English 5365 Week 9/10 Blog Post

I have been struggling between two topics for my paper.

The first was a vague idea of the impact of graphics on the text. The easier production of quality graphics should cause authors to chose graphics over words more often than in the past.

The second topic revolves around the improvement in fast communication technologies resulting in more team-authored papers. For this one, I have done some research during the past week. John Hudson published a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (Vol. 10, issue 3, pp 153-158) titled "Trends in Multi-Authored Papers in Economics." In the Abstract, Hudson notes, "Several decades ago, the overwhelming majority of papers appearing in leading journals of economics had a single author. In 1950, for example, only 6 percent of the papers published in the Journal of Political Economy, and just 8 percent of the papers published in the American Economic Review, were written by more than one author. These figures have changed dramatically. By 1993, the proportion of multi-authored papers in these two journals had risen to 39.6 percent and 54.9 percent, respectively."

In a paper that I wrote in my first class, I looked at changes in the style of writing in papers published in Journal of the American Chemical Society over the last 120 years. I noticed that papers written in the early days of the journal were published by at most one or two authors. Now, I see papers written not only by multiple authors but also by authors from multiple locations. People from different countries collaborate on these works. Imagine how long it would take for authors from St. Jude's Children's Hospital in the U.S. to collaborate with authors in China in the days of paper proofs sent through the mail.

How does this impact style? I would think that it would have to impact style. Different author's within the same country write differently; how can we expect author's from different parts of the same country, let alone different countries to write the same. Yet, we expect team-authored papers to have cohesion and coherence. I believe that authors writing as a team must use a more generic style to achieve cohesion and coherence; if they do not, their papers lack this critical trait and become difficult to read.

Therefore, I will state that the increase speed and convenience of modern communication technology has led to an increase in the number of multi-authored papers with authors from different institution, which in turn should lead to a more generic style or, alternatively, to a lack of coherence and cohesion when the disparate styles are expressed.