Mateo Gong

Writing 2

Professor Britton

March 22, 2023

WP1 Reflection

Even though I may be an environmental studies major, I sure don’t act like one. I don’t

live that differently from anybody else, even with a deeper understanding of my actions. I drive

to places far and often with friends in my old gas-guzzling sedan, often leave food-waste when

eating out at restaurants, and I don’t bat an eye whenever I unwrap the plastic around my plastic

spoon to eat my takeout, to which I often carry home in a plastic bag. Despite these

shortcomings, I am otherwise quite passionate about environmental issues and committed to

making a difference, however small it may be.

While we previously relied on human ingenuity and progress to solve our problems, this

may not be the case anymore. Research from Seema Jayachandran, an economics professor at

Princeton University, in her paper “How Economic Development Influences the Environment”

shows that economic development doesn’t always correlate with benefits to the environment, and

in fact is often to the environment’s detriment. Now, to an environmental studies major like me,

this is not news. The whole field is generally predicated on the fact that the system of Capitalism

is partially responsible for the environmental crisis. I decided to transform an academic article

into a critic review due to the fact that critic reviews are a genre that takes a piece of art and

offers opinions about it in an analytical way.

One big problem I didn’t foresee until I actually began the translation was how starkly

different these two genres are. In fact, I was initially hesitant to undertake this genre translation

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because academic articles are usually based on objective data collection and use objective

measures and assessments to reach a conclusion. In contrast, critic reviews are more subjective in

nature. How could I bridge these two apparently contrasting genre attributes? Well, as Bickmore

(2016) states, genre is a tool we use “to note the similarities and differences between kinds of

writing” (59), and so I got to work noting the similarities and differences between my two

genres. 

One of the biggest similarities I noticed was that both academic articles and critic reviews

use analysis to create informed and logical takes to convince readers that either the research is

valid in academic articles or to go see a piece of media in a critic review. Another similarity is

that both genres are written by people who are highly educated on their respective topics and go

to great lengths to prove their extensive knowledge. Unfortunately for me, that’s where the

similarities ended.

The biggest difference I encountered was that while academic articles are written

passively, critic reviews are written with an active voice to emphasize the actors who play a role

or the artist of an album. Surprisingly, this proved to be a more significant problem than I

initially realized as the issues I discuss are ones for which we all shoulder the responsibility of

together, something I felt was easier to convey in a passive voice, and I didn’t want to take away

that feeling from my audience. Also, I initially considered having the state of the whole world as

the target of my review, but this was too wide in scope so it was narrowed to Capitalism and the

mindset it builds in people.

I eventually encountered another big issue. As Dirk (2010) states, “You will not only

have to consider form, but also audience” (260). The intended audience for the article “How

Economic Development Influences the Environment” includes primarily professors, students,

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researchers, and others in academia. By contrast, the target audience of critic reviews is often

people who have already seen or heard what they’re reviewing, or plan to in the future. I wasn’t

really reviewing an actual piece of media, but rather a premise and concept, so pinpointing an

audience was difficult. I eventually settled on my audience being the general public as not

everyone who reads a review is actually interested in going to see what they’re reading about.

Additionally, climate change doesn’t discriminate, so this review is really applicable to

everyone. 

Keeping my audience in mind, I made sure to keep economic and environmental jargon

to a minimum in order to keep my review easy to understand so as not to “lose” my audience.

However, I did include one jargon-type reference to the “Environmental Kuznet Curve,” as this

described one of the key relationships between capitalism and the environment, and I also felt a

brief use of such jargon might perhaps establish some credibility as an expert amongst my

audience. I was also often tempted to dive deeper into the details and minutia of all the various

studies that were evaluated in the academic article. In fact, my earlier drafts were longer and I

ended up abridging some content to maintain the feel of a true critic review. Although I thought

of including actual charts and graphs to make my review more digestible, I felt as if this went

against the conventions of the review genre. 

It became apparent that there aren’t many shared conventions between academic articles

and critic reviews. Such reviews often use descriptive, flowing language to help persuade or

move readers. Academic articles are highly structured, blunt, jargon-filled, and to the point,

though still pretty wordy and dense. To circumvent this, I decided to only cover what I saw as

the most important parts of the article, making a quick note of key ideas and only translating

these into my review. To do otherwise would risk losing the attention of my audience.

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 Something I had to keep in mind while writing was that I was trying to review and

critique Capitalist policy, not argue for a certain way of running the world. This was especially

hard to avoid because critic reviews are opinionated by design, and it’s difficult to discern when

it starts to sound combative or inflammatory. One way I circumvented this was by making sure I

wasn’t accusative at all. I made sure not to place the blame on anyone, and rather addressed

Capitalism or direct results of Capitalist action or thought.

So, through lots of careful consideration and revision, I have spun a translation from two

completely different writing genres. My translation resulted in condensing a 14,000-word

academic article into a critic review of about 800 words, all the while retaining the same general

message with some latitude afforded for the genre. As Boyd (2011) explains, “choosing how to

express your meaning is every bit as important as the message itself,” and hopefully the

abridging and simplification of such a complex yet important piece of research will allow the

dissemination of this information to a wider audience and ultimately convince readers to

question the state of the world and our environment.

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 Works Cited

Bickmore, Lisa. “Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre within Rhetorical (Eco)Systems.”

Open English SLCC, Open English @ SLCC, 1 Aug. 2016,

https://slcc.pressbooks.pub/openenglishatslcc/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understanding-

genre-within-rhetorical-ecosystems/.

Boyd, Janet. “Writing Spaces.” Writing Spaces, 2011,

https://writingspaces.org/past-volumes/murder-rhetorically-speaking/. 

Dirk, Kerry. “Writing Spaces.” Writing Spaces, 2010,

https://writingspaces.org/past-volumes/navigating-genres/.

Jayachandran, Seema. “How Economic Development Influences the Environment.” Annual

Reviews of Economics, 2021, https://doi.org/10.3386/w29191.