Chris McDevitt
10/11/18
English 110 J
When studying James Gee’s Building Tasks, you see how much his study on Discourse impacts his writing as a whole. In the readings that we have had in class, the Discourse of science is considered to be the most important. We especially saw this in Haas’s article, because she was studying a biology student. The article by Nair and Nair also had a lot to do with science discourse, but it was more focused on a different area of natural science as Haas. When looking in a paper for building tasks, the best way to find them is to follow the IMRaD cheat sheet, which showed in a lot of ways exactly how to find and define one of the seven building tasks. I believe that the IMRaD paper format is quite important when studying a literary work that uses the discourse of social and natural sciences.
The seven building tasks that Gee writes about are, significance, practices, identities, relationships, connections, and sign systems and knowledge. These building tasks are the backbone of importance when analyzing or writing a scholarly article or literary paper. Significance is what a person would find important with a paper, and a really great quote that we went over in class that shows significance is,
“Experts within scientific domains, then, draw upon rich representations of discourse as a social and rhetorical act, what geisler has called socially configured mental models, as they create and interpret texts and as they judge the validity and usefulness of the information within them” (Haas 45)
This quote shows an example of significance because it shows that there needs to be both validity and usefulness in order for information to be important, or hold significance, in a paper. Practices are what a member of the science Discourse does that makes them different from people that haven’t joined the Discourse. While reading Nair and Nair, there was one quote about practices that appeared to be very strong. The article said, “Do not go into an extensive literature review; two to four most relevant and recent citations should be adequate to corroborate a statement. Do not repeat well-known facts nor state the obvious (Nair and Nair 18)”. This is considered a practice because it showing something that a person would only know to write if they are a member of the Discourse. Gee’s research on Discourse shows that there is different varieties of circumstances when being a Discourse can show.
The Building Tasks that I found most important in relation to the Discourse of Science is the Building Tasks of relationships and connections. These two are very important to the Discourse of Science because social and natural science are based off the relationships between different people and different animals, or just between different atoms or molecules. A great example of relationships is, “Acknowledging or attempting to understand these elements of discourse-constructing a rhetorical frame which includes authors, readers, motives, relationships, and contexts-is what I call the process of rhetorical reading” (Haas 48). This is a good example of relationships because it is a direct relationship between reader and writer, and an indirect relationship between writer and reader. In addition to that, a great example of a connection in one of the papers we read was, “She had come to a greater awareness of the rhetorical, contingent nature of both the activities and discourses are participated in within her chosen field, biology” (Haas 46). This quote is a good example of connections because it connects practices with significance in a wonderful way.
The IMRaD Cheat Sheet is actually an acronym, which stands for “Introduction and Importance, Methods, Results, and Discussion.” Introduction and importance can be seen as making a case for new research. It is how you are supposed to entice a reader and tell them about the topic if the article. The methods are sometimes described as what someone does. It is the way that a scientist may have conducted their research or created their hypothesis. The results are the findings of a study, or what the experimentation upon the hypothesis led to. Finally, the discussion is where the scientists go from the results. There is a lot of discussion about whether or not the experiment was well made, whether or not it needed to be studied over again, or whether the results were even correct. The interesting part about science Discourse is that it is very straight and to the point, which is a lot different from English or History Discourse.
When structuring a scientific paper of my own, I would use the IMRaD method to help my paper have good flow and make sense. The way that Carnegie Mellon made a cheat sheet which even had percentages on how much of each type of writing needed makes things so much easier. IMRaD says that a paper needs to have “25% of space on importance of research, 25% of their space on what you did, 35% of space on what you find: this is the most important part of the abstract, and 15% of their space on the implication of the research.” When reading a scholarly article, you should be able to see these elements alive in the paper, rather than just trying to force them into place.
The paper that showed off science Discourse the most out of everything we’ve read in class is the Haas paper. Haas’s study of Eliza showed a lot about how difficult it was for someone not in the Discourse of science trying to join it. When she first began her college journey, she was almost completely out of the discourse, and did not understand many of the scientific articles that she was tasked to read. She tried to mushfake it in the discourse, but it didn’t work out very well for the first year or two of her education. However, when she was surrounded by other people who were in the Discourse for a long time, she began to acclimate to the lingo. Four years into Haas’s study of her, Eliza was a member of the Discourse of science.
