WP1 Reflection

The process of translating a peer reviewed academic article into a blog post was

definitely a new task for me. For this project, I chose to translate the article, “Why Don’t We

Learn from Social Media? Studying Effects of and Mechanisms behind Social Media News Use

on General Surveillance Political Knowledge,” written by P. van Erckel and P. Van Aelst, into a

blog post. In order to completely change the genre of the academic article to a blog post while

maintaining the general content of the article, it was important to know the conventions of each

genre very well. I found that these two genres are extremely different, so I had to make a

multitude of changes in my translation of the article in order to accomplish my goal of creating

an educational blog post that was more accessible and understandable to the general public.

Overall, I feel that the conventions of the blog post genre makes the original article much easier

to follow for the average person.

The new audience my translation is targeting is users of social media who may be trying

to educate themselves on the many effects that social media has on their lives. The blog post

genre makes this information much more accessible to the general public because blogs are

typically available on the internet and not on a secure database which requires payment to access.

I addition, blog posts are possible for almost anyone to understand, which is why average people

could read this post. On the other hand, the original academic article was targeted towards people

in higher fields of academia with access to databases, possibly conducting research on the topics

pertaining to the article including political science or communications. The only difficulty

introduced by this difference in audiences is that I had to vastly change the type of language I

used in the blog post to make it more conversational and overall easier to read and follow for the

general public as opposed to people in academic fields conducting research. For example, the

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authors of the original article wrote that there is a “negative association” between social media

use and political knowledge - a term that most readers would likely not understand the

implications of. I changed this term to instead describe in more words that social media can have

a negative effect on peoples’ knowledge of news and politics. This is just one example of the

scientific jargon that I had to change in order to translate the article into a blog post.

I chose the genre that I did because blog posts are generally about a relevant pop culture

topic or trend and my article heavily involves social media, which is a very relevant topic in

modern day culture. According to author Kerry Dirk in his essay “Navigating Genre,” some of

the most important elements to consider when choosing what genre to use are the purpose and

audience of your writing. Dirk explains, “Learn as much as you can about the situation for which

you are writing. What is the purpose? Who is the audience?” (Dirk, 260). I feel that the article I

chose for this project presents findings that could be useful to many individuals, not just those

with access to databases or those conducting academic research, so translating it into a blog post

was a way to make it accessible and understandable to many more people who could take the

information presented and use it to make positive changes in their lives and habits.

I incorporated information from my academic article into my new genre by keeping the

main findings and overall conclusions and takeaways the same. I didn’t include the many

statistics, charts, tables, and data from the original academic article, however. This is because I

felt that including this information would make my translation of the article stray from the

typical conventions of the blog post genre, which is meant to be conversational, easy to follow,

and understandable for readers. In contrast, an element that I added to my translation of the

article is the inclusion of new subsections, such as “How could social media make our news and

political knowledge Worse?” and “How to find reliable news sources” that were not in the

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original article. I felt that these subsections helped the blog post to feel more conversational and

less formal in addition to making the post more educational to readers. Another element I added

to my blog post version of the article is that I included images to make the post overall more

pleasing to look at, as aesthetics are often important in blog posts. Finally, I added more

conversational elements including punctuation such as exclamation marks, to make the writing

more casual, entertaining to read, and thus more accurate to the blog post genre.

One challenge I faced in carrying out my translation is that the type of writing and

rhetoric used in the original article versus the writing and rhetoric typical for blog posts are

extremely different. The original article used very scientific and advanced academic language,

which was difficult to translate to conversational language while still keeping the main points

and takeaways of the article accurate. This difference is partially due to the fact that academic

articles typically rely on logos, or persuasion based on facts and logic, while blog posts often

make use of pathos, or the type of persuasion that appeals to emotions and elicits feelings. In

addition, the original article is extremely long and includes way more information than I knew an

average blog post would include. Trying to cut down on the sheer volume of writing and

information was another challenge I faced in my translation because I again wanted to keep the

blog post accurate to the findings of the original article so I had to pick out only the most

important and relevant information to include. Something I learned about the genre of peer

reviewed academic articles is that the language used is very scientific and an almost excess of

information is given in order to clearly demonstrate and prove the end conclusions, which in turn

also makes the piece not very realistic to read or use as casual reading for the general public. On

the other hand, I learned that blog posts are much shorter and to the point and use conversational

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language, which makes them much less thorough for conducting actual research, but much more

realistic for average people to read and understand.

The main concern I had to keep in mind while carrying out the translation is that I

would not be able to keep the findings of the original article accurate in my blog post. However,

I found that I was able to maintain the overall takeaways of the article, just without all of the data

and statistics. One skill I had to rely on was close attention to detail which I used to determine

the important parts of the article and to decide what was necessary to include in the blog post and

what was not. I focused on keeping the overall conclusions and findings of the article in the blog

post as opposed to writing about the survey itself and the related data. Another skill was

creativity which was important throughout the translation of a basic academic article into a

different genre with more freedom in its conventions. Overall, this process taught me that there

are many different factors to consider when selecting which genre to use in writing and that the

genre of a piece of writing has the power to affect the audience, purpose, and effect of the piece.

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 Work Cited

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” Writing Spaces: Read- ing on Writing, vol. 1, Parlor Press,

2010.

Patrick F. A. van Erkel & Peter Van Aelst (2021) Why Don’t We Learn from Social Media?

Studying Effects of and Mechanisms behind Social Media News Use on General

Surveillance Political Knowledge, Political Communication, 38:4, 407-425, DOI:

10.1080/10584609.2020.1784328