Comparing the Articles Perfect Paragraph

At first glance, the overall structure of the two articles is similar in the sense that they have sections that are titled. The article written by Boomsma JJ, Timmermans H, Corvers CPM, and Kabout J. about monogamous leaf mining larvae has a clear abstract, introduction, methods, results, and discussion. Within each of those are sub-sections that are clearly titled regarding their subject. The article written by Nakagaki about the smart behavior of slime molds has an abstract that is seemingly shorter in length than the abstract in the leaf mining article. The sections to the article written by Nakagaki are not labeled with the terms introduction, methods, results, discussion but rather labeled with the information and subjects that are within the corresponding paragraphs. Both articles have two columns of writing rather than the writing being in paragraphs that span the whole page. They are both visually pleasing overall and both take on a “textbook-like” look with figures and graphs located neatly within the columns of information. The level 1 headings in the article about leaf miners are the titles introduction, methods, results, discussion which are also numbered. For example, the level 1 heading “2. Methods” has a section below it that is “2.1 Field Collections” and so on until the last section of the methods which is titled “2.3 Within Leaf Feeding Stratification.” The article about smart slime mold behavior seems to only have level 1 headings. Both articles list references for the cited information. The leaf miner article is significantly longer than the slime mold article and thus has many more references. It is obvious that both articles are scientific in nature and are examples of scientific writing; even though they show various differences. Most paragraphs in each article show a clear “what” and “why” for a first sentence. Those sentences answer what the section is going to talk about and why it is talking about it. In the results section of the leaf mining article, the beginning of the section discusses that it is talking about “A substantial variation in hostplant characters” and specifically mentioned that “Betula pu- bescens appeared to have a broad distribution in the lower scale range, whereas Betula pendula was charac- terised by a narrow peak of high.” These statements indicate that section was going to discuss substantial variation between the hostplant characters and then specified what species had a broad range and what species had a narrow peak in the data. This first paragraph of this sentence gets to the point of what the section is discussing and why it is discussing it.