Chart Discription

This chart shows the average usage condition of DC Metro during a day. At a time, the number of people using DC Metro is from about 100 to 400. Starting at 6:00 a.m., the number continues to rise, reaching a peak at 7:00, and then decrease to below 200. Subsequently the number rises slowly to a plateau at 12:00, with the number around 300. Afterward there is a dip at 16:00 reaching to the lowest usage amount. Following is another spike around 18:00, which is the second rush hour in a day. After 20:00 the number becomes relatively stable, with only slight fluctuation.

Final -- Methodology

Introduction and abstracts are similar. They both serve as a summary, indicating the reason, the topic and maybe to some extent the result of the article. In order to compare them, a corpus of 12 research articles is adopted. The articles should be chosen in a variety of sources, from conference papers to students' dissertation in biomedical engineering field, with different length as a possible factor affecting the structure of introductions and abstracts. In this paper, the sources are journals, conferences, and dissertations. Each has 4 articles, written in recent years. Another possible factor is the purpose of the article, including to create a literature review of the area, to implement an algorithm, or to present a experimental finding. Such differences in purposes are also considered to be taken into account during the setup of the corpus.
Since CARS model is reliable and widely used, each introduction is analyzed under this model to see which moves it has. And then, to contrast with the introduction, the corresponding abstract is examined by CARS model. The research focus is counted as move one or two, while the methods used and findings are move three. The length of each move is also examined in a standard that moves less than 1/4 of the section are counted as "short", and those longer than 1/2 are counted as "long"; move length in between is "medium". Afterward contrast is made to see whether they are coherent with introductions, and why they differ if the two parts have the same structure.

Methodology

In order to get the most truthful statements of feelings and experiences from family members, face-to-face interview method, which is usually quickly approved, was adopted. This method was applied to ten people willing to be interviewed in the local Chinese community. Although there were not enough subjects for statistical analysis,  data from ten persons is enough for a small-scale pilot study. Within the study, one-hour interviews were carried out on each person, using whatever language the interviewees were most comfortable with-- Mandarin, Taiwanese, or English so that they could express their feelings accurately. The interview was semi-structured, i.e. there was not a fixed lit of questions.

Final -- introduction

Introductions play an important role in academic articles because it will give the audience a clear clue about the topic and structure of the paper. Therefore, the question "What structure should an introduction follow" has drawn much attention by linguists. Corpus had been investigated in a variety of disciplines and some models were proposed. For example, Swales put forward CARS (Create A Research Space) model and revised it in 2004, breaking down introductions into three moves: establishing the area of research, establishing the gap in knowledge, and filling this gap. This model was frequently examined and researchers found out that most introductions in all kinds of discipline follow it well.

After CARS model had been revised and accepted as useful, it was widely applied to analysis in introductions of research articles. Especially in recent years, several papers were proposed each year discussing about the rhetorical element, crosslinguistic expression or other aspects of introductions. However, during such a long time only a few researchers paid close attention to the structural difference between introductions and other elements of research articles when applying CARS model (Riley, 1991; Samraj, 2005; Pho, 2008), while these other elements such as abstracts and conclusions are structurally similar to introductions. For example, abstracts also require a brief generalization of the context of the article, mentioning the research process and result which is similar to the Move 3 of introductions regarding CARS model. Therefore, question arises that "Do other parts of research article follow CARS model as introductions and why are they structurally different in a certain discipline?" The goal of this research is to find what is the structural difference between introductions and abstracts, and what factor causes such difference. The result will help authors to better understand how to write introduction.