PB2A

When asked to compare a genre generating website to a scholarly article from a university’s database, somebody that has yet to take Writing 2 would probably be confused as to how these two sources have anything to do with each other. After comparing a scholarly article on fast food and its affects on childhood obesity in India to the SCIgen website, there are many similarities in their surface-level features. Both have bolded titles to grab the reader’s attention, with the components of the paper organized into categories below. Both begin with a section titled “Abstract” that gives a brief explanation of the source’s purpose followed by an introduction. Unlike SCIgen, the scholarly article “Fast foods and physical inactivity are risk factors for obesity and hypertension among adolescent school children in east district of Sikkim, India” was created by a legitimate author who is a professional in his field. This creates a sense of credibility among the source because the data is coming from a reliable source, adding to the ethos of the article.

In comparison to the SCIgen—a formulated scientific research paper that is extremely hard to understand—the scholarly article conducts an experiment, explains its materials and methods, gives the results and forms a discussion and conclusion concerning the study. The article also gives statistical analysis in the form of two tables, showing the prevalence of obesity and its risk factors. Instead of tables, the SCIgen website usually displays its evidence in the form of graphs. In contrast, the scholarly article performs a study on a topic that is relevant to society (usually a controversial topic), while the genre generating website lacks interesting/important topics, therefore it is almost impossible to relate to.

When taking a closer look at the scholarly article, it is crucial to find the aspects that strike you as most important. First, I think proving the ethos of the article is one of the most important aspects, since it is a scholarly article. Obviously since this article is generated from the library database and has an author with a PhD, one can agree that it is a credible source. The 45 references listed at the end also add to the credibility of the source, proving that the author did a lot of research prior and throughout the experiment. Another important aspect of the scholarly article is that it has a well-developed introduction, because the author needs to prove that there is a good reasoning for the experiment/study. Nobody would consider the article “scholarly” if the experiment seemed irrelevant or unimportant. Another important aspect and convention of the scholarly article is its use of strong diction. There are numerous highly-developed vocabulary words that prove the intelligence of the researcher and adds to the scholarly aspect of the article.

Since this article is based on child obesity, an aspect that I found important was the pathos created by the author. The author states that childhood obesity “increases the risk of subsequent morbidity,” which really hit home to me and made me realize how sad cases like that actually are. This furthered my interest in the study and helped me want to become more proactive with my personal health. I also liked how there was an explanation of the factors involved in calculating one’s BMI, and how it stated the percentiles in which a child was considered either overweight, or obese. Another important aspect of the article was that in the results, it included that boys are more likely to suffer from obesity rather than girls. This proves to the audience that the researcher conducted a wide variety of people for the experiment, so the results would not be biased.

At first, I was scared by the term “scholarly article” and believed that all of its content would be horrifically boring, but after browsing the library database the phrase, “never judge a book by its cover” proved to be true once again.