Comparison of two articles(Azuma 1997 and Xia et al. 2008).(revised version)

After skimming two articles, it is obvious that they have a number of differences in terms of audience, tone, vocabulary……etc. Here are some reasons why.

First, in Azuma’s article, the intended audiences are not professionals but the students with no academic background, while the article written by Xia focuses on professionals. Xia probably assumes that his audiences already have some professional background such as student pursuing master degree and professor in the similar field, since there are many mathematic formula and algebras in his article. It is hard to understand the meaning of these formula and algebra if the audiences have no similar knowledge background. On the other hand, Azuma’s article seems much more readable than Xia’s, because the sentence structure in Azuma’s article is really simple and because the topic of the article, a CS graduated school survival guide, is really easier to read than “Market-based Supply Chain……Buyer’s order profiles.”

Second, in Azuma’s article, the author use a number of “I”, which is seldom used in the academic writting, to make a conversation with the audiences. The author tried to give some example, in order to make the article appealing to the audiences. In other words, the author probably not only wants the audiences feel readable while reading the article but also wants to trigger more potential reader’s interest. However, in Xia’s article, since the article is for academic purpose, the audience might not find the content is readable while reading Xia’s article. After all, students should be serious when they approaching academic research. In addition, Xia’s article seldom used “I” to make his article seems objectives. And Xia used a lot of passive voice to reach the same purpose.

Third, the vocabularies of Azuma’s article are much easier than those of Xia’s article. Xia’s article used many terminologies to make his idea accurate, while Azuma’s article used very simple vocabularies to target on the students with no professional background.

In conclusion, two authors have different intended audience, as a result of differences on two articles’ voice, tone, vocabulary……etc. However, although there are many differences between these two article, they are both well written.