Scientific Genres

So far I've encountered a couple different types of scientific genres through internet research on assignments for class varying in complexity. The most interesting one was the most recent, "Transformational Technologies To Expedite Space Access And Development." by John D. G. Rather. The article was about creating new methods of sending stuff into space, but there was a lack of endless mathematical equations that one would expect from such a topic. The author decided to create the paper as a calling to stimulate space research and development. I don't really know what sort of genre the article would fall under. It was published through the American Institute of Physics so not really readily accessible to the general public and the lack of jargon put the article in a field of its own. The author put a lot of personality in the article and you can tell he's very passionate about the subject, it's unlike any article I've read before.

Another genre of scientific article I've encountered is featured in Louisiana Agriculture a quarterly magazine published by the LSU AgCenter. The article I read featured many tables and graphs of fertilizer contaminants in Louisiana's wetlands. The authors explained the graphs very well and the article was quite comprehensible even though I didn't know much about the subject. The genre of that article is for Louisiana farmers, environmentalists, and water management facilitators. I've stumbled upon the highly-technical scientific paper through online databases and they were pretty brutal. I enjoy looking at advance mathematics and pretending to understand what's going on, but unfortunately could not understand the article enough to use it as a resource.

Since I'm going into mechanical engineering, with dreams of specializing in astronautical engineering I imagine I'm going to be writing a lot of research papers about new technologies and designs for spaceflight. Also relating to what we just read in "Writing for Science" and "Accommodating Science" I imagine I'll be writing lab reports, memos to colleagues, and conveying results to a more general audience. So far I've written one abstract in my scientist career, but I have a feeling I'll get more experience before the semester is over. I've also written a few lab reports in my high school chemistry class, but that was a while ago and the teacher laid out the guidelines very specifically so it was hard to error.