Comparison of Academic and Informal Writing

Audience

   Dahl's paper: intended audiences are scholars looking for an academic point of view in some disciplines. They are supposed to know the background of this paper and be familiar with this field. When reading, audiences expected to get better understanding of the issue. The paper itself didn't indicate the intended audience, but from the type of the article (thesis) and the beginning part (abstract) we can get the idea of what kind of audience will be reading this article.

    Azuma's: This article aims at new graduate students coming to a computer science school. The audiences are supposed to know nothing about what will be discussed in the article. After reading, they should get more living information. Intended audience is directly indicated in the description.

Tone

    The tone of Azuma is relaxed and ready to help, with jokes and examples, while Dahl is using a more formal voice, avoiding personal emotion.

Authority

    Azuma's authority is established by indicating that he had such experience. And Dahl stated that he had study on the topic and gave analyzed data as support.

Rhetorical Structure

      Dahl's paper has a clear structure that is common in academic papers, including abstract, introduction, argument, experiential results and conclusion, because the reader may concern only a certain part of the paper and they need to quickly locate where to find what they need. Meanwhile, Azuma follows his own structure, using subtitles to make it clear to which part the article goes, because readers are supposed to read from the beginning.

Argument

    When put forward a statement, Dahl use much evidence (like data, experimental result, etc.) to support. On the other side, Azuma makes a claim based on only his own experience.

Scope
    Azuma's text has a wider scope of topic, referring to all kinds of aspects in life. Dahl's is more focused on an academic topic. The factor of audience decided such a difference. Audience of Azuma's are willing to know more on every aspects of life while those of Dahl's are only looking at an explanation of a certain issue, care no other aspects.

Sentence Mechanics and Grammar

     Dahl is using normalized grammar and complicated and integrated sentences while Azuma often uses short sentences and does not care much about grammar. For example, sentence "The bottom line: realize that ..." in Azuma's text is an informal expression in written paper.

Style

    Azuma uses informal format with colloquialisms . For example, in Azuma's text "Why the hell am I doing this" is a very casual expression, and he uses "I repeat: ..." which will hardly appear in a paper like Dahl's, which prefer to use sentences like "I suggested in section 2 that ..." so that the paper is not commanding the audience.

Reference to Others’ Ideas

    When there is a reference, Dahl will give full information about the author, publication time, brief description, etc.. The purpose of citation is to use others' conclusion to support his own opinion. In Azuma's writing, there are quotation marks when sentences are cited. these citations are often used as background or explanation. It is which kind the writing belongs to that decides the style of citations. One must have normalized format, and the other is more informal.

Vocabulary

     Vocabulary in Dahl's article is more specialized and specific. For example, in his paper, there is a paragraph:

     "This was the case for aim, article,11 claim, conclude, conclusion, contribution, demonstrate, goal, indicate, maintain and purpose. Three search words (two of them pronoun variants) turned out to be common (here defined somewhat arbitrarily as more than 10 occurrences) in both disciplines, viz. I, we and paper, while others, not unexpectedly, displayed disciplinary differences: find, show and result were common in economics12 and rare in linguistics, while argue and suggest were common in linguistics and rare in economics."

     We can see that some words are stressed as specific definition in the process.

     But in Azuma's article, use of vocabulary is more colloquial. For example, in the sentence "If you do not have an acceptable answer to this question, then don't get a Ph.D. I repeat: if you do not have a rock-solid reason for getting the Ph.D., then it is better that you leave with a Master's." It is like Azuma is talking to someone.