The effectiveness of the paper depends on the adoption of a style appropriate to the audience and purpose of the paper. The MSU Writing Center recognizes three styles: Expressive Persuasive, and Informational. To clarify these styles, a brief note by the Writing Center regarding the writing triangle has been placed on electronic reserve. By asking you to write a position statement, I have asked you to write a persuasive paper. The reason for this selection is that the course is preparing you for convincing professional writing. Most of you are Juniors in the Earth Sciences or some other other curriculum. You should have had an opportunity to write descriptively and to provide information in your sophomore classes. The staff now wants you to go beyond this level and learn to persuade another scientist that a particular scientific idea or point of view is correct using data and concepts in the literature.
The Writing Center also distinguishes between conversational, presentational, and institutional styles (see following page). You should focus on the presentational style. The conversational style is generally inappropriate for professional writing. In the sense that you are being asked to follow GSA format, you will also be writing in the institutional style. However, you will not encounter the complete discipline of institutional style (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion) until later in your writing career when you do an independent study, write a senior thesis, write for a consulting firm or company, or write a master's thesis. For the paper in this course, you will be asked to conform to the Geological Society of America Bulletin format (citation, figure, table, and bibliographic format), but your style for this paper should be presentational and directed to juniors in your curriculum.
In class we will explore audience by thinking about some examples.
Skim read the exerpts below by Alt (1982); Flint (1971); Badcock (1989);
and Yaalon (1979) with the following question in mind: "Who is the audience".
We will discuss these in class. Please come prepared.
Our surface environment is being affected by
artificial introduction of materials and chemicals. Geologists and
other scientists are regularly called upon to evaluate such environmental
effects to establish criteria for the prevention, control and elimination
of pollution to protect water supplies, wildlife and human life.
Dealing with pollution involves the logistics of clean up, the organisms
affected, the environment that are polluted and the degradation time of
the pollutants.
Who is the audience for this quote from Alt (1982, p. 80)?
"Farmers and gardeners are familiar with the hard crust that forms on cultivated soil after a few heavy summer rains. It develops as raindrops "puddle" the soil into a muddy slurry and then hammer that into a tightly compacted crust, a process called surface sealing. The sealed surface is not compacted tightly enough to prevent raindrops from detaching particles of soil but it does effectively prevent water from soaking into the ground. Therefore, surface sealing increases both the volume of surface runoff and the rate of soil erosion. Midsummer cultivation to break the sealed surface helps rainwater to soak into the ground and thus minimizes both runoff and erosion."
Who is the audience for this quote from Flint (1971, p. 269)?
"Permafrost develops where and when mean air temperatures are negative; the temperature of the surface portion of the permafrost itself fluctuates seasonally, so that a surface layer (the active layer) thaws and refreezes to depths ranging from < 1 m to > 3 m. At the depth of no seasonal change, ground temperature generally approximates mean annual air temperature; hence much permafrost is believed to be essentially in equilibrium with existing climates. However, minor fluctuations occur, as indicated by slight shrinkage of permafrost areas within the past 100 years, at least in USSR territory.
Little is known about the time of inception of permafrost. Radiocarbon dating of peat in permafrost in southern Alaska (D.R. Nichols, 1966) suggests at least partial thawing at the time of warmer climates a few thousand years ago. Still earlier fluctuation is implied by the occurrence of extinct Pleistocene mammals in permafrost, in both Siberia and Alaska."
Who is the audience for this quote from Badcock (1989, p. 125)?
"Neil Smith's series of paper s (1979a, b, 1982, 1986, 1987a) dealing with gentrification continues to create a great deal of interest in urban studies circles, not the least because his analysis "is by far the most sophisticated theoretically developed explanation available to date and any attempt to develop a systematic explanation of gentrification must take his work as a major point of departure" (Hamnett, 1984, 298). Smith has developed a materialist interpretation of gentrification, which he cites as one of the more tangible expressions of uneven development within the urban space economy. In its earliest version (Smith, 1979a), his interpretation represented a much needed corrective to the existing corpus, which was dominated by "one-off" case studies intent on documenting the scale, incidence, and impact of a nascent phenomenon. The North American literature on gentrification contains studies of its development within individual cities including New York (Zukin, 1982), Philadelphia (Smith, 1979b), Seattle (Hodge, 1981 ), Vancouver (Ley, 1981) and Washington, DC (Gale, 1979; Henig, 1982), or comparisons of inner city revitalization within selected cities (Laska and Spain, 1980; Holcomb and Beauregard, 1981; DeGiovanni, 1983, 1984; Ley 1987, 1988). Studies of the transformation of London's West End tend to dominate the British literature (Williams, 1976; Hamnett and Williams, 1980), while in Australia the gentrification process is reported in case studies of Sydney (Kendig, 1979; Horvath and Engels, 1985), Melbourne (Maher, 1979; Logan, 1982, 1985; Jager, 1986), Adelaide (Badcock and Urlich-Cloher, 1981) and Brisbane (Mullins, 1982)."
Who is the audience for this quote from Yaalon (1971, p. 93)?
"We consider the ages of carbonized wood, Fraction A, as forming a statistically valid time series with mean values 31,700 + 1,700/1,400 B.P. The term >17,000 B.P. (Island Bend, ANU-145) could generally be misleading, but it is used to indicate that the sample -value and the background (blank) - values, which oscillate round a mean value of = -1,000 (Polach, 1969), could not be statistically distinguished for this single determination (Callow et al., 1965). If, however, such a determination forms part of a series, where the -values and their associated errors can be shown statistically (% square, percentile distribution tests) to form a homogeneous series, then a result weighted proportionally to the reciprocal of the square of its error (Topping, 1962; Polach, 1969) can be calculated, giving the best available approximation of the pooled mean age. Thus, in our case, the pooled mean = -980.7 +3.6, corresponding to an indicated age of 31,700 + 1,700/1,400 years, was calculated as being representative of the mean age of the carbonized wood.
The discrepancy between the mean age of the carbonized wood control,
Fraction A, and the ages of the various humic and total soil OM fractions
now becomes significant. Only at the Munyang (ANU-143) site, the humic
acid, Fraction B, y ields an age in complete agreement with the carbonized
wood series mean value, indicating that at this one particular site, the
burial of the organic layer was sufficiently rapid and deep to prevent
further microbiological turnover and contamination by down-washed humus
and/or macrofauna. This agreement between the carbonized wood and the humic-acid
fraction is also additional proof that the carbonized fragments of wood
were comminuted into the soil matrix at the time of formation, within the
radiocarbon age determination error, + 1,500 years. For this to
be true, the ages of the comminuted wood could be older, or of the same
age, but not younger than the age of soil OM fractions."