the importance of evidence

I feel that evidence is everything in an argument.  If there is no evidence to support your claim, nobody will really acknowledge it is relevant or believe you.  It is interesting how much evidence is needed to sway an audience towards a certain argument has changed over the years.  Back in history, people would answer to and believe anything a higher power like a king, pope, or the majority of the population thought.  The higher powers would base their arguments on their personal opinions.   A king could sentence a person to death by saying they were a traitor as evidence and the public would accept this, even though the person was a respected member of society.  With no evidence shown to them that the person was a traitor, they would still show up to the gallows and cheer for their death.  Another thing that comes to mind is how Hitler in WWII persuaded his entire army to eliminate the entire Jewish population.  His evidence was that they were an inferior race and millions were killed because of this.  The entire army accepted this with little evidence and all on the basis of their leader believing it.  Today in modern society, it takes a lot more evidence to persuade an audience.  Everyone has to prove their stance with a certain amount of credible evidence for anyone to even listen to it.  Our judicial system is based on how much evidence it takes for a person to be guilty.  There is firsthand and secondhand evidence that help any argument prove to be more credible.  Observation, interviews, personal experience, experiments are a great way to provide evidence but since they are performed by an individual, the words or results can be skewed towards their opinion.  I think this is demonstrated in the advertising of products since every product shows results in graphs that make it seem the best.

Academic Prose

The excerpt entitled “Dancing With Professors: The Trouble With Academic Prose” proved to be a very interesting and controversial article to me.  As I read through it, I was a little confused at it.  I am not really sure I can agree that every university professor is a “shy, timid and fearful people”  who are trying to hide behind their writing.  In my experience in college at Arizona State University, I have definitely had some amazing teachers in all subjects who I have been completely able to understand any of the assigned readings.  Many of them have been interesting and supplemented what we were learning in class.  I never have really seen a huge problem with any assigned readings.  Although most of what I have been exposed to seems normal and understandable, periodicals is where everything goes wrong.  I can definitely see where the author of this article is coming from when it applies to the type of writing that goes into academic articles.  My only objection is that not all of these academic articles are necessarily professors which the author mostly relates to. 

My confusion starts whenever I am supposed to find multiple academic articles to support my research or claim in different projects.  The only times I have ran into this are in my Biology and Composition classes.  First of all, it is even hard for me to find articles that relate to my research or claim.  When I finally find ones that have something to do with my subject, I can barely even read what they are saying.  I especially notice this in science academic articles.  They are filled with confusing language, and random statistic terms that barley make sense to me.  Sometimes I think these articles are only meant for scientists directing their work at other scientists who have learned to understand this language through years of reading and practicing this type of writing.  Since I am a Biology Pre-Med major, I know I am going to have to become very familiar with these and that sort of scares me.  I wonder if I will reduce myself to writing in the dull sort of way academic articles are written.