PB3YAY

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.