A biological research paper has many components that make it stand out from other types of research papers. This can first be noticed when considering its rhetorical features. Every biology research paper is comprised of various parts including an abstract, introduction, methods, results, the discussion of the results, and a conclusion. The abstract serves to summarize the important pieces of the paper and is meant to be written at the end, but placed at the beginning of the paper to inform readers about the key pieces of the paper and inform them as to whether or not it is relevant to what they are searching for. This piece is followed by a basic introduction containing information relevant to understand the study as well as the hypothesis being tested. The next component is the methods and materials section, the purpose of which to allow the reader to recreate the experiment. This contains very specific explanation of each step as well as the required materials. Following this is the result section which just lists out the data with or without graphs and very brief explanations of the data. Discussing the data is done within the discussion, which is meant to explain what the data shows as well as whether or not the hypothesis tested was supported or refuted by the results. The conclusion section of a biological research paper is meant to summarize briefly the results and their implications in relation to the hypothesis. All of these papers have a target audience of other scientific researchers, a tone of sophistication, and have the purpose of telling other researchers what they were able to find with their experimentation. The context of all that is written within a biological research paper is all related to the hypothesis the scientist is testing. The conventions of biological research paper include concise language, scientific terminology, very specific thesis, multiple pages long, explanations of experiment and data, graphs or some type of visual representation of the information, citations for facts, connections to other research, potential use of results, and summary of the paper as a whole. It is the pieces of a biological research paper and their uses towards their audience that make this a research paper. The author is trying to find an answer to a question that could help others answer their own relatively related questions. It is the set up and purpose of a biological research paper that makes it different from other types of research papers. Few others is any include a brief but informative summary of the entire paper at the very beginning to aid those who are also doing research. Papers of this type are attempting to answer pieces of a larger question that often many people are collaborating on, further making the format of it necessary and different from other research papers. They build on the research of others, which requires many citations to give the paper more legitimacy and standing in the world of biology research. These things are not found as often in other types of research papers and differentiates them from this genre.
To start off, you did just what Zack wanted us to do, try to get a genre that was pretty specific. I personally liked how you went into detail into how all the parts of a biological essay would appear and what the purpose of each part serves to do. A great addition that you added near the near was sort of related to something from the of Dirk, who talked about how when a genre is made other use that genre to get ideas for their writing, you instead wrote about how these papers are used by others to answer some of the questions they had. Great job, I couldn’t find anything else that you could add or missed.
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