I choose audience, authority and
argument to compare Azuma’s and Xia’s articles. I will illustrate comparisons
individually according to the three criteria.
-Audience:
Azuma’s article focuses on computer science students who consider
to pursue a PhD degree. The readers may want to know the “journey” internally
(mentally changes) and externally (what happened to him) Azuma encountered
before, learn experiences from this article, and take advices from the author.
On contrary, Xia’s readers focus on a specific and narrow field. They are
researchers or students who study supply chain, and they mainly take this
article as reference to their study or as a supportive material to their
research.
-Authority:
Authority of Azuma’s article is from his/her observations
and real experiences. Proverbs, idioms and well-known sayings are added in the
beginning of every section to integrate the ideas he/she wants to explain later.
For example, “To know the road ahead, ask those coming back” and “Remember the
Golden Rule: Those who have the gold make the rules.” are sentences/proverbs in
Azuma’s articles. In contrast, authority of Xia’s article is from literature
review, model description and “order space segmentation sensitivity analysis”. It
means Xia utilize previous research and verification of models to support
his/her article. In an objective angle, Xia’s authority is stronger than
Azuma’s because of the background study, literature review and findings in
Xia’s article.
-Argument:
Azuma illustrates his/her argument in a linear way. That is,
to illustrate them like chatting with friends. Several important views are
provided, for example “Graduate school is a different ball game”, “tenacity”
and” flexibility” to be subtitles in different sections. Experiences,
observations and personal aspects are the resource of his/her argument. What is
more, Azuma’s argument is fluent and easy to read but not well-organized as
academic articles (of course there’s no necessity that way). Until the final
page, readers know all of Azuma’s perspectives. On contrary, Xia’s argument is
based on clear resource, literature review. He/she also utilizes models to make
assumptions and do analysis to support his/her argument. Xia’s article put
abstract first, then introduction, literature review, model, analysis and make
conclusions at last. Readers know “result” of the research from the beginning
and the end of the article.
To sum up, Azuma’s article is direct, informal and easy to
read for public. Xia’s article is formal, academic, mainly for research
purpose.
