Sonya Adler

WRIT 2
Bocchino
12/11/20
Making Mental Health Clearer For A Broader Audience

The translation of my academic journal article by Mark D. Weist, Ph.D.; C. Patrick

Myers, M.A.; Eileen Hastings, R.N., LCSW-C; Hari Ghuman, M.D.; and Yu-Ling Han, Ph.D;

“Psychosocial Functioning of Youth Receiving Mental Health Services in the Schools Versus

Community Mental Health Centers” into a nonacademic, online formatted, newspaper article

posed challenges like any translation would between a highly specific to a much wider audience.

However, the process became more manageable when I distinguished the differences between

the audiences, the diction, and the structure of the two completely different genres.

The academic journal article compares the effectiveness of in-school mental health

support versus community mental health center support services and is structured similar to a lab

report. It is organized, like any scientific academic article, with an abstract, background,

methods, results, and their discussion, or conclusion. This structure gives the article credibility in

the scientific field because other scientists will better trust and understand it. These types of

articles have a distinct audience of solely the scientific community and are in specific databases,

which makes them less accessible to the general public. This encourages the authors to write in

specific jargon and phrases that require background knowledge that are not as easy for the

average reader to understand. Journal articles and newspapers both try to convince their readers

that the information they’re providing is true, and therefore each have specific types of jargon

and structure that they use to do so.

Online newspaper articles, however, are directed towards the average readers who want

to understand important current events. A newspaper article considers different conventions that
keep the reader in mind. The headline of the article is the first thing that grabs the reader and

sparks interest in the article. Directly after the headline and often a picture, comes the byline.

The byline states the author(s) and the date and time the article was published onto the website

and can be seen in the Washington Post article, “As U.S. leaves Paris accord, climate policy

hangs on election outcome:”

“By Brady Dennis, Juliet Eilperin and Dino Grandoni

November 4, 2020 at 5:50 p.m. PST”1

The byline is critical when writing a newspaper article because it shows who wrote the piece,

which often makes it more trustworthy to the audience and also gives the date and time, showing

how up-to-date the article is. Pictures are also crucial to a newspaper article by establishing more

credibility that goes along with the information given in the text and captures the reader’s eye.

Another major convention I noticed when reading all newspaper articles is that the paragraphs

are very short. It is easy for the average reader to become disengaged in a sea of text, so making

the paragraphs short, clear, and easy to read, keeps the reader engaged throughout the entire

article. Direct quotes and interviews in these articles also let the reader have more confidence in

the sources and information presented in the article. Shown in the article “We Asked Kazakh

Celebrities What They Think of ‘Borat.’ The Verdict Was Less than ‘Very Nice.’” from the

Washington Post, they dedicated a whole subheading to a quote from a Kazakh producer. The

subheading said, “Nurtas Adambay, actor and director:” and it was followed by “‘I saw mockery

not over Kazakhstan, but over those viewers who could believe that such a country could exist in

the modern world. And I did not really take it as something insulting or humiliating toward me,’

1 Dennis Brady, Juliet Eilperin, and Dino Grandoni. “As U.S. Leaves Paris Accord, Climate Policy Hangs on Election
Outcome.” Washington Post, November 4, 2020.
said Adambay, who has his own production company.”2 This quote provides credibility for the

article and lets the reader know that they got true information from real people. In another article,

“A Transfixed World Awaits What’s Next in America” from the New York Times, I also noticed

that many of the paragraphs either started off with relevant quotes or the entire paragraph was

just the short quote.

“‘Trump-Biden: The United States is tearing itself apart,’ the

newspaper Le Monde said in a front-page headline, summarizing
French coverage of the election that has often depicted a country
coming apart at the seams.”3
This both emphasizes the important information the quote holds and, because of the one

sentence paragraph, maintains the reader’s attention. This contributes to the purpose of

newspaper articles trying to distribute lots of information in a credible and clear way to a large

audience.

In order to appeal to a wider audience and create writing that is more easily read, a major

convention that I translated from the academic to the non-academic article was the structure.

Academic journal articles have many more conventions to think about at once than newspaper

articles such as font size, headings, citations, and margins, while the structure of a newspaper

article has paragraph size, captions to pictures, formatted quotes and interviews to think about.

The academic genre was much more structured for a specific audience that knew how to read a

lab report efficiently, but when translating to an academic genre for the average reader, I had to

turn these big headings and subheadings of a lab report into smaller paragraphs that were easy to

read. In addition to the structure of the writing, newspaper articles often contain lots of images

that catch the readers eye, with descriptions below them that further clarify what the reader is

2 Almaz Kumenav and Isabelle Khurshudyan. “We Asked Kazakh Celebrities What They Think of ‘Borat.’ The Verdict Was
Less than ‘Very Nice.’” Washington Post, November 5, 2020.
3 Mark Landler and Damien Cave. “A Transfixed World Awaits What’s Next in America.” New York Times, November 4, 2020.
looking at. The image that I chose was of a high school putting on a “stress-less” week for the

students and a boy walking in the background. I chose this because it shows a real school

implementing mental health programs and this photo captures an actual student in the high

school that a photographer for a newspaper would capture to show that this is real like rather

than just a staged photo. Below the image I included a description that helps make the goals of

the article more clear.

The writers of academic journals assume the discipline specific readers have context and

know exactly what they are talking about while newspaper article journalists have to assume the

reader has no background information on the topic. When translating the diction and jargon of

the academic journal article into that of the newspaper article I saw that Karen Rosenberg says in

“Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Articles,” “Writers of scholarly sources, on

the other hand, likely don’t think much about you at all when they sit down to write.”4 However,

a newspaper article must be so clear that anyone could read it and understand what the writer is

saying. It must not only be easily understood, but also be able to easily grab the reader’s

attention. Because I had to make the article understandable to the average reader, I had to leave

out many details from the academic journal article. I left out words and parts of the article that

needed background knowledge to understand. When translating a sentence from the journal

article to the newspaper article, I left out phrases and parts of sentences saying things like

“Multivariate analyses failed to reveal differences…”5 Instead, my newspaper article focused on

the main idea of the academic journal study, leaving out the scientific aspects of the study and

focusing more on the general well being of the youth in the experiment.

4 Charles Lowe, Pavel Zemliansky, and Karen Rosenberg, “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources,” in
Writing Spaces 2: Readings on Writing, vol. 2 (Anderson: Parlor Press, 2010), pp. 210-220, 213.

5 Mark D. Weist, C. Patrick Myers, Eileen Hastings, Hari Ghuman, and Yu Ling Han. “Psychosocial Functioning of Youth Receiving Mental
Health Services in the Schools versus Community Mental Health Centers.” Community Mental Health Journal 35, no. 1 (February 1999) p. 77
 One of the main challenges I faced was when writing my nonacademic article derived

from my academic article was that I needed to make sure that I wasn’t just summarizing sections

of the academic article and making them into short sentences and paragraphs. Instead, I took the

wording of the scientific academic article and turned it into wording that a journalist would use

in a newspaper article. The readers of newspaper articles understand information differently than

experts in psychology. Similar to how Janet Boyd says that “All writers must make about what to

include and what to omit based upon the expectations of the audience for whom they write”6, I

just chose the parts of the journal article to bring into the newspaper article rather than change

the way the writer was speaking. I did this because, although the newspaper article is clearer to

the general reader, both types of genres are direct in their own way; the academic journal article

is straight to the point for those experts reading it, while the newspaper article is both direct, but

also much clearer and simple for the average reader.

Though there were major aspects of the journal article that I changed when translating it

into a newspaper article, there were also characteristics that I kept the same. Although a

newspaper article often prefers to show images rather than data tables, I added the data table

from the journal article because it brings in a visualization to the data collected that would have

been too long to write in the newspaper article. I thought this was a necessary addition to my

translation and it is not extremely out of the norm when reading a newspaper article to see a data

table every once in a while. I felt that not many rules could be broken while maintaining the

characteristics of the newspaper article, so I had to adhere to all of the conventions I mentioned

when writing my translation. I think that my translation was successful in my goal to change an

article that was tailored to a specific audience and difficult to read for most people to one that

6 Charles Lowe, Pavel Zemliansky, and Janet Boyd, in Writing Spaces 2: Readings on Writing, Volume 2 (Anderson: Parlor
Press, 2010), pp. 87-101, 94.
was more easily understandable to a broader audience. I thought that the change in the structure

from specific and dense paragraphs to shorter and more simple ones was the most essential

adjustment I made when converting the academic to the nonacademic genre. The major

difference in the word choices from specific academic jargon to more everyday vernacular and

simple wording was also a paramount change that needed to be made in the translation. I found

that above all, I had to continuously keep in mind throughout my translation process to omit

things that didn’t catch my eye in order to clarify the main ideas of the article.
 Sources Cited:

Boyd, Janet. “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking).” Essay. In Writing Spaces 2:

Readings on Writing, Volume 2, 87–101. Anderson: Parlor Press, 2010.

Brady, Dennis, Juliet Eilperin, and Dino Grandoni. “As U.S. Leaves Paris Accord,
Climate Policy Hangs on Election Outcome.” Washington Post, November 4,
2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/11/04/climate-
change-election-paris-agreement/.

Kumenav, Almaz, and Isabelle Khurshudyan. “We Asked Kazakh Celebrities

What They Think of ‘Borat.’ The Verdict Was Less than ‘Very Nice.’”
Washington Post, November 5, 2020.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/borat-kazakhstan-reviews-
movie/2020/11/05/902646e6-1849-11eb-8bda-814ca56e138b_story.html.

Landler, Mark, and Damien Cave. “A Transfixed World Awaits What’s Next in
America.” New York Times, November 4, 2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/world/americas/global-reaction-us-
election.html.

Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.”

Essay. In Writing Spaces 2: Readings on Writing, 2:210–20. Anderson: Parlor
Press, 2010.

Weist, Mark D., C. Patrick Myers, Eileen Hastings, Hari Ghuman, and Yu Ling Han. “Psychosocial
Functioning of Youth Receiving Mental Health Services in the Schools versus
Community Mental Health Centers.” Community Mental Health Journal 35, no. 1
(February 1999): 69–81. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1018700126364.