Nguyen 1

Tommy Nguyen

Writing 2

WP3

November 19, 2019

Poetry for Scientists

Within the scope of peer-reviewed journals, academic articles are abundant in specific

information regarding its topic and academic discipline. Thus, the authors of these articles use

various conventions in order to convey a purpose or a takeaway that they want the reader to

understand. Realizing that their purpose fits the needs of certain audiences, the authors use

distinct writing styles within their writing to convey this information effectively to cater towards

a specific audience. Giving a different writing style that is unconventional to a certain genre

would add a different effect to the authors’ purpose and could ultimately target a completely

different audience. Thus, translating an academic article to a poetry piece may have unintended

changes within the authors’ original purpose and consequently gets conveyed with a different

tone. Within academic articles, the authors intend to display their discoveries and their findings

about their academic topic, hoping to relay knowledge to their intended audiences for further

applications of research. On the contrary, the authors of poetry aim to express their ideas through

unique phrasing and formation of their piece in order to both add entertainment for the reader

and convey a message that the author wants. Despite these differences within writing styles

within the two genres, the authors show that their writing choices affect their purposes towards

an intended audience, but also allows these two genres to be distinguished and identified to their

respective genres through their use of each genre’s conventions. I converted the genre of
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academic articles into the genre of poetry through the use of different jargon, structure and

intended purposes in order to target different audiences.

Within the genre of academic articles, the authors’ intended purpose is to present

information in an effective manner that allows the intended audience to build off of the

information and allows for the growth of new ideas and advancements. In the introduction of the

“Human-intelligence workflow management for the big data of augmented reality on cloud

infrastructure,” the authors Hyun-Woo Kim, Jong Hyuk Park, and Young-Sik Jeong introduces

human-intelligence workflow management (HIWM) as a method of “dynamically distributing

and processing storage work and calculating operations for fast AR service provision on diverse

smart mobile devices based on human behavior to apply the next generation web

environments.”1 In search of a method that is “dynamically distributing and processing storage

work,” the authors of the article conveys how HIWM is currently the most effective in partaking

in different tasks regarding “fast AR service provision.”2 The main purpose of this article was to

find the most effective way to deal with the task of processing large amounts of data. Therefore,

the audience of these academic articles involves those who are involved in the article’s academic

disciplines, Computer Science and Engineering, and can use the discoveries within this article to

help with research on other topics. Furthermore, this article uses specific jargon that allows the

author to explain complex ideas further into depth without explaining terms that a member of the

intended audience would understand. According to Janet Boyd within her article “Murder!

(Rhetorically Speaking),” the use of jargon demonstrates a terminology that is shared and used

1
Hyun-Woo Kim, Jong Hyuk Park, and Young-Sik Jeong, "Human-intelligence Workflow
Management for the Big Data of Augmented Reality on Cloud Infrastructure,"Neurocomputing
279 (2018): 19-26.
2
Kim, "Human-intelligence,” 19-26.
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by others within the intended audience.3 By using distinct terminology such as “cloud

infrastructure,” “high performance computing,” and “high throughput computing;” it

demonstrates that the author of the academic article assumes that the audience would understand

these complex terms, which shows that the intended audience would be for members that are

involved within the academic discipline regarding this article.4

Given the genre of poems, the genre conventions differ between the two genres,

alongside the purpose of poems. The purpose of poems are to express an author’s ideas and

creativity and to serve as a means of entertainment. This is shown through some of the genre

conventions that poems include. By using a poem called “Scientific Inquiry”, we can determine

the different genre conventions that make up the genre of poetry. Rhyming is one of the

conventions, which uses similar or identical sounds in order to add musicality to poems, being

musically pleasing and satisfying. Also, the use of rhythm, which incorporates various

combinations of syllables within the lines of a poem. Within the poem, “Scientific Inquiry”, uses

a rhyme scheme of ABAB, which is very common within poems. Words such as “gist” and

“hypothesis” is an example of using rhymes within the poem in order to add musicality. 5 The

two genre conventions of rhyme and rhythm are most prominent within children’s poems, where

simple rhymes and repeated rhythm serves as entertainment that is pleasing to the ear. These

lines are further organized into stanzas, which sets off each group of lines from each other. This

genre convention allows the reader to easily read the poem by each stanza, further reducing the

effort needed to read the poem. Furthermore, including a photo adds a visual representation of

3
Janet Boyd, “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking),” Writing 2: Academic Writing (2019): 79 - 86.
4
Kim, "Human-intelligence,” 19-26.
5
Books, Pomelo. “Need To Memorize Some Science Vocab? Try Poetry.” Science Friday, 16
Apr.2016,www.sciencefriday.com/educational-resources/poetry-and-science-experimental-
design/.
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the poem, giving the audience an easier time to understand the main idea of the poem by

connecting the contents of the poem to the picture. According to the article “Discourse

Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict, and Diversity” by Ann M.

Johns, it exemplifies what the audience of a genre have in common: “shared expectations, shared

participation, commonly(or communicably) held ways of expressing.”6 The shared expectations

of the audience that reads poems is that they don’t have much background knowledge on

different topics, hence the author uses conventions that would appeal to a broader audience.

Therefore, the author also avoids including complex terms and jargon, which would confuse the

audience if included. Being entertained is something that anyone can easily achieve, and

therefore shows how poems have a broader audience, compared to an audience of academic

articles.

The process of translating an academic article to a poetry piece consisted of many

changes towards the original conventions of an academic article. Academic articles usually

contain large amounts of information that would easily overwhelm the audience of people who

read poems. The information needed to be broken down into main ideas, as poems are not very

long and had limited lines to include this information. Furthermore, an academic contains

specific jargon that is far too complex to understand in the perspective of the intended audience

for the genre of poems. However, removing all jargon that explains essential topics about the

academic genre would essentially change the overall topic of the academic genre, and would be

an unsuccessful translation. Therefore, the translated poem includes some academic terms that

are further simplified to adhere to the targeted audience. Terms such as “pre-processing” and

6
Johns, Ann M, “Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict,
and Diversity,” Text, Role, and Context: Developing Academic Literacies, (1997): 51-70.
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“Human-Intelligence Workflow Management” are used because these are important terms that

are used in order to fully understand the academic articles; therefore, the translated poem

includes these terms, but makes sure to explain such terms that would be essential to explaining

the main ideas of the academic article. Furthermore, the use of the picture was to give the reader

an idea about what the poem would be about. The poem included a picture that required little

knowledge of the academic discipline of Computer Science. Since the picture was easy to

understand, it allowed the reader to have some context when reading the poem. The academic

article included many diagrams and complex models, which would be unfit for a poem since it

appeals to a broader audience. Once the reader skims through the poem, the readers would have

to use the picture as a visual to further understand the method of Human-Intelligence Workflow

Management Therefore and why it was used. Therefore, I was able to transform the complex

diagrams into a picture that can be simple to understand. Also, the use of a different font allows

for the reader to be interested in a different font type, unlike conventional academic articles,

where the font is the same Times New Roman. This new font type is used to present something

that is new to the reader and keeps them engaged. Additionally, the conventions of rhyme and

rhythm were included, consisting of the main ideas of the academic article that was further

translated to include simpler terms. Another concern to keep in mind is the different authors that

write these two different pieces. The author of an academic article would include many complex

terms and jargon that meant to display information directly to the readers. On the contrary, the

author of a poem would want to express themselves and their topics in a creative and artistic

style. Keeping this in mind, there are different translations that were present within the translated

poem. To add more diverse and unique sentence structures, the poem includes many dependent

clauses that allow the poem to flow and transition into further lines. Many of the lines contain
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different structures in terms of “verb then noun”. Usually, sentences are formed in the “subject

then verb”, so including the “verb then noun” formation adds something new for the reader.

Also, the use of questions as lines allows the reader to stay engaged as they try to answer the

questions throughout the poem.

Thus, the distinct writing styles of the academic articles and poems allow for these genres

to be easily identified and each of the genre conventions help identify their purposes. Given these

distinct genres, the translation from an academic article to a poem consisted of changing these

writing styles such as rhyme, rhythm, visual aspects, and simple vocabulary to conform to the

intended audience of the genre of poetry. This information within the academic article was

ultimately transformed and changed in order to match the genre conventions of poetry, while still

maintaining the same topic.

Bibliography

Books, Pomelo. “Need To Memorize Some Science Vocab? Try Poetry.” Science Friday, 16

Apr.

2016,www.sciencefriday.com/educational-resources/poetry-and-science-experimental-

design/.
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Boyd, Janet. “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking).” Writing 2: Academic Writing (2019): 79 - 86.

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

and Diversity.” Text, Role, and Context: Developing Academic Literacies. (1997): 51-70

Kim, Hyun-Woo, Jong Hyuk Park, and Young-Sik Jeong. "Human-intelligence Workflow

Management for the Big Data of Augmented Reality on Cloud Infrastructure."

Neurocomputing 279 (2018): 19-26.