Officially Scholarly Articles

By Gabriella D.

Scholarly articles are difficult to read. Often, I find myself re-reading the passages of hard text for my 300-level and 400-level classes leaving me to take up as much as half the day to fully finish one scholarly article. It is a common idea that learning about things you are interested makes understanding easier, however certain proses make this task harder than it needs to be. Within the scholarly article form, it is common to see official style. Even with specific search techniques, like using keywords to narrow down my results to my interests, this article that seemingly served my interests was a hard read. Nathan K. Chan’s scholarly article published in the Political Research Quarterly showcases characteristics of official style throughout many aspects of the piece. The article attempts to understand the contradiction of how Asian Americans are the most digitally wired racial group while simultaneously also being the least politically active group online. They dive into possible theories and hypothesis, comparative analysis from pre-existing literature, and the results of their study. However, from the standpoint of an Asian American who is a junior majoring in Political Science, my interest in the article drastically decreased from the beginning to the end. The official style significantly lowered the readability score and made it a difficult read. In this piece, I want to analyze the variety of stylistic strategies the author used and its effect on the context in which the article could be used in the spheres of human activity.

First, I will show how the language used in the article can make it difficult for readers to understand. By way of the author’s sentence structure, word choice, and stylistic strategies, these official style strategies efficiently combined two thoughts into one sentence and consequently created longer sentences. Frequently, there were instances where two types of official style strategies were used in one sentence! Here is an example I found shortly after reading the short introduction on the article’s second page,

Asian Americans may turn out to vote less often because some may not have access to the ballot box but “rather than being passive objects of social forces, Asian American men and women have been pragmatic and calculating actors who have adopted a multifaceted style of politics to maximize their chances of survival and [realizing] their interests (Lien 2001, xii) (883).

There are many strategies that make this single sentence so complex. Here, the author is combining his thought with another author’s thought. Within each respective author’s thought, they each use at least one strategy to connect their ideas. So, to sum up the number of thoughts within this sentence, there are actually four complete thoughts. To be more specific, the two types of stylistic strategies used are relative clause and subordination. Towards the beginning, the author uses subordination through the word “because”. Afterwards, Chen references another author who uses relative clause through the word “who”. Using these strategies create the building blocks of official style – automatic higher readability scores due to longer sentences. I imagine I would be harder to read this article because of the probability of getting lost in who said what in any point of the article. Here, we can see that official style affected the coherency and conciseness of the article.

Next, I want to explore the implications surrounding the context of the article’s circulation, exclusivity of topics, etc. First, we must consider, can a piece be considered “official style” outside of word choice and grammar? An abundance of specific official style strategies is not necessary for a piece to be considered “official style” because exclusion is the main principle of official style. So, if exclusion is the main principle of the official style, what are the other ways a piece can reach this goal? There are many aspects to be considered that exclude groups of readers, for example, through the lack of background information on the article’s contributors, the very little circulation of the article, and the exclusive nature of the subject regarding digital modes of political behavior – a rather niche subject to begin with. To start, there is little to no information readily available surrounding who the author is, and what they do, but instead are left with no distinct information behind who wrote the article. In terms of the article’s circulation, I found this piece on a username-and-password search database unavailable to the public. It’s also important to consider its niche language. Using the concepts of “digital divide” and “pan-ethnic identity”, this terminology required a google search. For example, Chen explains how Asian Americans are less politically active due to less available political space online and offline,

The difficulty for Asian Americans, compared to other racial groups, to share a common pan-ethnic identity with one another helps explain why digital venues are far less developed for them (886).

We can see how the context of an article outside of its actual content can add to how an article can be considered official style due to its common trait of exclusion.

To conclude, the official style can make things harder than it appears to be. Personally, I was interested in understanding the nuances behind political participation as it relates to identity, however I started to become lost within the sea of official style strategies. The language created a maze of thoughts, sometimes occurring all within one sentence. In addition, the context surrounding the article itself continued to exclude parts of the public that not only may find this article hard-to-follow, but also who don’t have access to these articles. It seems that the purpose of the piece was to spread awareness through analysis, but some choices make this information difficult to understand. Therefore, the use of official style was not appropriate and negatively affected the article.

https://journals-sagepub-com.libweb.uwlax.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/1065912920945391