Chapter 2: Decoding Genre
Genre and Academic Writing in STEM Disciplines
Clarity, organization, and citation are key features of the academic writing genre. But even within this genre, expectations for each feature differ from one academic discipline to the next depending on the norms and conventions of the community of researchers, writers, and readers that make up that discipline.
Writing in STEM disciplines like Forestry and Land & Food Systems shares many features of genre:
- STEM writing is audience-specific. When writing for a specialized audience knowledgeable in the discipline, writing will probably feature discipline-specific terminology. When writing for a general audience, STEM professionals may have to change their language or define specialized words.
- STEM writing is often specific and to the point.
- STEM researchers used to default to the passive voice, but now most STEM researchers write in the active voice.
- Scholarly and professional STEM audiences require you to support your work (and opinions) by citing relevant sources. In Forestry and Land & Food Systems, we generally use APA citation.
- STEM writing often follows a clear organization: IMRAD.
“IMRAD”
Do you know what “IMRAD” stands for? Is it a special abbreviation for I AM RAD?
The IMRAD structure is a widely accepted and extensively used format for communicating scientific research. Although not included in the acronym, scientific papers often include a conclusion as part of the discussion.
Genre Remix
Exercises
Adaptations
Some material in this section has been adapted from the ScWRL, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
The rules and expectations for behavior that are upheld by society, usually through social pressure.
When you’re writing, it’s easy to forget that you are actually writing to someone. Whether you’ve thought about it consciously or not, you always write to an audience: sometimes your audience is a very generalized group of readers, sometimes you know the individuals who compose the audience, and sometimes you write for yourself. Keeping your audience in mind while you write can help you make good decisions about what material to include, how to organize your ideas, and how best to support your argument. (from The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Abbreviation for a way to structure a scientific paper; the respective components represented by each letter are: introduction, methods, result, analysis, discussion.
