Li

Xiaoyu Li (Michael)
Professor Roberta Wolfson
Writing 2
March 14 2016
WP1:
Review Articles and Tweets in Describing Wearables
What did one ocean say to the other ocean?
Nothing, they just waved.
As you have already recognized, the two sentences above are not normal texts, but jokes
which belong to a specific genre that makes people laugh. When the word genre appears in an
article, most people will think of different forms as its definition; however, when it comes to
writing, genres stand for several different things. According to Dirk, the author of Navigating
Genres, genres are meant to contain rhetorical strategies which bring certain reactions to the
readers (2). For example, the joke above is meant to make people laugh, and news article should
report things happening around the world. Genres are not fixed, but constantly altering according
to different purposes. Before introducing specific concept of genres, it is necessary to choose the
topic of genres, which is wearable technology for this paper. Wearable technological products are
all over the mass media, including social media, TV, websites, and radio. More and more people
are paying their attention to the rising wearable industry; as a result, people utilize different
genres to talk about wearables. The online review article of Jawbone Up 2, an activity tracker,
belongs to a unique writing genre with the purpose of providing a detailed description and
evaluation of products to readers. Twitter, as a classic example of social media, is meant to share
stories or news in a quicker way, which is used by wearable companies to attract audiences

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attention. The purposes of genres set the foundation of each genre, giving them different features
like rating score, different lengths and forms. With the purpose of providing specific description
to audiences, review articles use scores to evaluate the product followed by a detailed description
as well as pictures to present wearable products to audiences; whereas tweets from wearable
business, with the purpose of attracting audiences, use short sentence to attract audiences with
hashtag and URL to provide audiences the option of detailed information, and abbreviations to
present as much information as possible in a single 140-charecters-post.
With the purpose of introducing wearable products to the public, review articles use a
rating score to represent writers evaluation toward a product. Review articles are created to
share writers experience and evaluation of a product, so that audiences are able to know how
good or bad the product is before buying it. Some people may argue that people can find out
specs of a product on the official website; however, the trick is that companies only show the
perfect picture and benefits of the product. For example, Samsung Galaxy S7 was announced a
couple days ago. If people go to check out Samsungs official website, they will find out that S7
is a perfect phone without any defects. In reality, however, thats not always the case. Samsung
claims that S7 is water proofed, but no one knows its water-resistance level. It can be splash
proof or truly water proof like a sport watch. On the contrary of official website, review article
provides people a real hands-on experience from the writers. With this in mind, review articles
develop a unique feature of rating scores. Before each review article, there is a rating number
showing the writers score for this product. For example, in Grazianos Jawbone review article,
he gives Jawbone Up 2, a wearable band used to keep track of steps and other body movements,
an overall score of 8.1 out of 10, which is a good score compare to others. By giving a score to
every product reviewed, writers are able to provide the audiences a comparison between similar

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products. A score of 8.1 is greater than a score of 6, so that Jawbone up2 is better than those
products with a score of 6. The rating score makes it easier for readers to compare different
products, which achieves the purpose of presenting how good or bad the product is to audiences.
Furthermore, if the audience wants to know the raw score of different aspects of the product, a
list of different features and scores are also presented. Graziano, as an example, provides five
areas including design, battery life, performance, software and features. He gives Jawbone a 9
out of 10 for its performance and software, and an 8 out of 10 for its battery, design and features.
Audiences are able to know that Jawbone has a better performance but less battery life before
reading the actual writings. By providing this overall score of 8.1 and raw scores of different
areas, writers are able to tell audience that Jawbone Up 2 is overall a good product but with
disadvantages of battery life and design, which effectively achieves the purpose of introducing
audiences the writers evaluation of the product.
Tweets from wearable businesses, however, are unable to provide a specific score
because the purpose of those tweets is to attract readers rather than to evaluate products; by
posting tweets with short sentences, hashtags and URL, wearable businesses are able to attract
audiences as well as providing audiences an easier access to more information. In other words,
tweets from wearable businesses are trying to catch audiences attentions and lead them to more
detailed information by using hashtags and websites. In order to achieve the purpose of getting
attentions, short sentences are used by wearable business to catch peoples eyes. For example,
mashable, a Twitter account for wearable technology, posted Samsungs smart clothes are
wearables youd actually wear
There is no limitation for review article in terms of length, organization, and format,
which gives writers the freedom to utilize anything that is necessary, including images, tables,

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videos, and other forms, to achieve the purpose of describing and evaluating a product with more
detail. Words are powerful, but not omnipotent when describing a product. Even though readers
are able to get details of a product from writers words, it is far more efficient for them to look at
the product by themselves. In Grazianos review article, he uses pictures of the product to
support his own point in which he says that Jawbone Up 2 has a better design compared to the
older model. It is hard for the audience to understand what does it mean by a better style because
each person has different point of views. Grazinao, however, provides readers a series of pictures
so that people are able to compare the product by themselves. By combining pictures and videos
with words, Graziano is able to provide readers a comprehensive description of Jawbone Up 2.
In order to reach the goal of describing a product to audiences in a more in-depth way, review
article normally contain pictures, tables, and videos to present the visual image which cannot be
described in words.
Tweets, with the limitation of 140 characters, gives writers limited room to describe
wearable products; therefore, most tweets use abbreviations and punctuations to present the
maximum information for attracting more readers. Twitter is known for its limit of 140
characters, which is long enough for a short story yet too short for a detailed description.
Wearable companies choose not to present the detailed description of a product due to the
limitations, but at the same time, they try to shorten each words so that they can have more
information in a single post to attract people. Sometimes it is hard to delete any words from a
sentence, so the only way to minimize the characters is to replace long words with abbreviation
and punctuation. For example, Sprint La Metro posted Sun is shining in LA today!! w/Free VR
& Memory card still available at your local From this post, it is not hard to tell that the poster
is trying to post as much as he can in this single post. Several abbreviations are used in this post,

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LA is the abbreviation of Los Angels, and VR means virtue reality device. In addition to that, the
author also uses punctuations to replace words to save space. w/ is used in this post to replace
the word with, which saves two charters by doing so. The poster also uses & instead of
and to save another two characters. If the poster were to spell out ever single word, there wont
be any space for the second half of the post, which fails to reach the goal of presenting maximum
information. Some people may argue that posting two tweets can also serve the same purpose of
attracting people; however, if everything is packed in a single post, readers can finish reading it
in less than 1 minute, and they can click on the URL if they want to know more. If companies
post 2 tweets, readers are more easily to get confused by the unfinished sentence in both tweets.
In addition to that, reading two posts costs more time because readers have to go back and forth
if they need more information. By replacing words with punctuations and abbreviations, posters
are able to condense a lot of information into a single post to achieve the purpose of attracting
people.
Before setting genres, it is crucial for writers to understand the purpose of the writing,
which shapes the writing into completely different styles. Just like tweets and Up 2 review
article, they are two distinct genres with different purposes. The purpose of the review article is
to share the writers experience and evaluation of the Up 2. The purpose of tweets from wearable
business, however, is to simply draw publics attention to a product. With those two completely
different purposes, review articles develop into a long writing with different features including
rating score, pictures, and videos to present the product; whereas tweets, use short sentence to
draw peoples attention, with hashtags and URL to provide the option of more information.
Genres are different not because the writers want to stand out, but because different purposes of
genres shape different forms of certain genres. If the joke at the beginning of the paper has the

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same length as an academic paper, no one will laugh after reading it, which fails to reach its
purpose of making people laugh. It is crucial to fully understand the purpose of each writing
before writers start to write the paper, because genres are not fixed, but constantly changing
according to different purposes.

Works cited
Dirk,Kerry. Navigating Genres. Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1. Eds,
Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky. Parlor Press, 2010. 146. Web.
Graziano, Dan. Jawbone Up2 review- A Stylish band that wont fall off your wrist. Cnet.
N.d. 24, September 2015.
Mashable (@mashable). " Samsungs smart clothes are wearables youd actually wear
Sprint La Metro (@SprintLaMetro). Sun is shining in LA today!! w/Free VR & Memory
card still available at your local 10 Jan.2016,9:00a.m. Tweet.