ideas around the sources that creative writing was very

foreign to me.

Works Cited

Bunn, Mike. “How to Read Like a Writer.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 2, 2011,

pp.74.

Johns, Ann M. “Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict,

and Diversity.” Text, Role, and Context: Developing Academic Literacies, 1997, p. 502.