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Bawarshi, Anis. Amy J. Devitt, and Mary Jo Reiff. In Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities.College of English 65.5 (2003): 541-558. Print.
In Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities Amy J. Devitt, Anis Bawarshi, and Mary Jo Reiff are discussing discourse communities in situations that people of all types of backgrounds can relate to. The articles begin with an introduction which provides the reader with an overview of what a discourse community is and the ways that the authors are going to be discussing them. Devitt opens the discussions with her article. She speaks of discourse communities in the terms of the law. Her example includes specific terms that to most of the population would mean something different than in the language of law. Being part of a discourse community means you fully understand the language of said community. When people that are not part of the community try to make decisions within the community, such as a jury, a challenge is faced when explaining to the people exactly what the words mean in the context of the law. Bawarshi provided The second example of a genre. She discusses the patient medical history form, a simple form that every patient fills in during their visit to a hospital. The discourse in this form however proves to cause the doctors to treat the patients as nothing more than the illnesses that the people have. This form is a genre in itself. It provides insight to the specialists that are part of the discourse community that an outsider wouldn’t understand. Last but not least Reiff speaks of genres in pedagogy. He explains some of the more effective approaches to teaching what a genre is, and helping the students identify a genre. |
February
1, 2013 Discourse communities as described by Swales have to meet certain guidelines that make them discourse communities one of the guidelines he describes is genres. He requires that any discourse community have a genre or more than one genre within itself. In Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities we learn through examples that genres are much more than a fiction book or a love story. A genre can be anything from a briefcase to a voting ballot. They have the characteristics of a genre because they require some level of expertise in the subject and they cause action. For example in the discourse community of the people in charge of counting the ballots let’s say for a presidential election there has to be some sort of common ground. The genre of the ballot means that the people that are dealing with it will know how to interpret it. For example someone with a trained eye might know the difference between a valid ballot and one that needs to be void as used in the example by Devitt. In the community that I hope to someday be a part of Public Relations, one the genres that we use are media articles. Public relations specialists have to write to big time editing companies in order to get their company the publicity that it requires. The way they write the first draft of a media article is not meant for a general public but more so for a trained eye that knows exactly how to look for what the person want and then they have to translate the article into what the general public will actually take a part of. |