When I first started writing my research paper, I started my introduction with a personal anecdote. It seemed fitting because we started this project with how a topic in our community affects us. My topic is related to illegal immigration in the community of Arizona. This topic affects me because I experienced a situation when I was working at a healthcare clinic. However, after review of my rough draft, the tone of the paper did not match the formality with the rest of it. It was unprofessional to discuss a personal story in terms of a research paper. This showed me how important it it to maintain tone through word choice. Tone is a crucial part of a paper in order to establish the appropriate meaning in the correct context.
This also made me think about tone in different areas of writing and how it can be misunderstood. The most prominent example of this is through social media. It is extremely difficult to portray tone when texting or typing on social media. This is because there is no voice to accommodate for the words. Therefore, the meaning can lost in translation. People have used emojis or caps lock in order to help portray tone which can be used as an indicator of how someone is saying something. However, there can still be problems of miscommunication between people through texts or conversations on social media. It is important to establish tone in a paper in order to show intended meaning to the audience.
This is a really good thought. I had the same situation in my paper where I used a personal anecdote because I thought it would help me further my argument, but after reading through it I realized that it took away from my argument because it made it more personal. I decided that I still wanted to include the anecdote and therefore inserted it as a footnote. That way it indicates to the reader that I want to say something more but it doesn't interrupt the flow of my paper, or take away from the tone.
ReplyDeleteThis is a good point of how tone is important in writing. Sometimes I write and do not understand the importance of tone in not only speaking and writing. I think the aspect of tone that people tend to overlook is how it is audience based, rather than something you just come up with. The most important way to decide what tone is best is to know your audience.
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