Blog #23 Response

Deviit, Amy J., Anis Bawarshi, and Mary Jo Reiff. “Materiality and Genre in the Study of

     Discourse Communities.” College English 65.5. 2003. Print.

Summary

            The article, “Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities,” has three different essays put together to emphasize how genres influence a discourse community. In the first essay, “Where Communities Collide: Exploring a Legal Genre,” author Amy J. Devitt explains how different situations, such as ballot voting and jury duty, have instructions that are not necessarily implied and how language can cause miscommunication amongst the members (specialists and nonspecialists) of the community.  In the second essay, “Using Genre to access community: The Personal Medical History Genre as ‘Form of Life,’” author Anis Bawarshi attempts to show how genre and language go hand in hand. Language use and practice differentiates one discourse community from another. In the third essay, “Accessing Communities Through the Genre of Ethnography: Exploring a Pedagogical Genre,” author Mary Jo Reiff explains how students, in a way, can complete a mini ethnographic study by looking at the genres of a community and analyzing how the community composes its goals and social behaviors.

Dialectical Notebook

In this column you RESPOND to the quotes	In this column you TYPE OUT the quote
Devitt implies that discourse communities will commonly have conflicts within it. This is similar to what Wardle warned her audience (which was students) about in the article “Identity, Authority and Learning to Write in New Work Places.” Both give examples of how conflict can arise within a discourse community. Wardle uses her research on Allen as an example, while Devitt explains how the judicial system is flawed and causes conflict (specifically, the Michael Sharp case.	“Such analysis reveals the conflicts between communities that use a genre, conflicts often invisible to analysis that looks at discourse in terms of its communities alone” (99).
Throughout her essay, Devitt gives examples like ballots, jury instructions, and tax forms and how they miscommunicate. I think that her examples are one big metaphor to explain how all discourse communities, different and alike, all have miscommunications about genres. Meaning, not everything is written out word for word; some things are just implied.	“To mark a ballot seems a simple thing, but the community of election commissioners actually brings specialist knowledge to the interpretation of those ballots – knowledge not explained in the ballot genre” (100).
Devitt is explaining how, although the need for new memebers is necessary within a discourse community, it does get difficult to communicate. New members, or as she terms them “nonspecialists,” are very unfamiliar with the key words and language that the discourse community uses. It will take them time to become specialists and be able to properly give key words and exact definition.	“Part of the difficulty when specialized communities write to nonspecialist users lies in technical language, a difficulty commonly recognized and often addressed through defining key terms…” (101).
This is Anis Bawarshi thesis in her essay “Using Genre to access community: The Personal Medical History Genre as ‘Form of Life.’” She states who her audience is and why they should listen to her ideas. She is explaining how she will go into detail about how language and genre are a useful tool for her audience to understand.	“I demonstrate how genre analysis gives access to the workings of discourse communities in a way that renders the idea of a discourse community a more tangible, helpful concept for teachers, students, and researchers” (104).
This quote can relate to two articles that we have previously read. Bawarshi’s idea is similar to Swale's idea that genre is a priority that a discourse must have in order to exist. This quote also relates to Wardle’s idea that all members must learn to acquire a genre, and pick up on the language that the discourse community has. Her example of Allen proves that language barriers can exist within a discourse community and that  if not resolved, problems will arise.	“In this example, we notice the extent to which the genre becomes the site for the exchange of language and social interaction” (106).
Although this quote is very short and brief, it actually has a big meaning. Bawarshi is trying to sum up her idea into one concluding sentence. She is saying that new members will enter a discourse community, and it will change their way of thinking and they will gain knowledge. But she is also saying that the new member has the ability to change the actually community, and be an influence on his or her fellow members.	“… individuals compose in and compose discourse communities” (106).
This statement is reinforcing Swale’s idea that a discourse community must genre and language. If it does not have this, then it doesn’t have a behavior or social aspect; therefore, it ultimately does not exist. Reiff is adding (in her next sentence) to his idea by stating that how members enter this behavior is up for debate.	“Since genres embed and enact a group’s purposes, values, and assumptions, they can illuminate a community’s discursive behaviors” (106).
Reiff is literally telling her audience what a rhetorical discourse community is made up of. She is laying out the meaning of the term for them to easily understand. “Rhetorical learning” basically means to communicate and make choices; many do not realize this, but Reiff does a nice job of laying out the facts.	“… analyzing what the rhetorical patterns reveal about a community – its purposes, its participants, and its values, beliefs and ideologies” (106).
Reiff’s statement is very comparable to Bawarshi’s statement about members composing in the DC and them composing the DC. Reiff points out that changes in genre will occur throughout a discourse community and that by teaching students this concept will give them a better understanding of how discourse communities have evolved over time.	“… they also learn to use, adapt, and possibly change a variety of genres during the different processes of inquiry” (109).