Of
course, choosing just one article for PB3A was pretty tough. There were so many
topics flowing through my head that I wanted to write about. I decided to look
up ballet in Academic Search Complete and then pair that up with another issue
that came up in through the search, so I settled on ballet and gender, looked
through the given results, and chose the article titled Dancing Masculinity: Defining the Male
Image Onstage in Twentieth-Century America and Beyond by
Deborah Jowitt. The article goes
through the history of male roles in dance and how they and the views on men
have evolved since 1660’s. As someone who considers herself a ballet
enthusiast, this topic seemed especially interesting to me because not only
would I be able to provide factual evidence from the text, but also my own
knowledge and views.
The
topic is not super controversial, so I think translating this genre (a
scholarly academic publication) would be fairly easy to translate into new
different genres that are geared either towards a younger audience and an older
one. However, I know that for me, translating this into something suitable for
children will be much easier than doing so for adults. I think the reason for
that is the fact that a scholarly academic publication, in a way, is already
geared towards an older audience, although one could argue that its pointed
more towards college students and such.
As far
as turning this genre and topic into something more kid-friendly, I can see the
article turned into either an illustrated book. Illustrated books and comics
are easy for the kids to read and understand because they usually provide very
concise language that is very to the point, and the colored pictures aid in
understanding while serving as visual help. I would omit some of the details
concerning complicated terminology and just leave more of the historical
information and just stick to stuff that directly relates to the paper’s
thesis. Young girls are usually somewhat interested in dance at some point in
their lives, so they would have no problem reading the book/comic. But because
the original article deals with male
roles on the stage, I would also make sure that when young boys read this, they
would not only be interested in the topic, but also be able to walk away
knowing that dancing does not make them any less of a man.
For the
older folks, I’d turn the article into something less bland and more
interesting to read by turning it into a newspaper article. Why a newspaper
article? Because the conventions of newspaper articles usually include things
such as word count and writing style. And plus, older people tend to read
newspapers (whether they’re online or in hard copy) way more than young people
do. So if an article regarding male roles on stage appears in the paper, the
chances of it being read by older adults would be much higher than them reading
it in a peer-reviewed journal.