Bajarias 1

Avalon Bajarias

11 June 2023

Lopatko

WRIT 2

Does Being Funny Make You More Attractive?

As someone who has always been intrigued by psychology and human attraction, it felt

natural for me to choose an academic article focused on the specific traits found attractive by

other people, which in this case, is humor. However, I know how boring it can be to read through

twelve pages of scientific jargon like “Chi-square” or “exploratory principal axis factor

analysis,” seeing as that is exactly what I had to do for this assignment. If you have taken a

statistics class or frequently read research papers, then this academic article is a walk in the park.

But if you are like me and simply want to learn more about the principles of attraction without

having to navigate through all of that confusing data, then a short, simplified article is the perfect

means of learning.

I decided to write the short article “How Valuable is Laughter? A Look Into Humor in

Dating” to cater specifically to those in the dating pool or on dating apps like Tinder and

Bumble. The study that this article is based on was conducted using heterosexual, cis-gendered

individuals, so they are my main audience. Although the age range for this study is 17-49, my

translation is aimed towards those on the younger end of the spectrum because they use social

media more actively and, therefore, will be more likely to come across my chosen genre of an

Instagram advertisement. With this in mind, I planned to make an advertisement that would

appear on someone’s feed or in their story reels. I used blue and pink because they are soft

colors, aesthetically pleasing, and attention grabbing. I also included the fingers touching
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because spirituality and manifestation are very popular among the younger generation right now;

it is very relevant to romance and would pique interest in my article. For the article itself, I was

aiming for a relatively short, easy read that feels reminiscent of a quirky Buzzfeed article. My

article is geared towards people who just want to learn more about what traits other people find

attractive, with no requirement of a scientific background or knowledge of psychology. I wanted

the article to be funny as opposed to formal because it is much more enticing to a young

adult/teenager to read a funny article rather than a long, scientific-sounding one, especially if

they were previously scrolling through Instagram. I achieved this humorous tone by ending the

article with a comedic paragraph and including pictures of funny Tinder profiles.

The overall purpose of the translation was to translate the article “Humor in Romantic

Contexts: Do Men Participate and Women Evaluate?” by Christopher J. Wilbur and Lorne

Campbell into a much less dense piece that summarizes the research and provides basic

information on the importance of humor in romance. The original academic article was written

for fellow scientists who are actively studying psychology, which is proven through the heavy

scientific language and confusing data explanations. I did not want my translation to be like that

because I feel that my audience would not be engaged. That is why I chose to write my piece in

an informal way, and I tried to incorporate humor to make the article feel almost conversational.

The first step I took to translating this article was reading it as if I was the intended audience.

Karen Rosenberg in her article “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources”

writes that when reading an academic article “you are participating in a conversation” and

emphasizes the importance of “[locating] the writer and yourself in this larger conversation”

(212). Once I understood that the authors were writing to other academics and not the general

public, I was better able to grasp the purpose of the frequent scientific language and see the
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overall goal of the article. My role in this “conversation” was to be an interpreter; share the

inside information with the outside world. I have been taking science classes and writing lab

reports since my freshman year of high school, so luckily I was somewhat familiar with the

language being used and was easily able to cut out unnecessary or confusing information. As

important as the data is, I could get my point across easily without including a majority of the

data explained in the academic article. I did this by eliminating most of the data and only

including the main takeaways from each study, while also adding little remarks that will

hopefully make the reader laugh.

Although my article is significantly shorter than the academic article and does not contain

confusing data or big words, I still experienced some challenges when translating. The first

challenge I noticed was my struggle to make the piece informal. I have spent my entire academic

career writing formal essays and paragraphs, so I am very used to concise, formal writing. While

writing this translation I would often go back and reread a paragraph, only to find that it sounded

too serious and was not as casual as I wanted it to be. One way I kept track of my tone

throughout writing was by taking advice from the article “Reflective Writing and the Revision

Process: What Were You Thinking?” The article highlights the importance of an author's

intention, defining it as “a sense of audience and purpose and of what the writer wants the essay

to do” and goes even further to make a point of identifying intention as “essential to a good piece

of communicative writing” (Giles 198). I constantly thought of my overall writing goal and

repeatedly asked myself if the paragraph I had just written was achieving what I wanted it to.

The rhetoric required for this particular translation was fairly new to me, and it took me a good

while to get used to using personal pronouns or colloquial expressions in my writing, but I think

adding phrases like “drool-inducing” and “smokin’ date” in my article helped me achieve the
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casual tone I was aiming for. Similar to the previous challenge, I also struggled with including a

minimal amount of actual data and numbers in my article. The first piece I wrote ended up

having so many numbers and explanations that it almost felt no different than the original

academic article. To combat this I simply removed all the numbers from the article and avoided

explaining the data collected along the way. Instead, I only described the end findings of each

study, which I found to be a lot easier and interesting to read through.

After writing my short genre translation on this academic article, I learned that academic

writing does not always have to be formal or strictly formatted. It is extremely fun writing a

piece using “I” or including witty sentences that make the reader smile. This process has also

taught me that informal writing can be just as challenging as formal writing. Even though they

have different conventions, writing in one style when you have written in another your entire life

can be really difficult. It was challenging to make sure that my article was coming across as

casual and humorous because my default is serious writing. I am not particularly sure that I will

be writing many quirky articles in my professional career, but the struggles I faced in writing this

genre translation have helped me become a more versatile writer and I feel better prepared to

write things of a research-based nature, like proposals or theses. Being able to switch between

different genres and still communicate effectively makes me a strong problem solver and a more

desirable employee. As Kerry Dirk writes in her article “Navigating Genres,” learning how to

translate genres is highly advantageous because “it is this knowledge that helps us to recognize

and to determine appropriate responses to different situations” (259). So although I most likely

will not be writing funny articles in my professional career, the skills I have acquired through

translating an academic article into a casual, Buzzfeed-esque piece of writing will allow me to
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understand a variety of writing pieces on a deeper level. I will be able to effectively identify and

analyze rhetoric, which is essential to critical thinking and brainstorming.

Works Cited

“Couple in love silhouette during sunset - touching noses.” Depositphotos,

https://depositphotos.com/41066325/stock-photo-couple-in-love-silhouette-during.html.

Accessed 23 April 2023.

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 1, edited by

Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press, 2010, pp. 249-262.

Giles, Sandra L. “Reflective Writing and the Revision Process: What Were You Thinking?”

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 1, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel

Zemliansky, Parlor Press, 2010, pp. 191-204.

PixelsEffect. “I can’t believe we’re fighting about this again….” GettyImages,

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/cant-believe-were-fighting-about-this-again-ro

yalty-free-image/1144130467?adppopup=true. Accessed 23 April 2023.

Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.” Writing Spaces:

Readings on Writing, vol. 1, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press,

2010, pp. 210-220.

Skynesher. “Young cheerful African American couple in the living room.” iStock, 11 March

2019,

https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/young-cheerful-african-american-couple-in-the-livin

g-room-gm1135073129-301829712. Accessed 23 April 2023.

Wilbur, Christopher J., and Lorne Campbell. Humor in Romantic Contexts: Do Men Participate

and Women Evaluate? 3 February 2011. Sage Publications, SAGE Publishing,

http://psp.sagepub.com. Accessed 19 April 2023.