PB2A - SCIgeneric vs. SCOOLarly

You type the word “also” into the search box on Thesaurus.com. You then furiously scroll down and through 3 pages of synonyms, but you don’t find anything. The mustardy yellow of the website irritates you and you finally decide to just use the word “also.” Scratch that. You erase the whole sentence and decide to integrate the information in a different way. You look at the time and realize your paper is due in two hours and decide to start it all over because it just didn’t sound “scholarly” enough. You look at the clock again and realize it has been half an hour and you still have nothing. Finally, you decide to look up “how to write scholarly paper” on Google. Success. The first thing to come up is a “Step-by-Step” guide to writing a scholarly paper. There are apparently sixteen steps to write a scholarly paper so you try it out. You finish within in forty minutes and your paper sounds fancy as hell, but for some reason it still sucks. Your paper sounds like a robot wrote it but it will pass through peer reviews and maybe even fool your professor. But how does this happen? It is all thanks to genres and conventions. Conventions are the unifying traits of genres. Conventions can make your paper fit into a genre, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they will make it good or convincing.

A website that is better than you at so-called “BSing” papers is called SCIgen. SCIgen can turn you into the published author of a fancy gibberish research mess with the click of a button. SCIgen papers make no sense—that is easy to see—but how can a website possibly generate a paper that could go as far as fooling someone? The answer is easy: genres and conventions. Through careful use of the conventions of a research paper, SCIgen can “write” a paper that will fit into the genre of a research paper.

In order to find out more about the conventions of a research paper, I found an actual research paper that studies the effects of stress on the brain. The paper looked much like I expected. Simply accessing the paper made it feel like a research paper. I had to go through a library database to find it, which I was only ever required to do for AP Chemistry laboratory reports. The article appeared similar to SCIgen. They were both aesthetically similar—they were presented in a boring manner, on a boring website, in a “formal” font, and in a seemingly reader-friendly format. Both SCIgen and the research article I found started out with an informative title and a quick overview of the content of the paper. Both also contained a conclusion, and of course, they included fancy “jargon,” lots of names, impressive transitions, and page after page of data.

The scholarly piece, despite its many similarities to the SCIgen article, made SCIgen look like what it is: a whole lot of BS. The scholarly piece, unlike SCIgen, actually had a point to make. It was filled with research and names, but again, unlike SCIgen, the scholarly piece had data that you could actually find on the works cited and maybe even read it if you had the time and interest. Under the titles of both, you could find the authors, although on the stress articles, a number linked to similar articles and author affiliations followed each name. In that sense the actual research article appeared more trustworthy than SCIgen. Both SCIgen and the research article were broken up into different topics pertaining the subject, but only the scholarly piece’s organization seemed to make sense. SCIgen appeared as more of an experimental process, while the article on stress was neatly broken up into human and animal research as well as some further results of the study. Furthermore, the scholarly piece went above and beyond the expectations of a research paper. It expressed the many aspects of stress, but in the end, the scholarly piece actually discussed stress and the fact that it is not always a bad thing. A person evidently wrote the scholarly piece, which is what SCIgen could not simulate. It is hard to explain how this was evident, but one of the main separating traits of SCIgen and the scholarly piece was that I could see and feel the effort that went into the scholarly piece. The scholarly piece seemed almost passionate when compared to SCIgen, which at the end of the day, seemed like someone slapped a keyboard for two hours and the result was a bunch of autocorrected nonsense. Just because something fits into a genre does not mean it will have the same effect as another paper of the same genre.

http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v10/n6/full/nrn2639.html#a2

http://scigen.csail.mit.edu/scicache/870/scimakelatex.31533.Nat+Politron.Gaby+Flores.Tiffany+Velasquez.Grecia+Jimenez.html