Scholarly articles

In “Cutting the 'new tattoo' for teens,” an article on self-mutilation, Dr. Larry Brown, a professor of psychiatry and human behaviour at Rhode Island Hospital and Brown Medical School in Providence, R.I., discusses some of the factors that lead people to cut. First Dr. Brown distinguishes an infrequent cutter from a frequent cutter, stating that infrequent cutters see cutting as a “sort of a passing fad, that cutting is for adolescents the new tattoo” and that frequent cutters cut themselves “when they are distressed in any way…And some of them are doing it to hurt themselves, which is very different from the infrequent cutters.” Next, Dr. Brown explains that it is difficult to determine the diagnosis that explains the behavior or self-mutilation because there is no psychiatric diagnosis. Finally, Dr. Brown lists some of the repeating characteristics of frequent cutters after examining patients such as being a female, non-white, having a history of sexual abuse, and using condoms inconsistently. He encourages clinicians to also consider “sexual risk-taking in patients who frequently self-cut in addition to the commonly considered issues of suicide and substance abuse.”

In comparing the three articles on text messaging, I noticed that the article from “Red Oxygen” seemed like it was no written by a professional. I noticed that there were many grammatical errors some of the things I read (“According to the CTIA, the US still lags behind Europe and Asia with percentage of cell phone users using text messaging”) were hard to believe. I know the article was written over two years ago so things are different now, but because the article was written so poorly I found myself questioning if this was really true. The article “Thumbspeak” from The New Yorker was informational and I also found it amusing. People argue that texting is corrupting the language but I think that using the telephone is being lazy over texting. Some people don’t use initialisms and write poorly and some do and write perfectly. When texting, people are thinking of speed so they abbreviate but that does not necessarily mean it turns into bad habits with writing or speaking of any language. The third article “Exploring the Potential Effects of Emoticons” from Information and Management was the most informational. This was more of a scholarly article, describing the development of IM and the relationship between emoticon use and the information richness, perceived usefulness, personal interaction, and enjoyment of IM.

Scholarly articles are good for getting information and facts without bias. They are good for research and experiments and they will be beneficial for Project 2.