Mohammad Alhelabi ENGH-121.

AC3 Academic Language Analysis Draft 1 Thursday, December 12th, 2013 Analysis of Siani Pearsons Academic Paper Every academic writing paper has a goal of getting a point across to the audience whether the point was about a new discovery, a new concept or even a new solution to an argument. Academic writing papers are usually divided into two categories, which are scientific papers and humanities papers and even though they might seem alike each paper has a different purpose, structure, field, and use of language. The purpose of a scientific paper is mainly to find to solutions to an inquiry that is based on a made up hypothesis to see whether it fails or succeeds and is mostly supported by evidence such as an experiment, an observation, and/or a survey. In addition scientific papers have a different structure than humanities papers which is that they are based on a hypothesis and include a results section and a conclusion section in their papers. The purpose of a humanities paper is to build on existing knowledge and to expand it by interpreting different notions and texts such as books, journals, and scholarly articles, which are all for the sake of sharing it with the reader who happens to be a seeker of knowledge in the field of humanities. Compared to scientific papers, a humanities paper has different sections and a variety of subsections which makes it easier for the reader to locate what he/she is interested in and not be put off by all the superfluous content and details. In other word this feature makes a humanities paper more accessible and comprehensible to the scholarly reader. In order for the author of an article to get his or her point across to the reader, the author has to use a specific 1

structural and linguistic format that associated with his/her field and with his or her type of academic writing paper that distinguishes him or her from the other type of academic paper whether it was humanities or scientific. A language analysis of a 2009 article from The Journal of CLOUD 09, Taking Account of Privacy When Designing Cloud Computing Services by Siani Pearson, a research scientist and a cloud computing expert at the Hewlett-Packard laboratories, demonstrates how a humanities paper relies heavily on organized structure that is based on many sections which has many subsections within them, which includes a concise Abstract that briefly summarizes what the article is about, in addition it includes a straightforward introduction that introduces the reader to the thesis and to the content of the paper which is it is necessary to design in privacy from the outset, and not just bolt on privacy mechanisms at a later stage (Pearson 44), And finally the conclusion which restates the author's thesis and recalls what has been mentioned in the content of the paper. In the thesis the author claims that it is necessary to design in privacy from the beginning and not just add it in later stages of a cloud service. Above every section there is a brief summary on what is going to be mentioned that is considered a linguistic pattern because of the combination of complex simple sentences, and the simple vocabulary that it uses. An example of that is when Pearson states, "In this section we examine the notion of privacy, types of information that might need to be protected in cloud computing and the nature of the privacy challenge in cloud computing." (Pearson 44), which is like a preview of a thesis that informs the reader of what will come up next. Pearson wrote the title of the article Taking Account of Privacy when Designing Cloud Computing Services to give the reader a clue of what the thesis of the article will be and what will the article be about. Pearson also wrote the introduction to clarify some of the issues of 2

privacy in public cloud services through some evidences. Pearson explains, As cloud services process users data on machines that the users do not own or operate, this introduces privacy issues and can lessen users control. (Pearson 44), as explained cloud service process the users data which makes them vulnerable and defenseless against hackers which is exactly what happened in 2007 the cloud service provider Salesforce.com sent a letter to a million subscribers describing how customer emails and addresses had been stolen by cybercriminals (Pearson 44). The author uses (33) simple sentences compared to (21) complex sentences because simple sentences are used to express the authors though concisely and it easily gets the point across to the reader, but the author uses complex sentences to explain something in depth and to provide details and evidences in his paragraphs. The author only used one quote so that his piece of writing does not get filled up with quotes and interpretations which might bore the reader. Pearson mostly uses neutral verbs in her research paper in which it helps the reader learn that the author is unbiased. Pearson use many adverbs throughout her academic paper such as unless, only, and if and many more which help introduces complex sentences, but it seems that Pearson was not careful enough when she was proof checking her article in which I have noticed a spelling error or a typo that I could not help but notice, Pearson states, Personal information must be collected directly from the person unlesss there are very good reasons why this is not possible.(Pearson 2009 p.47). Pearson misspelled the adverb unless in the academic article that she had published which I could not overlook. Pearson successfully reintroduces the thesis at the conclusion section of the article in which she states, We have argued that it is very important to take privacy into account when designing cloud services, if these involve the collection, processing or sharing of personal data.

Privacy should be built into every stage of the product development process: it is not adequate to try to bolt on privacy at a late stage in the design process. (Pearson 2009 p.51). All for the purpose of reminding the readers of the thesis and what had been discussed in the academic article. Finally we have discussed linguistic patterns, academic stone, and academic structure of the paper and how the author, Siani Pearson, had used them in her article and how they differ in humanities and scientific writings.

References Pearson, S., HP Labs, B. (2009). Taking Account of Privacy when Designing Cloud Computing Services. The Journal of CLOUD 09.