English 320, web-based Class

Lesson for Week 5: Day 1

5:1

"When we speak of genre knowledge in disciplinary and professional cultures, we refer to knowledge that professionals need in order to communicate in disciplinary communities." Huckin and Berkenkotter

Your assignment for today was to . . .

You were to send me that list of to do's either as an email attachment or in the body of an email message. You were also to make an entry in our blog site and to begin doing research into the concepts of discourse communities, forums, and genres.

Our focus to day is on genres and forums

This lesson discusses the rhetorical concepts of genre and forum in more detail than the last. Here are a few more readings on genre, discourse communities, and forums. You can't read them all for this lesson, but you should hop in and take a look at each to get a sense of what it is about. Later, when you write your lit review for the discourse in your field paper, you can come back to these and raid them for entries in the lit review.

• Berkenkotter and Huckin on Genres
• Porter on Analyzing Forums
• Borg's brief summary of the Concept of Discourse Communities
• My brief notes on genre and forum

The next links are all .pdf files, so they may take a while to download, and they are all from research journals, so they are rather dense. However, taken together with a few of the articles linked in Lesson 4.2 they will provide most of the material you need to write a literature review on forums, discourse communities, and genres:

• List of some articles on genre and discourse communities (from JSTOR--library database)
• Artemeva, How Genres Help Introduce Engineering Students to Discipline Specific Discourse
• Brender, Writing at Riverside Health
• Kain, Contructing Genre: Threefold Typology
• Killingsworth on Discourse Communities
• Genre Repetoires by Orlikowski and Yates
• Palmeri, When Discourses Collide
• Kate Ronald on having students study professional discourse communities
• Rescuing Discourse Communities" by Clark
• Rutherford on Genre Analysis of Corporate Annual Reports
• Sacred Texts and Discourse Communities by Freed and Broadhead
• John Swales on Discourse Communities
• Swales on Genre, Part I
• Swales on Genre, Part II
• Bazerman's Shaping Written Knowledge, a book-length study of the genre of the science article
• Bakhtin on Speech Genres, Part I, Much of modern rhetorical genre theory is based on Bakhtin
• Bakhtin on Speech Genres, Part II

Key Concepts for Definition

• Forum: A forum is a place where people gather to discuss or debate something. In the ancient world, people often gathered at the city gate, which became a forum. Sometimes specific places for debate developed--the courtroom, the assembly or legislature chamber, the synagogue or church, even the theater. In the modern world people sometimes gather in electronic spaces rather than physical spaces. A chatroom would be an electronic forum.
• Medium: Medium is whatever conveys a message. Sometimes air waves carry sound, and so the air can be a medium. The telephone can be a medium. A television, email, video-conferences are all media. It should be clear that electronic spaces and electronic media can be just about the same thing. You can say that a chatroom is a forum, because people gather there to talk, but you can also say that it is an electronic medium, because the messages are carried electronically.
• Genre: A genre is a type or form of discourse. They are "typified responses to recurrent situations," according to Carolyn Miller. What that means is that in the work world the same kind of situation calling for communication comes up over and over again. As people try to address the needs of the situation in speech or writing, they find that the same kinds of things need to be said in these "recurrent" situations and that they are best said in certain ways and in a certain order. These responses then become "typified"--this is the typical way we handle this communication situation. There are rather obvious general genres like proposals, progress reports, project reports, recommendation letters, and so on. But a specialized community will develop specialized genres that meet the work demands of that community. For instance, realtors work with purchase agreements, sales contracts, mortgage agreements, whereas police work with accident or incident reports, forensic reports, and such (I don't know because I've never studied that discourse community.)
• Genre and Dynamism: Genres are dynamic rhetorical forms that are developed from actors’ responses to recurrent situations and that serve to stabilize experience and give it coherence and meaning. Genres change over time in response to their users’ needs.
• Genre and Situatedness: Our knowledge of genres is derived from and embedded in our participation in the communicative activities of daily and professional life. As such, genre knowledge is a form of “situated cognition” that continues to develop as we participate in the activities of the culture.
• Bakhtin's primary and secondary genres: Bakhtin s (1986) distinction between primary and secondary speech genres is a useful framework for helping us to distinguish between those forms of response that we use in daily communicative activities (greeting our children after school, making love, calling a colleague to ask for a favor) and those that are removed from the context activities in which primary genres are embedded (e.g. scholarly and scientific articles, written forms of organizational communication, summons, subpoenas, patents). These “secondary genres” codify activity in situations occurring over time and in distant locales). For this reason Bakhtin called the secondary speech genres “complex.” The primary speech genres, in contrast, are “simple”; it is not the formal characteristics that are foregrounded but rather the particular communicative activities in which these genres are embedded.
• Bakhtin's concept of dialogism and response: Sooner or later what is heard and actively understood will find its response in the subsequent speech or behavior of the listener. In most cases, genres of complex cultural communication are intended precisely for this kind of actively responsive understanding with delayed action.... Any utterance—from a short, single-word rejoinder in every day dialogue to the large novel or scientific treatise—has, so to speak, an absolute beginning and absolute end: its beginning is preceded by the utterance of others, and its end is followed by the responsive utterances of others.
• Genre and Form and Content: Genre knowledge embraces both form and content, including a sense of what content is appropriate to a particular purpose in a particular situation at a particular point in time.
• Kairos: rhetorical timing
• Genre and Giddens' Duality of Structure theory: In place of dualisms such as the individual and society, or subject and object, Giddens proposed a single conceptual move, the duality of structure. Through this concept Giddens argued that social life was essentially recursive: “Structure is both medium and outcome of the reproduction of practices. Structure enters simultaneously into the constitution of the agent and social practices, and ‘exists’ in the generating moments of this constitution."
• Community ownership of genres: Genre Conventions signal a discourse community’s norms, epistemology, ideology, and social ontology.
• Discourse communities: People who voluntarily join a group, like a discipline or profession, that communicates in specialized ways. The term is often associated with Swales. (see Borg for more)
• Speech communities: People sharing a given language or dialect. The term is often associated with Hymes. (see Borg for more)
• Interpretive communities: People who tend to share common interpretations of literary texts. The term is often associated with Fish. (see Borg for more)

Relevance to your writing assignment

These theoretical concepts should inform your understanding as you continue research for the discourse in your field paper. You should begin to gather information for your paper and to write sections of it. Based on your reading for today, you can write part of your introduction, the literature review, which, in this case would be a brief summary of pertinent sociological and rhetorical theory. By summarizing these theoretical concepts, you contextualize your research in a body of theory.

A lit review’s purpose is really to show what other people have said, generally, about a topic you wish to contribute to. Therefore, lit reviews usually sound like a series of summaries introduced by a general statement, something like the following:

Researchers in sociology, English, and linguistics have developed a body of theory about discourse communities. As firstname Borg says, “quotation here” (citation here). Communication within these communities takes place in different locations and through different media; that is, each discourse community has its own forums. Forums, according to James Porter, can be analyzed by . . . . (page #). Furthermore, communication within these communities tends to become typified. As people in these communities seek to respond to others in situations that have often occurred before, they find that certain structures have already been developed to fit the occasion. These, according to Carolyn Miller, are genres, or “typified responses to recurrent situations” (page #). Thomas Huckin and Carol Berkenkotter have analyzed the nature of genres within specialized discourse communities, or disciplines. They claim that, “blah, blah, blah” (page #).

An advanced paper--say a graduate paper or a professional journal article--would require and extensive literature review. You would have to not only read the material we have discussed, but you would have to read Swales, and Bakhtin, and Fish, and Giddens, and Miller, and Yates, and all the others cited in our reading, but you would also need to check the theoretical literature that has developed in recent years. Here is a portion of one of my papers that constitutes a literature review on modern approaches to genre. This lit review was part of a chapter for a book consisting of a collection of essays being pulled together by someone else. The book has never been published, so I can't send you to the full paper.

Obviously, you can't do that kind of extensive researchfor this assignment, but you should be able to write one to three paragraphs summarizing the theory in your own way and citing Borg, Berkenkotter and Huckin, Porter, and maybe one or two others. Because this material comes early in the report, it helps keep your report on task--everything is written to add to or exemplify this theory review.

Assignments

Remind yourself of the larger project, the discourse-in-your-field report, by looking at this report written by Anita Reich for this class. It is a good example of a report that investigates the discourse field constituted by the world of chamber of commerces.

Read chapters 8 and 9 in Dinner at the New Gene Cafe. Read HTW's discussion of APA documentation, pages 144-149. Write a one to three paragraph summary of the theory (about discourse communities, forums, and genres) covered in this lesson and send it to me (as a Word document). Make sure you include parenthetical page references and a list of references at the end. Follow the APA style for this paper. You should add to this summary, or literature review, as you do more reading about genre and discourse communities (links above) and the completed lit review should become a part of your finished report. See the example of a literature review I linked above for a model. A literature review is a way of "telling back" to a community of scholars what they have said about a subject. It serves the purpose of showing that you are well read in the field, that you are ready to contribute to their conversation, and to indicate where your contribution adds to the conversation. Perhaps one of the best discussions of how lit reviews work is Swale's Discussion of Introductions.

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