Devitt

Devitt:

Before you read: List of ways I communicate during the day:  Conversations in person, Texting, Phone calls, Emails, Facebook posts and chat, Skype, Written letters, Blogging for english, reading books, reading the post.

Summary: Devitt's essay is about how genres impact a discourse community. She talks about how the people within the discourse community who know how the groups work are the ones that make up the genres. This makes it difficult for the people outside of the discourse community to understand the language. Devitt uses the example of the jury instructions, to the lawyers and judge in the court room understand the language used to instruct a jury because they are the once that make them up, and are used to the lingo, for a jury member understanding what exactly is being asked of them may be difficult because the language is complicated.

Synthesis: This can be related to Swales because he talks about how people can be in different discourse communities, and can go in and out of discourse communities. Devitt is talking about how genres can be in many communities, but it is the experts in the community that make up the genre. This could connect to Glenn in the since that some of the stuff Glenn talked about was hard to understand as a reader because I am not a part of that discourse community. Lastly this could relate to porters intertextuality.

Response	Quotation
with the up coming effection in a week, it would be important that voters go to the polls informed and know how to read the ballot, with many 18 year olds their first time voting ( like myself) it is something that should be talked about or read about.	"To have our votes count as we learned in the united states so vividly so recently, we must not only feel informed enough to be willing to walk into the voting booth; we must also be able to understand the ballot once we are in the booth"
This was something I had never heard of before and would not have know if I had not read this essay. This is an example of if you were not in the discourse community you wouldn't know about this restriction.	"The specialist know that drawing a line through one candidate's name will reder that ballot invalid, while the good citizen might know only that drawling a line is a known way to register displeasure."
I noticed this last year in my highschool law class, we ran a mock trial, after closing arguments were read then the jury was read the jury instruction once, and they were expected to undersand the difference between the 3 different charges. I thought this was unfair to the defense side because I had done the closing arguments presented all the reasons the crime wasnt a crime and my client was not guilty and then the jury came back with a guilty charge on the highest offence, afterwords we asked the jury why, and they said they didnt know the different between the two levels of crime.	"The genre thus has a significance for the legal community that it does not have for the jurors. As a result juries do not and cannot interpret the genre the way the creators intended as lawyers would and cannot render verdicts that follow those instructions fully and accurately, thus resulting in significant consequences, particularly for defendants"
	"the genre of jury instructions is meant to guide jurors in following that law."
the genres used in a discourse community are the communication paths of that community.	" to claim that genres are environmental within which familiar social actions are rhetorically enacted is to understand them as language practice."

MM: I dont think this type of field work really helps exploring discourse, I think that talking with the discourse group and studying it hands on is the best way to study it.

Thoughts:  I thought this was interesting, I never realized that being outside a discourse community would be so difficult when trying to understand the language.  I could connect to the law section of this essay because of the mock trial that my law class ran in highschool.