Translating a Scholarly Article in Your Field of Study for a Public Audience

Matthews Discipline Project Assignment Fall 2020

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THE DISCIPLINE PROJECT

Translating a Scholarly Article in Your Field of Study for a Public Audience (20% of final grade in the course)

Adapted from An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing, by Miller-Cochran, Stamper, and Cochran. Bedford/St. Martin’s P, 2016.

O VE R VI E W

The goal of this assignment is to “translate” or rewrite a scholarly article written about a current

topic in your academic discipline for an educated public audience. Your purpose is to make the

findings in that article comprehensible and relevant to an educated, non-expert reader.

There are three parts to this assignment:

• locate, read, and analyze a recently published scholarly article in your academic discipline

that addresses a topic of interest to you and the general public.

• "translate" (rewrite) the article in a new genre appropriate for public audiences

• write a reflective analysis about the choices you made as you wrote your translation

LE A RNI NG O B JE C TI VE S

After completing this assignment, you should be able to

• analyze the rhetorical features of scholarly writing in your discipline and public writing

• Identify the conventions of various genres of scholarly, professional, and public writing

• write with an awareness of how the rhetorical situation and rhetorical context influence the

structure, language, and reference conventions (SLRs) writers use to achieve their purpose in

writing to specific audiences.

ST EP ONE: CHOOSE A SCHOLARLY ARTICLE AND READ IT CAREFULLY

Choose a scholarly article published in the last two years so that your topic is relatively current. The

topic of the article should address an issue in your field of study that would be of interest to the

general public.

After you choose your scholarly article, read it carefully so that you understand its key findings and

the basic research methodology the author(s) used to determine them.

Matthews Discipline Project Assignment Fall 2020

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ST EP TWO : IDENTIFY YOUR NEW AUDIENCE AND GENRE

Next, identify a genre of public writing for your translation of the article and learn how it shapes its

information for a general, educated audience. The objective is to shift the audience from an

academic one to a public, educated one.

You may choose to write an article in a magazine dedicated to topics in your field, a newspaper

article that reports research findings, or even a feature article in one of the better newspapers,

such as The New York Times.

ST EP THREE: ANALYZING YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE AND GENRE

CONVENTIONS

Closely analyze two examples of the kind of public writing genre you’re attempting to create and

identify the characteristics of that genre, or its conventions. For example, identify how the example

integrates and acknowledges its sources and how that differs from source integration and citation

in a scholarly work. Look at how the example phrases its title, how it introduces the topic, the level

of diction (word choice) it uses, and where it places the key findings of the scholarly work.

Your project will be assessed according to its ability to reproduce those genre conventions, so you

will need to consider the rhetorical choices you must make in the construction of your piece.

Consider all four elements of the rhetorical context: author, audience, topic, purpose.

ST EP FOUR: WRITING THE “TRANSLATION”

At this point, you’re ready to begin translating the article into the new genre. The format, structure,

and development of your ideas are contingent upon the genre of public reporting you’re attempting

to construct. If you plan to write a feature newspaper article, for example, then the article you

produce should really look like one that would appear in a newspaper. Try to mirror how the genre

would appear in a real situation, to include complying with the way public writing acknowledges its

sources. Public writing does not use MLA or APA, but it still acknowledges sources.

ST EP FIVE: WRITING THE REFLECTIVE ANALYSIS

Once your translation is complete, compose a reflective analysis about writing to a new audience

and in a new genre. As part of your analysis, compare and contrast the rhetorical choices between

the scholarly article and the genre you chose for your public audience. Focus on the following:

STRUCTURE, LANGUAGE, and REFERENCE CONVENTIONS (SLRs) as you constructed your translation.

See the sample student essay for how to do this.

Matthews Discipline Project Assignment Fall 2020

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Offer a rationale for each of your decisions that connects the features of your translation to your

larger rhetorical context. For example, if you had to translate the title of the scholarly article for a

public audience, explain why your new title is the most appropriate one for your public audience. If

you had to use signaling phrases and hyperlinks to acknowledge sources you reference, explain

why.

Finally, reflect upon what you learned by adapting the scholarly findings for a public audience. What

skills did you use that were new to you? How might you use those skills in other coursework or in

your current or future workplace?

Failure to include a good faith response in the reflective analysis results in an automatic 10-point

deduction in grade.

EVID ENCE

The Discipline Project does not require you to incorporate secondary sources, but if you feel it is

appropriate to your reader and the genre you chose, then do so. Just make sure to use the format

for acknowledging sources used in the genre of public writing. In most cases, this will be a hyperlink.

It is more important to think about how you will incorporate evidence from the scholarly article you

are translating. Public audiences appreciate a quotation or two, but you will find that you need to

rely more heavily on summary and paraphrase in translating the article for a general reader.

Summary and paraphrase still require attribution, but public writing often accomplishes this with

the signaling phrase.

FORMAT AND DOCUMENTATIO N

● Use the manuscript format for the genre you chose.

● Use signaling phrases and/or hyperlinks to acknowledge source material so that you comply

with the genre conventions of public writing.

This adapted assignment by the George Mason Composition Program is licensed under a Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.)