Devitt

Before You Read

I was recently at the doctors office (heath clinic) here at OU just last week. When I was filling out medical history form I did not think much of it. I only filled it out because I was asked to, but I did understand that the form is so that the doctor knows your medical history so that he can properly diagnose you. When filling out these forms, I did not have much difficulty with the language. There were just a few medical terms I was not used to and didn't know that well. 

Summary

Amy Devitt's (Anis Bawarshi, Mary Jo Reiff) "Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities" is a collection of 3 essays about genre and communication. Devitt's essay is mainly about how genre is used in the court system with lawyers and jury members. Bawarshi's essay talks about the patient medical history form and how experience impacts the persons skills with this. The last article by Reiff talks about the genre of ethnography and genre analysis. The audience for this article can be anyone who is looking to learn more about discourse community and genre. 

Synthesis

These essays can be compared to Wardle's article on discourse community. They both talk about discourse community and also mention identity and how it affects your discourse community. The essays can also be compared to Pollan because they also talk about discourse community and it's specifics. Lastly, these essays can be compared to Gee because Gee also talks about discourse community. 

Dialectical Notebook

Response	Quotation
This quote is important because it tells us how genres affect a discourse community.	“Because genres represent their communities, they effect and make consequential the communities’ interests.” (pg. 99)
This quote is important because it explains how language plays an important part in communicating in discourse communities.	“Part of the difficulty when specialized communities write to nonspecialist users lie in technical language, a difficulty commonly recognized and often addressed through defining key terms, but most of the difficulty comes from differences of interest and value that definitions cannot control.” (pg. 101)
This quote is important because it explains how using ethnographic research is better than studies and researching.	“The idea of genre, despite the work of scholars in literary and rhetorical studies over the last few decades, is still more often than not understood as a transparent lens or conduit for classifying texts.” (pg. 104)
This quote gives us a good idea of how ethnographical research works.	“Ethnographic observation of a community that foregrounds genre analysis allows researchers to explore more fully the complexity of the group’s social roles and actions, actions that constitute the community’s repeated rhetorical strategies, or genres.” (pg. 107)
I like this quote because it tells how using ethnographic research is good for students and how it helps them.	“When students carry out ethnographies, they become researchers who are also active social figures participating in and observing how people integrate their language genres with their wider collective purposes.” (pg. 109)

MM

I believe that the best route to understanding discourse communities occurs through ethnography because you get hands on experience and research. Through ethnographic fieldwork, you get to actually study and observe your discourse community instead of just looking things up and learning. Through ethnographic fieldwork, you learn through watching and observing which is more helpful when studying a discourse community. 

Thoughts

I liked these essays especially because they talked about the topic of ethnography. I am currently taking a media theory class where we are also studying and conducting ethnographic research. I also liked how this article was split up into 3 different articles. It made things more interesting and easier to read.