Tanenbaum 1

Zach Tanenbaum

Kaaronica Evans

Writing 2

21 January 2024

Writing Project 1: Genre Translation from IMRaD Article to Text Messaging

Proposal:

The primary source which I will be translating is the research article titled: The

Family-School Relation and the Child's School Performance, by David L. Stevenson and David

P. Baker, into the genre of text messaging. In this article, scholars researched three hypotheses:

mothers with higher education will be more involved in their children’s schooling, parents will

be more involved with younger children and children will perform better in school if their

parents are more involved (Baker and Stevenson, 1). The report conducted a cross-sectional

study to analyze a nationally representative sample of 179 children, parents, and teachers. The

study found that higher maternal education was correlated with greater parental involvement in

their child’s schooling activities, younger children’s parents were more likely to be involved and

parental involvement was highly predictive of teachers’ ratings of the student’s in school

performance. Not only that, but parents being around their boys’ schooling had a larger effect

than when compared to girls. The article was written in 1987 with the intended audience of

experts in the field of child development, psychology and education. Moreover, the purpose of

the piece is to examine the relationship between a parent’s involvement in their child’s school

related activities and the kids’ educational performance. Furthermore, the study intends to

provide insights to parents about how they can positively influence their child's education simply

by being around more.

 Tanenbaum 2

The new genre I will be translating the scholarly article into is a string of text messages

between two individuals. Texting occurs on individuals’ cellular devices when they are trying to

communicate with one another, both individually and in group chats. The subject of texts

between two individuals is future plans, maintaining conversations and sharing tidbits of advice,

while group messages also revolve around future plans and random conversations, but typically

do not include people giving each other life advice. Additionally, both singular and group text

messages are typically short and informal in order to create efficient communication. For my

reinterpreted work, the audience will shift away from experts trying to study adolescent

performance in school. Instead, the new translation will have an intended audience of a parent

with a child in primary school. Not only that, but the busy parent will not have time to read a 10

page IMRaD article, which is why they are relying on me to text them using the findings I read

about in the research article’s cross sectional analysis.

I chose texting between two peers as my genre to translate the peer-reviewed article

because these strings of messages allow people to get the most important pieces of information

without having to waste valuable time parsing through a scholarly article. Not only that, but I

chose texting between two people rather than a group chat because it would be out of place for

an entire group to be giving one person life advice; this makes it seem like a counseling session

rather than friends catching up. Moreover, I hope to challenge myself to keep the messages as

short as possible. Through doing this, I will look to learn about including the most amount of

content, while cutting out filler words and even breaking conventional grammatical rules to get

my point across quicker. This specific translation could help those who do not have the time to

read the original study, but still want to learn how to better their lives using the conclusions of

the cross sectional analysis.

 Tanenbaum 3

Translation:

Zach Marshall

Yoooo

What up???

Bro u got toddlers, right?

Dude, my kids are 10 and 12

Huh? Time flies I guess lol.

Anyways, I saw a TikTok that was talking
about how parents gotta get more involved in
their kids' school.

Okay… sounds super reputable 🫵😂

🤯
Nah nah bro. It cited a cross-sectional study

Do u even know what that means?

Well, no. But that’s not important bro…

Basically the study looked at a 179
combinations of kiddos, their parents
and teachers.
👨‍👩‍👧‍👦👨‍👩‍👧‍👦
🤨
And… what were they even paying attention
to lol???

So they noted the parents’ education level and

the age and gender of the kid to see how these
affected how involved the parents were at
school. Also, they talked to the teachers to get
some info on if the parents attend
parent-teacher conferences

Yea that checks out. I definitely gotta get out

to my older one’s PT conferences… younger
kid got me tired as heck tho bruh

Dude…you definitely gotta go. The study

basically found that parents of kids under 12
were about 1.5x more involved than those of
 Tanenbaum 4

kids from 12-17. Also, when a kids’ mom had

higher education, they were more likely to be
getting to their kids school

🧠🧠
NO WAY!!! That's exactly what’s happening
w/ my wife too. She’s super smart
she’s the only one who goes to PT
and

conferences

For real. But get this homeslice. These stats

matter soooo much more for boys than girls.
The kids age and mom’s education were much
more telling of the kids success in dudes, but
for girls it didn’t matter nearly as much

Huh? They got reasons for this or somethin?

No idea tbh, study didn’t really get into that.

But the big takeaway was involved
parents=better performing kids and that
involvement moms=3x rating of kids from
their teachers

💯💯💯💯
Whoah!!!! No wonder my kids be at the top
of their class #StraightA’s

Hahaha exactly bruh! The discussion at the

end came to the conclusion that it's hard to
say that parents cause all of them A’s, but
parents getting engaged with their kids def
helps them kids succeed when they’re young.
In the end, they said this just be a snapshot,

⏳
but what they really need is a longer study
that happens over the course of years

U da real MVP #1️⃣

Lol of course bro. Go get #DadOfTheYear

champ

Yuhhhhhh… Peace homie ✌️

Reflection:
 Tanenbaum 5

I translated an academic research paper, "The Family-School Relation and the Child's

School Performance," into a text message for an imaginary friend who is a father of two

school-aged children. My personal goal for this translation was to reflect on the typical

conventions of texting individually and explore how they could be used in a more formal

discipline. Additionally, I aimed to improve at conveying the many facts and statistics from an

academic journal in a succinct manner. Furthermore, the overall objective of the assignment was

to delve into the conventions of a genre and understand how its audience, purpose, and contexts

shape it. For this piece specifically, I picked apart the conventions of texting a peer.

Subsequently, students were tasked with applying their knowledge of genres by taking a

peer-reviewed article and adapting the conventions to fit another genre, which was text

messaging in my case.

For the translation, one of the first questions I had to consider was who I wanted the new

audience to be and how they would differ from the primary source’s audience. As noted in Amy

Ciccino’s chapter 11 of “Writing Spaces: Volume 5”, the first step to finding the audience of a

new writing situation is asking yourself if your intended audience will be “other experts in your

discipline” (Daniels-Lerberg et al., 175). This quintessential piece of information allows the

author to note if they can use more technical knowledge, as the audience would already have a

good understanding of the topic. In a typical situation, however, one uses text messages to

communicate with a peer, rather than an expert. Therefore, I chose a friend as the recipient of my

texts, my intended audience. Since my friend is not an expert on the subject, I must use less

niche jargon that only a specialist in the field of children's education can comprehend; this is

perfect for my scenario, as it would be out of place for someone to text their friend using

extremely sophisticated language.

 Tanenbaum 6

The genre that I selected to translate the IMRaD article into was text messages. I chose

texting primarily because of how pertinent texting is in my day to day life. As a daily user, I

understand the many implied features of the genre. First, it is of the utmost importance for both

writers and readers of the genre to buy into the idea that texts are supposed to be short and

informal to create efficient communication. That being said, texting is an extremely inclusive

genre, as anybody with a cell phone can participate in it; the only people getting left out are

occasionally cell phones running Android as their operating system, given that some elitist

iPhone users dislike green text bubbles in group messages. Additionally, some assumptions

underlying text messaging is that everything should be taken with a grain of salt, as responses are

meant to be rapid and not too thoroughly thought out. Moreover, a couple topics that hold more

weight than others are when people express their feelings to others or when trying to make plans;

it would be considered rude to not respond in a timely, respectful manner. Something that holds

very minimal weight, however, is confirming the other person’s thoughts, such as writing

“Perfect” after someone makes plans. Here, a response is not necessary, but a simple liking of the

message could be a polite gesture. Not only that, but with the rise of texting, plans are able to

transpire instantaneously; one can text their friend to meet up and within seconds their plan is in

action. This type of expeditious communication does have its disadvantages, unfortunately, as

people cannot ignore others as easily. Now, it is widely accepted that if somebody doesn’t

respond to your text in minutes, it is seen as disrespectful. Furthermore, a writer’s attitude

towards and assumptions about the reader are completely subjective to the context and the

relationship between those texting. That being said, if someone has another’s phone number, it is

likely that the author feels like they are somewhat close to the reader. Finally, the writer’s

attitude towards the world is whatever they are feeling at the time. Texting can occur at all hours
 Tanenbaum 7

of the day and among anyone, so it is extremely hard to pinpoint the author’s attitude at the

instant they are sending a text message.

Not only that, but I chose texting because it is an antithesis to scholarly writing: there is a

lack of proper grammar, punctuation, and citations. In the scholarly article, there were phrases

such as, “Parental involvement, school performance, and ability to perform are not significantly

different for boys and girls, although girls had slightly more involved parents and tended to

perform better in school: involvement t(1,177) = 1.88, p = .06; school performance t(1,177) =

1.83, p = .07.” (Daniels-Lerberg et al., 175). This excerpt detailing the findings of the study is

filled with statistics and information that only an expert in the field would be able to

comprehend. Obviously, this wouldn’t fit into the genre of texting, which rarely uses complete

sentences or proper grammatical structure. An example of a text that would be sent to summarize

this finding could be, “Girls' parents are usually around more and they usually are smarter.”

Clearly, this is an oversimplification of the research article, but it would be a typical message in

the genre texting.

Just because a text message is not as lengthy or fleshed out as a scholarly article, it does

not mean I cannot use text messages to adequately relay the meaning of a peer-reviewed article,

however. In the article “Genre in the Wild Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical

(Eco)systems'', Lisa Bickmore delves into the topic of genres and how to properly define them.

In the end, one of the final sentiments is that “becoming a capable user of [many] genres makes

you a more flexible and adaptable writer” (Bickmore). According to Bickmore’s advice, I wanted

to become a more adaptable writer by translating a scholarly article into something dissimilar:

text messages. Furthermore, as stated by Bickmore, a writer can really grow “by observing and

jumping in” when learning how to learn genres in a new setting. Taking her advice, I chose the
 Tanenbaum 8

genre of texting because I wanted to test myself and see if I could adequately communicate with

my intended audience in a whole different set of conventions. Instead of writing using the typical

conventions for a scholarly article, such as only using complete sentences, academic language,

exact statistics and figures to enhance its credibility, I am writing using the typical conventions

for a duologue of texts. Moreover, I tried simplifying the content to allow a wider audience to

comprehend the information, an audience that could actually utilize the information.

In the end, I was able to use texting to a peer in order to disseminate the most important

claims, facts and statistics of the scholarly article. The main purpose of texting one person is to

communicate with them and spread information quickly, which I executed by spreading

information regarding the benefits of parents participating in their children’s schooling to my

imaginary friend, Marshall. For example, I disseminated the piece of advice that mothers who

actively engage with their child’s schoolwork are correlated with three times higher grades on

their teacher’s evaluations. By doing this, it shows how the genre of text messages are perfect

for spreading knowledge and information to one's peers.

One of the hardest parts of the translation was ensuring that I was able to get all of the

content in the IMRaD article across without oversimplifying it too much. A reading that really

helped was “Shitty First Drafts'' by Anne Lamott, who prophetically stated, “You need to start

somewhere. Start by getting something–anything–down on paper” (Lamott, 25). In the

beginning, translating an entire research article into a friendly text message to a peer could be

daunting, but using her insight, I started by getting the backbone of the text down and writing a

summary of the study. Using the summary, I inserted the key details into the translation, such as

the ages and gender of the kids in the study, as well as their parents’ education levels. These

formed the basis of the study and, therefore, could not stand to be omitted. The main thing I had
 Tanenbaum 9

to leave out, however, was a lot of the exact quantitative statistics, such as the r-values of the

data. Furthermore, I was forced to cut out some typical conventions of a peer reviewed article,

such as the academic jargon and rigid structure. Although these are important, they would not fit

the conventions of a text message, which include compressed language and contractions, missing

parts of words and emojis. In turn, I ensured that I fulfilled many texting conventions by

inserting an adequate amount of phatic language, which is intended to maintain social

relationships, shortened language and emoticons. For example, I included phrases such as

“yoooo” to build relationships without providing any substance or meaning, “lol”, a shortened

version of the phrase “laugh out loud” and emoticons such as “ 🤯” to express shock. All of
these conventions are essential to text messaging and really helped the piece fit the specified

genre.

One of the challenges I faced with the genre translation was understanding the different

requirements of the community and applying that to the translation. Although some conventions

are very clear, there are many that are not so. However, as depicted by Ann Johns in “Discourse

Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership; Conflict, and Diversity”, “Text should

comply with the genre requirements of the community or classroom” (Johns, 510). This made the

translating tricky, as it was often hard to tell what the requirements of the community were,

especially with the scholarly journal in the original text. I felt that it was often hard to distinguish

between what was integral to the message of the scholarly article and what were just conventions

that I could alter while translating. An example of this was the data and statistics used in the

study; they reported that they studied 179 children and teacher combinations across 620

households. Here, it was difficult for me to decide if this level of detail was a crucial part of the

study or if it could have been simplified to just “hundreds”. I overcame this issue by asking
 Tanenbaum 10

myself, “Does this number have significant implications? If I changed the number, would it

affect the study’s results?” In the end, I realized that the precise number involved helps provide

credibility for the study, so I kept it.

In order to perform the translation of an academic research paper into a text message, one

concern that I had to keep in mind was that although genres are fluid, they are already defined

for you. As stated by Bickmore, “Genres are both stable and to some degree fluid and evolving,

just as human communication itself is both predictable and unpredictable” (Bickmore). This

realization that genres are set, yet can change greatly aided me in translating the article into text

messages, as it reminded me that even though people historically wrote text messages with

certain conventions, it doesn't mean that's the only way to utilize text messages. For example,

typical text message conventions exclude periods and multiple sentences; however, this doesn't

mean the genre must omit all lengthy messages, which I felt the need to include to convey the

information adequately. Moreover, a crucial skill I employed to successfully translate the article

was not adhering to typical conventions 100% of the time. As noted by Ciccino in “Writing

Spaces: Volume 5,” “Writers do sometimes purposefully reject conventions because they want to

challenge the expected to impact the audience” (Ciccino, 177). To make the information more

applicable to the audience, a father of school-age children, I wanted to provide a bit of

quantitative data. In turn, I supplied the statistics of the ages of the kids in the study, allowing the

father to easily see that the findings were relevant to his children. These statistics are atypical for

text messages, which typically do not include such facts or figures, but I felt that going against

the ordinary conventions of texting would help in this situation.

Overall, I was quite apprehensive going into this assignment, as it seemed like a daunting

task unlike any writing piece I had done prior. However, the detailed prompts, example
 Tanenbaum 11

translations, and plethora of course readings provided more than enough information to get

started. Furthermore, using the knowledge I obtained from Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts,” I

realized that the most important, and hardest step, would just be getting started. After that,

everything else fell into place. And as theologian Desmond Tutu wisely said, “there is only one

way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.”

 Tanenbaum 12

Works Cited

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

Pressbooks.pub, 1 Aug. 2016,

pressbooks.pub/openenglishatslcc/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understanding-genre-within-

rhetorical-ecosystems/

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

Conflict,and Diversity.” Text, Role, and Context: Developing Academic Literacies,

Cambridge,New York; Cambridge UP, 1997. 51-70. Print.

Lamott, Anne. Shitty First Drafts. Pantheon, 2005.

Stevenson, David L., and David P. Baker. “The Family-School Relation and the Child’s School

Performance.” Child Development, vol. 58, no. 5, 1987, pp. 1348–57. JSTOR,

https://doi.org/10.2307/1130626. Accessed 25 Jan. 2024.

Trace Daniels-Lerberg, et al. Writing Spaces. Vol. 5, Parlor Press, 13 Aug. 2023.