Original:
A large part of scientific Discourse is the formatting of scientific papers. One of the “things” that Gee mentions is Practices or Activities. These practices are “socially recognized and institutionally or culturally supported endeavor(s) that usually involves sequencing or combining actions in certain specified ways” (Gee, 32). In saying this, Gee is saying that every Discourse has specific actions that occur, which help distinguish whether or not someone is in a Discourse or not. In scientific Discourse, one such practice is IMRAD, or the formatting of all scientific papers. Using IMRaD “indicates a pattern or format rather than a complete list of headings or components of research papers” (Nair & Nair, 13). Although it isn’t a defined outline, IMRAD is the format for most, if not all, scientific papers, making it a practice of the Discourse, as Gee defined it.
Revised:
A large part of scientific Discourse is the formatting of scientific papers. One of the “things” that Gee mentions is practices or activities. These practices are “socially recognized and institutionally or culturally supported endeavor(s) that usually involves sequencing or combining actions in certain specified ways” (Gee, 32). In saying this, Gee is saying that every Discourse has specific actions that occur, which help distinguish whether or not someone is in a Discourse or not. In scientific Discourse, one such practice is IMRaD, or the formatting of all scientific papers. Using IMRaD “indicates a pattern or format rather than a complete list of headings or components of research papers” (Nair & Nair, 13). Although it isn’t a defined outline, IMRaD is the format for most, if not all, scientific papers, making it a practice of the Discourse, as Gee defined it. Because IMRaD is an accepted outline for writing scientific papers, and most journals use it, it became socially recognized as the official format for published scientific papers. It has gotten to the point where most journals won’t publish articles not written in IMRaD format.
