Piper Harris

De Piero
Writing 2
13 March 2016
WP2 Reverse Outline
Paragraph
Have you ever thought about what a large influence social
media has in your life? Whether it be keeping in touch with
your family on the other side of the country or sharing
what you had for lunch with your Facebook friends,
millions of people look to social media as an outlet for
spreading information and making connections. However,
people have very different opinions regarding social media
and its impact on the world. To investigate these matters, I
analyzed three different articles that all take various
positions regarding social medias influence on society
The Impact of Social Media on Personal and Professional
Lives: An Alderian Perspective by Jesse Fleck and Leigh
Johnson-Migalski (will be referred to as An Alderian
Perspective), Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social
Media by Emilio Ferrara and Zeyao Yang, and Social
Media is Making You Stupid from Time Magazine. To
identify some differences between scholarly and nonacademic sources, I analyze the three different articles
perspectives on social media, their different use of moves
to present data, whether it be anecdotal or actual numbers,
the role the audiences play on moves, like prompting the
use of formal language, and how an academic audience
appeals more to facts and logic, while a non-academic
audience responds better to persuasive and entertaining
language.

Main Point
Thesis: To identify some
differences between scholarly
and non-academic sources, I
analyze the three different
articles perspectives on social
media, their different use of
moves to present data, whether it
be anecdotal or actual numbers,
the role the audiences play on
moves, like prompting the use of
formal language, and how an
academic audience appeals more
to facts and logic, while a nonacademic audience responds
better to persuasive and
entertaining language.

The first scholarly article An Alderian Perspective is one

from the Psychology discipline, and aims to explain the
influence of social media within the health care field; the
purpose of the article is mainly to inform people in the
health care field about the effects of social media, so they
can understand the impact it may have on their
relationships with patients good or bad. The article cites
some positive influences of social media within the health
care field, such as health-care professionals using Twitter
to share wellness ideas, or how social media can educate
and reduce isolation of clients by making them feel more
connected with other people dealing with the same health

This paragraph serves to explain

how scholarly article The
Impact of Social Media on
Personal and Professional Lifes:
An Alderian Perspective is
about social medias influence
within the health care field, and
its purpose is to inform people
within the health care field about
the good and bad effects social
media can have on their
professional lives. This

issues as themselves. The article also identifies some of the

more negative aspects of social media use in the health
care field, like how it induces boundary-pushing behaviors
when patients add clinicians on social media or how social
media could risk the privacy of a clinicians professional
and personal identity (Fleck and Johnson-Migalski).
The next article I analyzed is Measuring Emotional
Contagion in Social Media by Emilio Ferrara and Zeyao
Yang, which stems from the Sociology discipline and
focuses on how the content of what people see on social
media can influence their emotions. The authors of the
article implemented their own observational study that
recorded how the emotional tone of peoples tweets were
influenced by the tweets they had previously been exposed
to. The purpose of the study is to explain how the content
produced and consumed on social media affects [readers]
emotional states and behaviors (Ferrara and Yang). To
investigate this issue, the authors reconstructed the tweets
people viewed before tweeting themselves, and looked at
how the tone of the tweets the subjects read influenced the
tone of the subjects own tweets. The experimenters
collected data such as a sentiment score, which is a
rating the experimenters give a tweet depending on if it is
positive or negative (Ferrara and Yang). The experimenters
found a correlation between people tweeting with more
negativity after reading others negative tweets, and also
between people tweeting more positively after being
exposed to more positive tweets prior. The experimenters
also discovered that people were more influenced by
reading positive tweets than negative ones (Ferrara and
Yang).

paragraph relates back to my

main point because I need to
present the background
information of the article before
I can cite evidence and make
arguments about it.
The purpose of this paragraph is
to detail the observational study
implemented in Measuring
Emotional Contagion in Social
Media to investigate how
reading tweets can influence
ones own emotion, and provide
the reader with background
information about the article,
such as what information the
authors recorded, like the
emotional tone of peoples
tweets. This paragraph adds to
my paper because by providing
information about the scientific
nature of the article, I can later in
my paper make arguments about
the moves the authors use based
on evidence and data from the
study.

The purpose of the non-academic, pop-culture

opinion article from Time Magazine titled Social Media is
Making You Stupid is to investigate how social media
could actually make people less intelligent. The article
focuses on the more negative aspects of social media,
arguing that it makes you unproductive and [supplies]
answers and insights without requiring any actual
thinking (Social). The article also mentions results from
a study published in Journal of the Royal Society
Interface that investigates the negative impact of social
media on intelligence. The study separated volunteer
subjects into five different groups, with some in constant
contact with each, and others more separate. Then, they
asked the groups to solve a few difficult questions. The

This paragraph discusses how

the non-academic article, Social
Media Is Making You Stupid, is
about how social media and
having connections with others
can actually be handicapping our
intelligence, rather then helping
it. This paragraph is included in
the article to outline the kind of
information included in the nonacademic article, so that I can
contrast it later with the
academic sources.

results of the study showed that groups with more contact

with each other provided more right answers, but only
because they were able to copy off each other. The article
uses the study to show that although social media can
provide people with more information and answers, it
prevents you from learning things yourself, hence making
you stupider (Social).
Throughout the various articles pertaining to social
media, the authors consciously make certain choices in
order to best get their message across. Boyd writes that
choosing how to express your meaning is every bit as
important as the message itself, which is really what
rhetoric is (87). Thus, the authors make use of moves
and strategies to convey their message in the most effective
way. Moves are specific choices the authors make in order
to elicit a desired response from the audience. A move can
be something like the kind of language an author uses, or
the structure of the piece.

This paragraph explains what

moves are, which are specific
choices made by the author to
make their message most
effective, and why moves are
important, such as eliciting a
desired response from the
audience. This paragraph is used
to introduce the readers to what
moves are, but I did not want to
include it as the same paragraph
as when I actually give examples
of an articles move, because the
paragraph would be too long.
In Alderian Perspective, Fleck and Johnson-Migalski
The main point of this paragraph
implement a variety of moves that relate to the type of
is that because An Alderian
evidence used. Because the evidence used in the article is
Perspective is based off of
not based off an experimentation or study, the authors
citing sources and does not
cannot assume cause and effect. Thus, the authors make
implement its own study, it must
use of a move called Hedging, which prevents
make use of moves such as
overgeneralizing by limiting something by conditions or
Hedging or summarizing
exceptions. For example, the authors claimed Sometimes, sources when backing up its
social media can be helpful for inducing a bidirectional and claims. This paragraph serves to
cooperative relationship (Fleck and Migalski). The use highlight how the different kinds
of the words sometimes and can shows that the claim
of evidence used in scholarly
can be true in some cases, but it is not making too broad of articles influences the moves that
a statement. In another move I named Summarizing
the authors makes.
Sources, the article supports its claims with textual
evidence cited from other authors, and does not use direct
quotations to support arguments, but rather combines and
summarizes the works of others, such as writing that
Reich argues that social media or Osman
documented that (Fleck and Johnson-Migalski). The
use of this move is most likely to summarize some
concepts for the readers, and make the article seem a little
less complicated for them, as opposed to using direct
quotes from what might be a complex study. Although An
Alderian Perspective and Measuring Emotional

Contagion are both scholarly articles, Measuring

Emotional Contagion is a bit more scientific, and follows
a different set of moves.
In the scholarly article Measuring Emotional Contagion,
Ferrara and Yang present a more scientific approach to
social media and make moves based more on facts and
their own evidence. In one move I call the Colored
Graphs, the authors present the data they collected in
organized, colored graphs. Since the report collected data
from different groups, the use of colors allows the reader to
easily identify which group the data being presented
belongs to. It also presents the data in an organized way,
which is more visually appealing for the reader. Also, the
authors incorporate a move called Math n Stuff, which
involves many charts and formulas, such as S(t) = S+(t)
S-(t), figures displaying the data collected, such as the
emotional ratings given to peoples tweets, or the
correlation between seeing negative tweets and tweeting
negatively after (Ferrara and Yang). The use of this move
is to present the authors findings in a professional way,
and make the overall results of the study clear to see for. If
the audience did not want to read the entire article, they
could just look at the figures and graphs to see the results.
The non-academic article Social Media is Making You
Stupid, on the other hand, is based on a study as well, but
implements quite different moves.
In the Time Magazine article, the authors include the
results of a study done to see the effects of social media on
intelligence, but they use less complex moves. In one move
called the Question and Answer, the authors prompt
questions such as How can spending more time on
Facebook or Twitter end up making us stupider? or Were
those who were more socially connected more or less
likely to figure out the right answers? (Social) and then
explicitly answers those questions in the following
sentences. This move is a creative, solid way to explicitly
show readers what is being explained and adds some
variation to the writing. This move also draws the reader
in, and makes them more interested in the piece by making
them question things.

The main point of this paragraph

is to explain how because the
authors of Measuring
Emotional Contagion
implemented their own study,
they had to employ specific
moves to present the data and
results, such as organizing it on
colored graphs or in a formula.
This article ties back to the main
point because it is showing how
this sources uses moves and
how those moves are still
different from the other
academic sources because of the
type of data used in the study.

This paragraph serves to show

how the some of the moves
made by the non-academic
article are more creative and
simple than the ones
implemented by the academic
sources, such as using the
Question and Answer move.
This supports my overall
argument because it shows how
moves to explain data/results are
used differently in non-academic
sources, such as explicitly
explaining data in questionanswer form.
The intended audience of an article has a huge impact on
The main point of this paragraph
the type of moves an author uses. As Carroll writes,
is that the audience has a large
Rhetors make all sorts of choices based on their audience influence on the types of moves
(49). The audience determines countless features of an
used by each article, as the
article, such as the format, tone, and type of language used. audience dictates what is

Thus, the audience has a big influence on the types of

moves used, as certain strategies work better with certain
audiences.

The article An Alderian Perspective, is primarily

directed towards at a scholarly audience, specifically
people involved in the health care field, as it deals with
their connection to social media; this type of audience is
expecting an article that is professional and scholarly,
therefore prompting the authors to make some moves.
Thus, the authors make use of a move I call Fancy
Phrases by including a lot complex language popular in
the health care field, such as therapeutic relationship and
health-care practitioners (Fleck and Johnson-Migalski).
This kind of language makes the writing seem more
legitimate and credible to professionals in the health-care
field, and shows that the authors are informed about the
topic. However, the authors do not assume that the
audience knows everything theyre talking about the
author make a move of defining more complex terms. For
example, not everyone in the health care field knows about
Alderian psychology, so the authors explain that
Alderians look at everyones conscious and nonconscious
motivations in the context of community feeling or social
interest (Fleck and Johnson-Migalski). This move is used
to ensure the audience can follow along with and
understand the authors argument, so that the article is most
effective.
The article Measuring Emotional Contagion in
Social Media is aimed towards an even more scholarly
audience, with readers presumably from the sociology or
science discipline; this audience calls for a more formal set
of moves. The audience of this article is expecting it to be
complex and scientific, so the authors implement a move
of using professional, appropriate language, such as
phrases like manipulate the exposure to arbitrary
emotions (Ferrera and Yang). The use of this move shows
the audience that the article is factual and credible, because
only authors who know about the subject would be able to
write about such complex things. However, it should be
noted that most complex concepts or definitions are not
explained, which infers that the authors assume the reader

appropriate for a given situation.

I felt this paragraph adds to my
main point because it explains
how important audience is, and
how the author bases many
choices off of what s expected
by the audience.
This paragraph is about how the
authors of An Alderian
Perspective were driven to
make many moves and choices
specifically based upon what is
best for the audience and meets
their expectations, such as
building up the articles
credibility and explaining certain
terms so the audience
understands the argument. This
paragraph ties back to my main
point because it demonstrates
how the authors are led to make
many moves based upon the
audience they are addressing.

This paragraph highlights how

an even more scholarly
audience, such as the one
addressed in Measuring
Emotional Contagion can
prompt an even more formal set
of moves, such as using
extremely complex language that
is not explained, or having
explicitly labeled sections. This
paragraph supports the main
point of my argument by
providing an example of how the
audience causes the use of many

already knows about the given subject another move on

the authors part. This is because the people who would
typically be reading such an article are usually very
educated in that discipline. The audience is also expecting
an organized, strictly structured article, as that is typical of
a scientific academic publication. Therefore, the authors
implement a move I call Strict Sections, which is
labeling sections extremely explicitly, such as
Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, and
such. Social Media Makes You Stupid, on the other
hand, has a much less academic audience, and a lot more
freedom with its moves.
Times Magazine typically aims their publications at people
who want to be informed about world issues, but also
entertained; a mass variety of people read their works,
prompting a completely different set of more casual moves
than the previous two scholarly articles, as those were
aimed at scholars. The audience is expecting something
straightforward, simple, and easy to comprehend.
Therefore, the authors make a move of not using any
complex or technical language that an everyday reader
would not be able to understand the authors explain
everything extremely clearly, such as writing If you look
at things on the group level, there is reason for cheer and
But for individuals, the implications are less positive
(Social). The audience also wants to read something
entertaining, influencing the authors to use the move
Kiddy Talk which is when the authors use childish,
playful language such as downright dumb and
copycats (Social). This move keeps the reader
interested in the article by using fun, unusual language.
The authors also keep the audience hooked by using
writing that takes on a casual, conversational tone, with
phrases such as Nope, they were just stealing (Social).
The use of this move makes the writing feel more personal,
and gets readers more interested in the article. It gives it
more of a fun, relaxed tone, rather than a strictly
informative one, which is more appealing to a nonacademic audience.

moves, because the authors have

to meet their expectations.

This paragraph is about how the

more relaxed/casual nature of the
Time Magazine audience allows
the authors to use much more
casual moves, such as a
conversational tone, or
extremely informal language,
and how these moves appeal to
the audience. This paragraph
strengthens my main point
because it highlights one of the
key differences between nonacademic and academic sources,
which is the audience, and also
shows how the audience of the
non-academic article allows the
authors to use more fun moves
that entertain the audience more.

What are some differences between an academic

and non-academic article? To begin, one of the biggest
differences between a scholarly and non-academic article
are the constraints, which are the things that have the
power to constrain decision and action needed to modify
the exigence (Carroll 49). In an academic publication, the
authors are extremely constrained in that they must use
formal, professional language, such as the technical words
emotional valence and negative polarities used in
Measuring Emotional Contagion. The academic
publications are aimed at professionals, who expect this
kind of language. On the other hand, a non-academic
publication is much, much less constrained with their
language, and can take on a casual and conversational tone,
such as the one exhibited in the article from Time
Magazine. This allows non-academic sources to use more
entertaining and persuasive language, unlike the strictly
professional language academic sources must use.
Another key difference between academic and nonacademic articles is the use of logos, which is defined as
argument from reason, and it usually appeals to an
audiences intellectual side (Carroll 52). Since the
scholarly publications are about presenting facts and
evidence, and are aimed at highly educated professionals,
they must make use of logos to keep their work credible.
They follow a strict format and structure, they are based
off of research and evidence, and they make references to
many other works to support their argument. This is to
appeal to the professional audience, which will only be
persuaded by facts and evidence not superficial factors.
Although the article from the Time Magazine does include
some information from a study, a non-academic article
does not need to utilize research from other people, can be
opinion based, and can persuade people with things other
than the facts, such as humor. This kind of language
appeals a lot more to a non-academic audience, which is
why it is used in such an article.
The effectiveness of both academic and nonacademic articles depends on the audience that they
addressing. As Carroll writes, the audience can determine
the type of language used, the formality of discourse, the
medium or delivery of the rhetoric, and even the types of
reasons used to make the rhetors argument (Carroll 49).
The scholarly articles are aimed at a more academic

This paragraphs main point is

that one of the largest differences
between academic and nonacademic sources are the
constraints; academic sources
must abide by many more
constraints, and have a lot less
freedom than the non-academic
sources. It also touches base on
how a non-academic source can
use its lack of constraints to
better persuade the audience.
This article ties back to my main
point because a large part of my
thesis is about identifying some
differences between nonacademic and academic sources,
and also how that can change
their effectiveness.
The paragraph demonstrates
another important difference
between an academic and nonacademic source, which is their
use of logos, and how that
effects the persuasiveness of the
article on the audience. This
relates back to my main point
because again, it shows how
academic and non-academic
sources use data and studies
differently, and how this appeals
to different audiences.

The main point of this paragraph

is to show how the different
sources appeal to entirely
different audiences based on the
type of evidence used, and also
how the effectiveness of the
message depends entirely on the

audience, and must be factual and professional. People that

are well educated or are in the scientific community might
prefer these types of articles over ones like the Time
Magazine article, as the scholarly articles provide more
data, analysis, and evidence. On the other hand, nonacademic pieces can sometimes be more effective than
scholarly pieces because non-academic pieces have much
more freedom they are allowed to be subjective and use
persuasive language. This type of rhetoric might appeal
more to people who know less about the matter, and are
more persuaded by superficial factors of the article rather
than just facts, like the scholarly articles. Scholarly pieces
are simply stating information rather than trying to lure
people in. However, some people might take a nonacademic article less seriously because of its lack of
formality and actual evidence, and might find a scholarly
article more persuasive because it is unbiased and just
provides information.

audience. For example, the

scholarly articles appeal more to
an an academic audience, as they
are more persuaded by logos and
facts. This article supports the
overall argument of my paper by
showing that how effective an
article is depends on the
audience it is addressing and the
moves employed to persuade
that audience.

This part of the Portfolio was the most frustrating for me, as I simply couldnt figure out how I
wanted to structure my essay. Every time I tried to do a reverse outline of my essay, I realized
that it just didnt flow quite right. I made huge structural changes, and rewrote a lot of my work.
The first change I made was first summarizing each article in its own paragraph, as opposed to
providing background info and rhetorical moves into one, huge paragraph, which is what I had
done in my original paper. I also restructured my paper to make it focus more on moves by
mentioning them earlier on in my paper. In my original paper, moves werent mentioned until the
4th or 5th page, so doing the reverse outline showed me that moves needed to be a more important
part of my paper. The reverse outline helped me keep moves a central focus of my paper by
forcing me to make sure that each paragraph essentially tied back to them. I had to think about
why each paragraph strengthened my paper, and if I couldnt think of a good reason, I had to go
back and fix it. This activity forced me to do a lot of revising, but I think it worked out in the
end.