PB2A

Case Study for Chemistry, for Atomic Layer Composition, on Trimethylaluminum/water Process

            Chemistry case studies, like any other genre of text, is going to have conventions, or common features to look for or that exist among most if not all texts of that genre. I would expect scholarly articles to follow conventions more than some other genres, such as novels, comics, song lyrics, etc., because there is little room for creative input. This particular scholarly article is in the genre of Chemistry scholarly articles, more particularly for “atomic layer composition,” and even more particularly for the “chemistry scholarly articles regarding atomic layer composition, with an emphasis on the trimethylaluminum/water process.” The conventions particular to “atomic layer composition” and “trimethylaluminum/water process” are not really going to be considered, but the broader conventions of the “Scholarly articles on Chemistry” will be considered.

If this particular article were to be used to represent scholarly chemistry articles as a whole, then it would be safe to say that they generally start with a title that describes the subject in great detail, such as “A case study: surface chemistry and surface structure of catalytic aluminas, as studied by vibrational spectroscopy of absorbed species.” Following are the names of the researchers the department, college/university, and city/country, involved.  It seems conventional for chemistry scholarly articles to begin with an abstract. This provides a very short description or summary of what the article will be about and what kind of research has been done; it also discusses what is to be expected and explained in the article. Following the abstract, an introduction, labeled “introduction,” is provided in the beginning of the article. “Introduction” is labeled “1,” indicating that each topic in the article is going to be numbered. Visual representations, such as graphs, are included in the article, and sub topics are included within the main, larger topics (2. Vibrational modes… 2.1. vibrations of the solid). A conclusion—still numbered among the larger topics—and a list of references is also included. There are a lot of in-text symbols and formulas as well.

            The amount of chemistry-specific jargon used, such as “thermodynamically stable corundum phase,” “hexagonal system,” etc., and the many in-text symbols and formulas that are included indicate that this article’s intended audience includes peers of the chemistry discipline—it is not for novices of chemistry, although it may be for students of chemistry. This article has a depersonalized and somewhat pedantic tone, again because of its intended audience, but also because of its purpose, which is to lecture on the findings of the research.

            Although no questions are raised directly in this article, there are answers to questions that may have been raised and may have necessitated the research done in the case study. For instance, it is revealed in the abstract that the study focuses on the various aspects of the surface chemistry of aluminas—so the main question is most likely what are the properties of the various aspects of the aluminas’ surface chemistry?  This article mainly provides a dissertation on the characteristics of surface chemistry, and does not involve much original research, if at all; it is more of a compilation of the models and theories from older chemists that describe the specific aspects of the surface chemistry of the different aluminas. Related larger concepts are grouped together, however, such as the acidity and basicity of certain aluminas.

Thlog 4

This week in Writing 2, we began to explore perspectives in reading, writing, and analysis. On the surface level of this concept, since that is all we have explored so far, we have practiced analyzing and writing in the perspectives of different sorts of people—in particular, people in the three different disciplines of academia—hard and soft/social sciences and the humanities—in the situation of questioning beachgoers about a melting alcohol bottle in the middle of a fire, and through the perspectives of different sorts of writers in the practical world—facebooking colleagues, detectives, coroners, local-and-national-newspaper writers, etc—in the situation of writing about the violent death of a university man in a parking garage. In these exercises, I was not only formally enlightened that these different perspectives exist in the reading, writing, and analysis of topics in writing, but also that conventions of genre—a concept that I learned and practiced extensively over the past couple of weeks in this course—are ever-present in different perspectives of writing. For instance, an example that was brought up in class involves comparing a writing from the perspective of a parking lot customer about the death of the university man—for the sake of expressing personal concerns—and writing from the perspective of a coroner analyzing the body of the university man—for the sake of providing a coroner’s report: a parking lot customer may typically introduce his or her name and address his or herself as a parking lot customer when writing a letter to the operators of the parking garage, while the coroner may not provide his or her name and his or her title as a coroner in the coroner’s report. These conventions have everything to do with genre, a concept I am feeling will be continuingly considered throughout the rest of the course.

WP1, PB1B

Using genre generators, I was able to experiment with identifying conventions regarding 4 different types of genres, all of which were textual. The textual genres included ballad lyrics, ( http://www.song-lyrics-generator.org.uk/create.php?song=13, the sci-gen website would only generate one paper), comic strips, memes, and horror-story introductions (http://www.springhole.net/writing_roleplaying_randomators/creepypastaplot.htm).

The ballad lyric generator clearly outlined the conventions of ballad lyrics; in order to provide all of the necessary information for the lyrics, the site explicitly instructs the user to provide an adjective that defines the user, the user’s occupation, the sex of who the song is about, the role of the person in the user’s life (cousin, friend, etc.), an adjective to describe the person, and the person’s occupation; the site instructs the user to provide a day, month, or season, and a period of the of day; then the user provides something or someone he/she could meet, and something reckless someone could have done with the thing/person; the same is done but with respect to someone else meeting a person or thing and something reckless someone else could have done with the person/thing; then two body parts, four adjectives, and two verbs must be provided.

The ballad then goes as follows:

1. The ballad begins with a nostalgic set-up that introduces the (first person) main character and the (third person) emotional interest, along with a term of endearment for the emotional interest by the main character, followed by a nostalgic memory of the two when they were happy with each other, and even had hopes for the future.
2. Next, the two characters undergo a pivotal negative experience that changes their relationship, in these cases involving the two messing up the relationship themselves by doing something excessively, followed by the emotional interest finalizing the mess-up by doing something extra stupid..
3. After that, the main character dwells on his/her emotional distress due to the final stupid incident caused by the emotional interest, which indicates that the main character and the emotional interest are now split up.
4. Finally, the main character reminisces on the emotional interest and the pivotal negative experience that changed their relationship, and relives the emotional distress he/she underwent during that time.

The conventions of the ballad can be summarized as follows: there is main character, usually portrayed in first person, and an emotional interest of the character, whether it may be a family member, a love interest, etc, who are introduced in a nostalgic set-up; The two start out well, but then a pivotal negative experience begins jeopardizes their relationship, which is finished by the emotional interest doing something stupid to finalize their splitting of the two; The main character dwells on her emotional distress from the experience; then the main character reminisces on the experience as a whole, indicating that the emotional distress is still relived and not quite resolved.

The Pandyland randomly-generated comics with Finlay and Simon provide a very simple example of the conventions of the comic-genre: the comics involve (at least) two characters, a beginning, middle, and end that includes a situation, and room for interpretation. The Pandyland comics, more specifically, are humorous, and include popular references as well as unexpected/shocking events. The room for interpretation is what works well for the humorous aspect of these comics, because it allows us to form our own conceptualizations about what is happening in the scenes.

To create the comics, it is obvious that the generator is accounting for a beginning, middle, and end within the three events it shows. The order of the events can not be changed, because they would be nonsensical; the ending event shows something that at times would not be able to come before any of the other events, such as one of the characters being killed. The middle event is generally a response to the beginning event, which acts as a set-up. This shows that comics’ beginning event is usually a set-up, followed by some sort of response, which leads to a conclusion; and so, humorous comics such as these have a set-up, a response (or effect) and a conclusion.

As a genre, memes have their own conventions as well. While many subgenres exist within the genre of “memes,” they all have a few things in common, one of which is the format, in which there is a header text and a footer text; all memes also revolve around a specific photograph that captures a specific expression that can be attributed to the intention of the text in the meme (the “meme” is created by providing a humorous text for an image with which it is not originally associated, but with which an association (usually humorous) may be seen and drawn): some, such as the “Willy Wonka” memes, have headers that are not specific to the meme, and may change every time the picture is used; others such as the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World” meme (I don’t always…)  may not have a fixed header, but a fixed introduction; others such as the “One Does Not Simply” meme have a fixed header all of the time.

According to the Horror Story Prompt Generator on springhole.net, horror story prompts (or extracts) have conventions as well: there is a set-up involving a prepositional phrase (one day in a wrecked plane), a set of characters (a man, an evil widower), and a supernatural event (transforming a doctor into a werewolf).

These websites can help one understand genre because they provide many examples that share common fundamental elements. These fundamental elements that provide skeletal structures for the genres help one distinguish among genres and recognize the existence of sub-genres that share more general fundamental elements (such as the header and footer of a meme) but differ in more specific elements (such as the specificity of the header).