Response to "Materiality and Genre..."

I thought this article was great for a number of reasons, and made me consider a lot of things I don't ordinarily think about. I was underlining and starring and making notes all over the place. I also disagreed with a few things, which I like because I often don't feel like I have enough knowledge about the things I read in Practicum to disagree. One of the things I had a "problem" with was Bawarshi's piece, about the Patient Medical History Form. Bawarshi states that "the genre is mainly concerned with a patient's physical symptoms [which] 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). As someone who has filled out these forms before, I disagree that the PMHF is "mainly concerned" with one's current physical symptoms. The forms (and there are a lot of them) ask all sorts of questions and get all sorts of information, and this has never struck me as the focus. There is also no reason that patients can't list mental as well as physical symptoms. Bawarshi states that "the forms tend to discourage patients' reporting of mental or emtional circumstances," though he failed to say how or why. I'm not sure what his point is, ultimately. Is he suggesting that patients shouldn't list their symptoms prior to seeing a doctor, that this should be done away with? What is the alternative? I guess this is ultimately a little off topic, but it just seemed like he had a lot of claims in this paragraph that he provided no evidence for.

The main thing that interested me while reading this article was language, and how different communities define words differently. On page 555, Mary Jo Reiff writes, "Since the main goal of an ethnography, according to Moss, is to gain 'increased insight into the ways in which language communities work' (170), it follows that the oral and written genres of groups will play a central role in the investigation of social context..." Last week, I tutored a student in 102 who was writing her discourse community paper on the tanning salon where she is employed. I was fascinated by the language of this community. The tanning beds were given names like Bahama Baby and Paradise Island, and were categorized according to Levels. For example, all of the employees used the Level One beds, which meant they were hardcore devotees. They ran two-for-one specials called "Bogos." Even the lotions they sold (pushed?) on customers had what I would call fun-in-the-sun names. I was so fascinated. The student had worked at the tanning salon for so long that she didn't realize laypersons wouldn't know what a "bogo" was, or that "light" and "fair" did not mean the same thing. We spent much of our session talking about properly defining terms so that her audience would understand what she was talking about. Words, in general, are tricky little things. They often have so many different meanings and connotations.

Along these same lines, I found it of interest that courts define "might" as "probable." Whenever I say I "might" go somewhere, it almost always means I won't.

I really enjoyed reading Devitt's piece, "Where Communities Collide: Exploring a Legal Genre." She writes, "What I discovered is that no matter how much I elaborated, no matter how many assumptions I made explicit, I could not capture in those instructions all the information that the lawyers considered relevant to the jury's task. Clarifying for the jury's purposes clashed with adhering to legal purposes" (545). While I was reading her piece, I could not help but thinking that the instructions were purposefully misleading, that jury instructions aren't really meant to be followed exactly as the lawyers write them. And then I read that the jury is actually asked to evaluate what terms like "great" and "serious" mean but (of course) "nowhere do the instructions say that" (546). I seriously doubt that lawyers would ever want other lawyers on their juries. They don't really want people to know what's going on; it seems like the system works, in large part, due to the ignorance of laypersons.

Anyway, lots of good stuff to think about...