The topic that I have chosen for my second paper is earthquakes. Earthquakes are related to the field of geology which is categorized under natural sciences. I picked this topic because I am already taking geology as a science. It is also one of my potential majors, so I thought that I should do a research paper relating to it to explore my interest. For this project, I am to pick one scholarly article and one popular article. The idea is to compare the two articles, make connections and to point out any key differences. Differences such as audience, formatting style and context.
The content of my scholarly article revolves around statistics and how to determine the location and size of earthquakes using mathematical equations. Since nature is hard to predict, I would say that they are more likely to be calculations than accurate measurements. My reasoning is that this article is embedded with many equations. The equations are pretty constant which shows that they are using certain algorithms to measure earthquakes. Nature has many accounting variables for it to be easy to predict. Aside from formulas, this article includes figures and explanations with complex contexts. The link to my scholarly article that I chose: http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&hid=106&sid=495abcfb-af63-4799-87a0-f78f91ab0347%40sessionmgr113
And here is the link to my popular article as well: http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/natural-disasters/earthquake5.htm This article is quite different from the scholarly one. I found this article on Google whereas I found the other on a school trusted database. Their formatting is very different from one another. The popular article is more organized and the context is easier to follow. It talks about the basics and leads you into an more in depth study. Basically it is information for people who have no knowledge of earthquakes but have somewhat of an interest in it.
Concerns that I have for typing this paper is my outline. I really don't know how I would start my paper and I need to work on my transitions. Especially if I am going back and forth on my articles. But the first challenge is to get the hang of APA citation, so I must correctly format my title before I can even begin to type my paper. My next concern is to find connections between the two articles. I feel as if they are too completely different to find similarities. My reasoning is that the scholarly article goes way too in depth while the popular article gives its readers many segments and key points on the topic. And I have already mentioned that transitions are not my forte, so putting the paper together would be another major concern. Despite all of these existing problems, I still feel confident that I'll type a great paper. My plan is to introduce each article and to briefly summarize them. Then I would compare the articles in terms of context, formatting, audience and any other dissimilarities that I may find. I would go on with any bits of similarities that they may have, since that could be the weakest part of my paper. And finally end with a conclusion that gives out the key points of my paper. I may have to outline my paper with the information from the articles first. So I can decide which is my strongest identification. I want to type from my strongest point to my weakest. Well that's how I plan on starting, but I'm hoping that Ms. Clark would be available to give out more advise. Well anyway, here I go.
References:
Arnold, R., Townend, J., & Vignaux, T. (2005, November 23). Mapping Tectonic Stress Using Earthquakes. AIP Conference Proceedings, 803(1), 475-482. doi:10.1063/1.2149828. 2, October 2010.
Harris, T. (2001, January 16). How Earthquakes Work. HowStuffWorks.com. http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/natural-disasters/earthquakes.htm 2, October 2010.
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