Finding the Commonalities: Investing Organizational Structures and Formatting of Academic Articles
Purpose: Helping students develop knowledge about organizational structures and formatting common to academic articles, so that can use this information to help them read difficult texts. This might be a worthwhile way to introduce academic articles to students before they begin researching for ENC2135's second project.
Description: This exercise asks students to identify and present on the features and types of academic texts. This exercise works for particularly well for research-based classes, but can work in other composition courses as well.
Suggested Time: 2-3 class periods and outside of class work time
Procedure:
In groups of two or three, students choose one of the types of essays or essay features from the list at the bottom of the page, find 1-2 examples of this, and create a short presentation for the class. (The list is by no means complete but is applicable to most of the texts students encounter in scholarly databases.)
For the article types, students should explain the "moves" the author(s) making:
the purpose of the article (i.e. what does a review article actually do?)
the kind of information in each section (i.e. what does the results section do?)
how each section is connected to the others (i.e. how is the lit review connected to the argument?)
and how knowing this information helps readers understand the text (i.e. how can you read differently knowing the purpose of a lit review?)
For the features common to multiple article types, students should focus on
the purpose of those features (i.e. what do notes do?)
the kind of information in the features (i.e. what kind of information would you find in notes?)
how the features are connected to the content of the article (i.e what is the relationship between the subject heading and the actual text?)
how knowing about these features helps readers understand the article (i.e. how might you read differently knowing about subject headings?)
Each group creates a PowerPoint or similar artifact that can be distributed to the rest of the class. After the presentations, discuss what the students learned and then, during the next class period, apply this knowledge to a course reading.
List of Article Types and Features
IMRAD Articles (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion)
Review Essays (Introduction, Methods, Article Discussion, and Implications)
Humanities Essays (Introduction, Lit Review, Body/Argument, and Conclusion)
Book Reviews (Introduction, Summary, Critique, and Implications)
Abstracts
Subject Headings
Signposts / Forecasting Moves
Notes/Endnotes/Footnotes
Works Cited Pages
CARS (Creating a Research Space) model introduction paragraphs