Reverse outlining
Read 5 paragraph and answer 4 questions below:
Q1.
What do you think is the main argument, position, or conclusion of the paper? Is it stated close to the beginning, close to the end, or both?
Q2.
It will be easiest to work on this question offline and then enter your work here.
What headings would you give to each of the sections? Consider both the content of each section, and its purpose in the paper.
Write the section headings that you would choose.
Now look at each paragraph. Write the following two things for each paragraph:
the content of the paragraph (i.e., describe what’s in it); and
the purpose or role of the paragraph in its section (i.e., analyze the function of the paragraph in the section and in the overall construction of the argument).
Type (or copy and paste) your section headings and your notes about the content and function of each paragraph under each section heading – this is your reverse-engineered outline of the paper.
It should look something like this:
Section 1: Introduction (or whatever you chose to call it)
Para. 1: Briefly describes the event at Tuban and introduces the concept of gravity erosion
Para. 2:… etc.
Q3.
On the basis of your outline, do you think the paper is well organized? Have the authors developed the argument logically, with each paragraph performing its function and contributing to the conclusions, overall? Are there any major gaps?
Q4.
I have stripped the title from the paper by Xu et al. (2015). Now that you have read the paper in detail, what do you think the title should be?
Remember that the title of a scholarly paper should be informative; scholarly-sounding; not awkwardly long, nor too short; and should indicate the content and possibly even the main conclusion of the paper. The title is very important because it sets the readers’ expectations
JGE378H5 Natural HazardsWeek 10 Tutorial: Reverse Engineering an OutlineThis excerpt is modified from a paper by Xu and colleagues (2015), published as a “short communication” in the journal Natural Hazards (vol. 79:2181–2187). I will eventually provide a link to the original paper on our Quercus site.For the purpose of this reverse outlining writing exercise, I have stripped out all of the figures, graphs, and tables, as well as abstract, section headings, reference list, most of the citations, and the title, leaving nothing but the text itself. I have added a few paragraph breaks and made some very minor changes in wording to smooth out the gaps caused by removing those materials from the paper. ***Section 1Gravity erosion is the mass failure of steep slopes triggered by their own weight, in contrast to other soil erosion types that require the physical impetus of wind or water. Its forms include landslide, avalanche, earth flow, creep, and so on. Presently, serious gravity erosion occurs in nearly all areas of China, and the most severe areas are those provinces located in the west. Mass failures had resulted in approximately 1000 fatalities per year over the past 20 years in China. On May 19 and August 12, 2015, two hazardous mass failures struck Tuban and Shanyang of the Loess Plateau, respectively. The two disasters caused more than 70 fatalities and caught public attention. Thus, evaluating the behaviors and triggers of collapse disasters has significant implications for mitigating such failures. Factors that induce gravity erosion fall into the following two main categories: (a) internal factors that have decisive effects on landslides, i.e., geology, geomorphology, soil property, vegetation cover, flow distribution and fractures; and (b) external factors that trigger sudden landslides, such as rainfall, earthquake and flood. Most mass failures are triggered by slope cutting and heavy rainfall. The scale of a rain-induced failure event depends on the intensity, areal extent, position and duration of the triggering rainstorm, whereas antecedent rainfall has relatively little influence. The erosional history and the consequent morphology are also much more important, except for the trimming induced by occasional very large runoff eventsIn addition, human engineering activities have become more intensive and more influential with rapid economic development. Residents in an area might cut terraces to build their houses near a loess slope for example, which results in the instability of the side slopes and can induce landfall. Poorer communities are often located on steeper, less stable slopes, and residents in these areas can experience a higher proportion of fatalities when landslides occur. Poverty creates poor households that are unable to maintain needed protective works or to restore resources; at the same time, that natural hazards such as drought and soil loss further degrade these natural resources. As a result, an earthquakecan lead to mass failures on steep slopes. Repetitive seismic activity renders slopes unstable and more vulnerable to failures. Degree of damage depends on the intensity of the seismicity and the distancefrom the epicentre. Because gravity erosion is affected and constrained by so many factors, quantifying it is complicated and difficult to achieve. Furthermore, gravity erosion is a stochastic, non-continuous process, and it usually occurs as a combination of soil transportation with sheet flow and mass failure on steep slopes. Here, using the recent avalanche in Tuban, China as a case study, we analyze the causes of the mass failure and attempt to determine how to control the hazards that occur so widely in the rural areas of the Loess Plateau, China
Section 2 At 8:27 p.m. local time on May 19, 2015, an avalanche struck at Yimin New Village in Tuban Town, Linxian County, in northwest China’s Shanxi Province. The avalanche buried nine people by engulfing 33 houses and caused a direct economic loss of more than 1 million yuan RMB. Twenty-one hours later, the rescue teams sent by the local government had extricated all residents who had been buried in ruined rooms, although unfortunately, seven residents died. This study’s authors trekked into the site of the accident to carry out geophysical investigations on May 22, 26 and 27. We hoped to obtain additional information about the disaster and identify effective measures to control the congeneric hazards in the area.Researchers estimated that some 5000 m3of loess fell and formed an accumulation with a maximum thickness of 20 m. Field measurement showed that the maximum width and height of the failure block were 50 and 40 m, respectively. The incident was only a small-scale loss event because the failure bulk was less than 104m3, according to the standard of classification for geological disasters published by the Ministry of Land and Resources of the People’s Republic of China. Nevertheless, based on the number of dead and the financial losses, the avalanche was considered more serious, a moderate loss event. In other words, although the collapse was small in size, the death toll and financial losses were shocking. It appears that the defense capability was fragile in the area. Section 3 The event happened on the Loess Plateau of northwestern China, which is covered by loess with the presence of macropores, well-developed vertical jointing and susceptibility to water infiltration. The area is prone to avalanches and landslides, and it exhibits the greatest environmental vulnerability to human activitiesThe phenomenon of soil suddenly toppling, fragmenting, and rolling down fully separate from a sloped face is termed avalanche, fall, or collapse. Different from other types of gravity erosion, e.g., landslide or mudslide, an avalanche is completely separated from a sloped face, and the avalanche block is fragmentized and scattered on the down slope or gully after the mass failure. Avalanches occur onsteep hillsides as violent mass failures. Once released, they may move quite rapidly downhill. In this case, no distinct sliding trace was left on the failure scar, and the failure block was completely fragmentized. In conclusion, all indications suggested that the accident was a dangerous avalanche. In addition to the local steep topography, the principal factors that might have contributed to the accident include (a) high antecedent water content caused by rainfall, (b) disturbance triggered by earthquake, and (c) destabilization from human activities. An important correlation has been found between the occurrence of geological disasters and the accumulated rainfall 10 days before. Inferred from the statistical data, intraday rainfall-induced landslides accounted for 71.3% of the total of 1414 landslides in Zhejiang Province in China, and landslides related to rainfall events with duration above 10 days were below 3% of total landslides. Data from Shaanxi Province, an adjoining area on the Loess Plateau, also suggest that the influence of rainfall vanishes gr adually as evaporation increases over time, and change water content would not trigger gravity erosion after 7 days. Earthquake magnitude is also a significant variable that affects mass failure. From a worldwide set of landslides, the smallest local earthquake magnitude (ML) that was likely to cause landsliding was estimated as ML≈4.0. Nevertheless, a small earthquake, if near enough, could have been sufficient if the hill had been primed to fall. Precisely what triggered the deadly avalanche in this case remains a mystery. Little rainfall occurred in the period of 15 days before the avalanche in Linxian County, except for a rainfall event on May 10 that brought only23.7 mm of precipitation in a day. Thus, antecedent rainfalls did not play a conclusive role in the initiation of the collapse. As mentioned above, a slight vibration might have been sufficient if the
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