Long-Distance Relationships, Ducks, and Fridges. Oh My!

            “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” However, if it looks like a scholarly article, swims like a scholarly article, and quacks like a scholarly article, it might really be a bunch of random nonsense assembled by the SCIgen generator. It turns out that things are not always as they appear to be when it comes to writing. Conventions make it easy to fool us into thinking that a written work is valid because it coincides with our idea of what it should be. “In Times of Uncertainty: Predicting the Survival of Long-Distance Relationships” is a real scholarly article written by a group of psychologists who put a huge amount of work into their research. However, when put side by side with a nonsensical article from the SCIgen generator a reader may not be able to recognize which one is a load of crap.

The scholarly article “In Times of Uncertainty: Predicting the Survival of Long-Distance Relationships” is a great example for how the SCIgen genre generator gets away with its trickery. The main comparison that can be made between “In Times of Uncertainty: Predicting the Survival of Long-Distance Relationships” and an article that SCIgen generates is a comparison between the structural conventions. Both articles start with an abstract that lets the readers know what information they should expect to receive, although the SCIgen articles give the reader very little information considering it’s just a bunch of fluff. Another convention related to the structural elements of the articles is the scientific/important looking graphs and figures. Graphs are likely a convention of scholarly articles because they are a convenient way to organize information that has been researched in a way that is also easy for readers to comprehend. A final important structural convention to compare is the list of references. SCIgen articles always have a long list of references at the tail end of their articles and the same can be said for “In Times of Uncertainty: Predicting the Survival of Long-Distance Relationships”. References are an immensely important element of the structure of these articles. When we read scholarly articles we expect a long list of references because we assume that a lot of work and research went into composing the articles. If there were no references, the reader may question the credibility of the author/authors and the validity of the information being presented.

            Rhetorical analysis is a bit difficult when it comes to the papers created by SCIgen because it is essentially a lot of nonsense. One thing that both articles have in common is the audience they are writing for. These articles are aimed at students or other fairly well-educated individuals who have an interest in their field of study. Credibility, or ethos, plays a role in these articles in a lot of forms. The articles have a formal tone and include a list of references because they don’t want the audience to question their credibility. The final element of rhetoric that the articles have in common is visual literacy. These articles use visual literacy in the same way, through graphs and charts, in order to present their data clearly and concisely.

I think it’s important to note that in order for the researchers to arrive at their conclusion about long-distance relationships they had to put in a significant amount of time. The researchers had to do initial interviews with the couples and then wait a year before the final interviews that gave them the information they needed to evaluate the results. The time elapsed from the beginning to the end of the study shows that the researchers see a value in the information being presented. The researchers/writers did a good job of organizing the information in a way that makes it easy to follow. They conveniently labeled the content of each section in either italics or bold so that the reader would know the content of that particular section. This was a good writing decision because it breaks the text up in a way that makes it seem less overwhelming from the standpoint of the reader. This makes it so that the main conclusion of the study, “being geographically distant from a partner enhances interpersonal risk and stress…”, can be found even if the reader is disinterested in all the scientific mumbo-jumbo.

Reading an actual scholarly article demonstrates the validity of the SCIgen generator. The generator simply plays with the conventions we have established in our heads for what a scholarly article should look like. Our assumptions about genres can lead us awry and knowing that can help ensure we don’t assign value to a work that holds no value simply because it follows the conventions of its genre.