This document appears to be notes from a class discussing genres and discourse communities. It references concepts like enculturation, discourse communities, and genres. It also discusses an article about how genres reflect the practices and assumptions of communities. The notes suggest genres are shaped by communities but also shape how community members interact and the roles they perform. The document also includes sample discussion questions about analyzing a Patient Medical History Form genre.

1. Tuesday, 6/26

2.  Enculturation?
 Discourse Communities?
 Genres?

3. What type of genre would you say this is?
How do you know? What is it saying?
Your amorous ruling planet Venus,
turns retrograde,
puts your social life in reverse for much of the next six weeks.
The Moon's presence in your pleasure-seeking,
an invitation to indulge your senses.
Generously sharing the delights of food, nature, music
and physicality
creates a joyful experience for you
and your lucky companion.

4.  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.

5.  “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).

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

7.  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?

8. “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).

9. “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).

10. “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).

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

12.  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

13.  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