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Writing Project 2: Analysis of Decisions for Genre Translation

Phuc D. Lu

Writing Program, University of California, Santa Barbara

Writing 2: Academic Writing

Valentina Fahler, MA

December 5, 2021
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Writing Project 2: Analysis of Decisions for Genre Translation

Because we’re studying writing genres in my writing class, the second writing project

asks me to translate an academic genre to a non-academic genre. From what I learned, genres are

stable forms of writing that are used repeatedly by humans and evolve over time (Lisa Bickmore,

n.d.). The difference between academic genres and non-academic genres depends on the context.

Academic genres appear in academia, while non-academic genres appear outside of academia.

However, what does it take to translate from an academic genre to a non-academic genre? In this

essay, I will be describing the process of translating an academic article into a non-academic

genre which I’ve chosen to be memes.

Firstly, I’ve chosen a peer-reviewed IMRaD article called “Nature of Beauty--Beauty of

Nature” by Finnish philosopher Sonja Servomaa to represent the academic genre. The article

defines beauty in eastern philosophy by observing Ikebana, a Japanese flower art. The process of

finding the article includes finding a research topic and evaluating the topic. The tools that were

available to me included my laptop, the criteria for academic articles on the prompt, the UCSB

Library website, and its peer-review filter. Unfortunately, this process took longer than warranted

because I initially wanted to research a different discipline, but I ended up changing to

Philosophy last minute. The change was due to my lack of experience within the discipline, so I

couldn’t read any of the articles. This idea is called writing friction and is found in Ittersum and

Lockridge’s article about writing workflow (2020). To overcome the friction, I consulted with

my instructor about a topic change and I decided to change the topic to Philosophy. I settled on

changing the topic to Philosophy because I plan on getting a Philosophy minor at my university

and a conversation about Philosophy is easier to enter than the first topic. To narrow in on a topic

in philosophy, I drew from my curiosity and settled on the philosophy of beauty. I’ve been
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curious about how certain things are considered beautiful. To find academic articles for my new

topic, I repeated the steps from before by using the UCSB Library website on my laptop.

To learn about the audience of the article, I tried finding clues within the reading to figure

out who might be interested. I noticed that the simplistic language used in this article makes it

accessible for high schoolers to everyday adult readers with an interest in the philosophy of

beauty and Ikebana like myself. Although this is a piece on philosophy, I don’t believe that this

article is fit for experts within the field looking to write a research paper. The article doesn’t

provide many philosophical arguments and lacks references to other philosophers, thus its

purpose is reading for insight and a brief introduction, rather than being a work for expert

scholars in the field to refer to. With an idea of the audience, I want to know what they’re like to

find what non-academic genre would best suit their interests. Being that the audience of this

article are high schoolers to everyday adults, having to sit down and read a whole paper might be

not interesting for them. I can attest to this myself because as a young adult, I want fun,

stimulation, and I want to see applications of the things that I read. I want other people to see

what I’ve read, so we can talk about it together. With these ideas in mind, I decided that memes

are perfect as the non-academic genre for this project. I also decided that the new audiences for

the memes are people outside of the originally intended audience. The purpose is for them to be

interested in the topic from the genre translation and engage with the original article.

To make each meme, I considered McCloud’s idea of choosing an image: My image

should “communicate quickly, clearly, and compellingly with the [audience]” (2006). To

accomplish that, I first needed to pick out the templates on a meme generator on the internet. To

meet these criteria from McCloud’s idea, I made sure to look for templates that can convey an

idea on their own without a caption first. This is where I also considered the idea of exploitable
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memes. Nearly all meme templates are exploitable because they convey an idea on their own,

which means that I can just put a caption to use that idea in a different context without taking

away the original idea of the meme. For example, the main idea of the meme with the adventurer

is disappointed by the treasure that he spent so long finding. I can tell that he is happy to find the

treasure through his facial expression and the glowing scroll in the treasure chest showing that

it's sacred. Later, he opens the scroll, and his expression changes from happy to angry as he

tosses the scroll away. The words already on the template help convey these ideas also because I

know that he spent 15 years finding the treasure, and “myehh” is a sound of disgust. I also

wanted to find templates of something that my new audience of young adults is familiar with.

These include the show The Office, which is a very popular TV show, and Winnie the Pooh from

Disney. I grew up watching these shows so the new audience might’ve seen them when they

were growing up as well.

The other half of the meme-making process is choosing what to say for the caption.

Because memes are not meant to capture the entire article, I picked out the two most important

ideas from there. I chose to focus these memes on the idea that beauty is found in nature in

eastern philosophy, the sophisticated background of Ikebana, along my reaction when reading the

article. The two memes that chose to focus on capturing the strange perception of beauty in

eastern philosophy is the man with the butterfly. According to the article, “beauty in ikebana

does not dwell in fixed completion and symmetry” (Servomaa, 2005, p. 25). To translate this into

a caption for my meme, I used a method that I called simplified humor. I simplified the idea of

“fixed completion and symmetry” into just being crooked. The humor part is that I generalize the

idea to all eastern philosophers saying that all eastern philosophers see crooked things like

beauty. Although that’s not the case in reality, which is implied by the humorist nature of memes,
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so in this context, the generalization is valid. On the contrary, I made the same assumption with

the adventurer meme. The idea is that beauty comes from nature according to eastern philosophy.

However, this plays on the fact that western philosophy views it oppositely. The adventurer

rejecting the scroll is like western philosophers rejecting the idea that beauty comes from the

asymmetry of nature. However, this time I copied and pasted the actual line from the text rather

than paraphrasing because I want to capture that idea exactly as how it is phrased. This language

used in the article for its sophisticated tone matches what I would personally expect from a

sacred scroll, so I kept it there. I didn’t use quotations because it doesn’t line up with the genre

conventions.

I did mention that I also wanted to capture my reaction while reading the article. I wanted

to capture my reaction to the memes because one of the best things about memes is that they’re

meant to be relatable. If I felt a certain way when reading, then a member of the new audience

might feel the same, and we can share that. Although the article was easy to read, I felt a bit

overwhelmed by the amount of detail that went into describing Ikebana. To convey this feeling

of being overwhelmed, I intentionally copied and pasted directly from the article because I want

to point out a specific spot in the text where I felt this way. The large chunk of text is not meant

to be read word for word by the audience, but it just serves as an indicator for what I’m referring

to. I hope that the audience also feels overwhelmed when looking at that chunk of text as I did. I

used the Winnie the Pooh template because while the simplified idea is that Ikebana is just a

Japanese flower arrangement, the article describes it in a way that made me feel sophisticated for

its language but a bit overwhelmed. Both of which are conveyed through the original language

from the article and Winnie’s nervous expression.

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A moment of friction that I encountered during the meme-making process was that my

understanding of the memes I chose needed some reinforcement. I wasn’t sure if I was framing

my captions accurately enough to make them be exploits of their templates. To solve this

friction, I looked upon the internet for the same four templates but with different captions. The

key terms that I used were “butterfly anime man”, “scroll of truth meme”, “office same meme”,

and “Winnie suit meme”. The results were overwhelmingly large, but I only needed a few

samples. I collected and interpreted the information I found from the few samples using a

technique I learned from “How to Analyze Data in a Primary Research Study” by Melody Denny

and Lindsay Clark. First, I identified that the type of data that I will be analyzing is open-ended

data. Secondly, I collected a few samples-- these are variations of texts that were used with the

four templates that I plan on using. Thirdly, because these four templates are independent in that

they’re their meme templates, I made sure to not categorize each meme template so that they

have their distinction and looked for other memes with the same template and a variety of texts.

Fourth, with the data that I’ve gathered, I began to look for patterns under each category. The

four category names were Winnie the Pooh, Treasure, Office, and Butterfly Anime Man. The

common pattern that I found with Winnie the Pooh is that they appealed to one’s desire to be in

an exclusive and superior group. As for the Scroll of Truth meme, the common pattern is that the

content from the scroll of truth is always hard to believe by the adventurer, thus he tosses it out.

As for The Office, what they had in common was the two pictures being compared within the

meme were always something absurd. The anime butterfly man had a common thing in that the

original caption asks “Is this a pigeon?” to what is a butterfly. A butterfly is not a pigeon,

therefore, there is a false equivalence. Some variations of this meme included the butterfly being

something simple like sneezing while the man claims it to be something egregious like having
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COVID. With all that said, I was then able to better understand the meme templates and started

making the memes.

Time was a big factor when considering the number of memes that I wanted to make.

Since memes can only capture a small idea from the original text, I had two choices: I can make

one meme to summarize the whole article with little to no details or a hundred memes to capture

every little detail. I didn’t want to misrepresent the sophistication of the article by dismissing all

of its detail, but I can’t make a hundred either. Making more memes and having to analyze them

require time that I don’t have because this project is due soon. I didn’t want to do the bare

minimum, while not overdoing the count. This was how I just settled with four memes. The

caveat is that making only four memes meant leaving out many details like the philosophical and

spiritual background of Ikebana itself. However, with the memes that I’ve made, I was able to at

least convey that Ikebana is sophisticated and is not just some Japanese flower arrangement.

Finally, because this reflection is a part of the project's entirety I want to note my decision to use

the “I” throughout this reflection. I used “I” simply because the rhetorical situation is appropriate

for me to do so when writing this academic reflection. According to Kate McKinney Maddalena

(2010) in her text “‘I need you to say “I”’: Why First Person Is Important in College Writing”, ​I

need to “guide [my] reader through the organization of [my] text in some way” (p. 188). This

means that I need to use “I” so that the readers can follow my process of composing the genre

transition for this project. In addition, I applied Maddalena’s (2010) idea of using “I” to claim

ownership because using “I” in this reflection enabled me to establish ownership of this

reflection and my work. If I omit myself from the reflection then it wouldn’t be my reflection.

In conclusion, I learned about the process of genre translation when doing this project.

The amount of thought process behind the scene is tremendous because as a composer, one must
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consider the audience, the situation, and consider their choices accordingly. Although this is a

first-time event where I translated a genre in the first year of college, I can see myself applying

these ideas in my future classes. For example, I can turn different concepts into memes so that

my classmates and I can enjoy learning about the topic together. More importantly, for my major,

I can see myself using this new tool to translate statistical data as a genre into a new genre. With

the new genre being one that my new audience could understand. The ability to translate from

one genre to another is such a powerful tool and I hope to change the world with it.
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References

Bickmore. L. (n.d.). Genre in the wild: Understanding genre within rhetorical (eco)systems.

Pressbooks.

Denny, M., & Clark, L. (2021). How to analyze data in a primary research study. In D. Driscoll,

M. Heise, M. Stewart, & M. Vetter (Eds.), Writing spaces: Readings on writing, volume 4

(pp. 85-109). WritingSpaces.org; Parlor Press; The WAC Clearinghouse.

Exploitables. (2021, November 1). Know Your Meme. Retrieved November 22, 2021, from

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/exploitables.

Ittersum, D. V. & Lockridge, T. (2021). Find the best tools for the job: Experimenting with

writing workflows. In D. Driscoll, M. Heise, M. Stewart, & M. Vetter (Eds.), Writing

spaces: Readings on writing, volume 4 (pp. 85-109). WritingSpaces.org; Parlor Press;

The WAC Clearinghouse.

Maddalena, K. M. (2010). I need you to say “I”: Why first person is important in college writing.

In C. Lower & P. Zemliansky (Eds.), Writing spaces: Readings on writing, volume 1 (pp.

180-190). WritingSpaces.org; Parlor Press; The WAC Clearinghouse.

McCloud, S. (2006). Making comics : storytelling secrets of comics, manga and graphic novels.

William Morrow Paperbacks.

Servomaa, S. (2005). Nature of beauty--beauty of nature. Dialogue & Universalism.

https://doi.org/10.5840/du2005151/262