Analyzing GenresTuesday, 5/16

Write

What type of genre would you say this is? How do you know? What is it saying?

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Homework

Finish reading your first article (Devitt, Bawarshi, and Reiff). Take notes in your journal. I will be collecting this. Try to have a brief summary, along with notes.

Start looking for an article in your field. Use the library databases.

Devitt, Bawarshi, and Reiff “Genre study allows students and researchers to recognize how ‘lived

textuality’ plays a role in the lived experience of a group” (542).

“But it is when genres encompass participants beyond a narrow community that the effects of those interests become most troublesome” (543).

“Clashes of knowledge and perspective still result when specialists and nonspecialists meet, clashes that have consequences in terms of how participants interact, perform their actions, and produce certain effects in the world” (544).

“Genre study gives us specific access to the sites of language use that make up communities, in all their complexity” (549).

“genres appear to be transparent when they are understood as ways of classifying texts. But recent scholarship in genre theory has tried to dispel this view by stipulating genres to be language forms that have identifiable and changing roles in interpersonal relations and in larger collective contexts” (550).

Bawarshi, the Patient Medical History Form

“is a good way to understand something about how doctors function and how they treat us as patients” (550).

In your groups

Take a look at the sample PMHF

Then, discuss and be ready to share: What issues, ideas, suggestions does the genre address? When people use this genre, what is it that they are interacting

about? Who reads this genre? Who writes this genre? Is there more than one

type of reader and/or writer? Why is the genre used? What purposes does the genre fulfill for the

people who use it? What diction is most common? What types of words are most

frequent? Is slang used? How would you describe the writer’s voice? What values, beliefs, goals, and assumptions are revealed through the

genre’s patterns? How is the subject of the genre treated? What content is considered

important? What content (topics or details) is ignored? What actions does the genre make possible?

What Bawarshi says about the PMHF

“The fact that the genre is mainly concerned with a patient’s physical symptoms suggests that one can isolate physical symptoms and treat them with little to no reference to the patient’s state of mind and the effect that state of mind might have on these symptoms” (551).

What Bawarshi says about the PMHF

“the PMHF reflects Western notions of medicine, notions that are rhetorically naturalized and reproduced by the genre and that are in turn embodied in the way the doctor recognizes, interacts with, and treats the patient as synecdoche of his or her physical symptoms” (551).

What Bawarshi says about the PMHF

“The form is at once a patient record, a legal document, and an element in a bureaucracy, helping the doctor treat the patient and presumably protecting the doctor from potential lawsuits” (551).

So…

Analyzing genres allows us to see why individuals use language in specific settings to make specific practices possible.

Entering the conversations of your disciplines:

Use the library databases to find articles published in a journal within your discipline.

If you can’t decide on a conversation, focus on a communication issue

Your assignment

Preliminary Genre Analysis:

Find 3-5 articles using the databases Analyze how the genre reflects the

community (look at assignment sheet)

Take notes in your journal as you read

Final assignment will be in paragraph form, though you can use headings to separate content