Goal
To translate a scholarly article for a popular and public audience; to learn to control formal and informal language depending on rhetorical context
Instructions
Step 1. Choose one of the sources from your annotated bibliography to translate.
Step 2. Identify your audience and genre
You’ll need to identify a rhetorical situation (audience, purpose, and context) for the information in your selected research article. The goal here is to shift the audience from an academic one to a public one. You may, for example, choose to write a magazine article targeted toward a general audience of people who are interested in in science, or you may choose to write a newspaper article that announces the research findings. Notice that once you choose your audience, the form in which you report will need to be appropriate for your audience.
Step 3. Analyze your target audience and genre expectations
Closely analyze several examples of the genre you’re attempting to create, and consider how the examples fulfill the expectations of the targeted audience. Your project will be assessed according to your ability to reproduce these genre expectations. Here are some examples of genres you can choose from:
● Press release
● Blog
● Newspaper article
● Magazine article
● Newsletter
● Podcast (written transcript)
● News broadcast (written transcript)
● Other?
Step 4. Constructing the genre
At this point, you are ready to begin constructing and translating the article into the genre your have selected. As I’ve indicated above, the genre you are producing could take any number of forms. Accordingly, the form, structure, and development of your ideas are contingent on the genre you are attempting to construct. If you are constructing a magazine article, for example, the article you produce should be similar to one that would appear in a magazine.
REFLECTION
Goal
To reflect on language choices you made in translating a scholarly article into a popular one.
Instructions
Compose an essay in which you examine the rhetorical choices you made in translating an academic essay in to a popular source. Offer a rationale for your decisions.