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Keventon Davis Professor Wolcott ENC 1102 MWF 12:30 1:30 20 September 2013 Genre Analysis: Final Draft According to Amy Devitt, genre is the response to a rhetorical situation in a discourse community. Which means a situation must have occurred enough times to have a specific way to respond to it every time. Bawarshi stated that a discourse community is built on the premise that what we know and do is connected to the language we use. With the use of genre analysis we can begin to recognize how "lived textualities" interact with and transform "lived experiences." The writers of journal Neurology uses a specific genre in their articles to show the way they interact with each other throughout their discourse community. I will be analyzing the use of genre within three Neurology articles. A common similarity between all three Neurology articles is the way they all use the same color text. The use of black ink shows a sign of professionalism and lack of flexibility. All three article use the same green ink for their subheadings throughout their articles. Each article uses these sub-heading to divide the article into sections. For example, in Clardys article Emerging Subspecialties in Neurology: Neuroimmunology, she separates her article into five sections: Training Opportunities in Neuroimmunology, Career Prospects in Neuroimmunology, Acknowledgement, Disclosure, and References. Each of these subheadings serve a specific purpose by creating organization within the article. These subheadings allow Clardy to group the relevant information in her article accordingly. The other two articles follow this same set up, but

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not to the full extent. They all include the acknowledgement, disclosure and references sections in their articles as well, and are placed in the articles in the same order. This shows that the neurology discourse community strongly upholds uniformity within their community. Since these are articles were written by experts in their field, there will be a great amount of appealing to ethos and logos, but not pathos. This goes for most academic discourse communities. Its customary for academic articles to not appeal to pathos. They should not be conveying their emotions about what they accomplished or what they discovered. The outline of the neurology discourse communitys genre does not give them much room to express their emotions. To be accepted and respected in this discourse community, an authors main reason for writing their article is to usually present the newest or revised information on a particular subject to us without any bias. In this case, the Neurology articles are written to tell us what is happing in the field of neurology. The authors of these articles use the people in their reference section to build their credibility. The use of this reference section seen below from Emerging Subspecialties: Neuroinformatics is to provide credibility for the author. This helps to prove that the information that the author is displaying is accurate and that it can be proved. As well as confirming the authors credibility, it increase the credibility of the references themselves.
REFERENCES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Wood H. A rapid e-volution. Nat Rev Neurol 2011;7:415. Crasto CJ, Koslow SH. Neuroinformatics (Methods in Molecular Biology). Totowa, NJ: Humana Press Inc; 2007. Koslow SH, Subramaniam S. Databasing the Brain: From Data to Knowledge (Neuroinformatics). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley;2005. Koslow SH. Discovery and integrative neuroscience. Clin EEG Neurosci 2005;36:5563. Bjaalie JG, Grillner S. Global Neuroinformatics: The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility. J Neurosci 2007;27:36133615. Morse TM. Neuroinformatics: from bioinformatics to databasing the brain. Bioinform Biol Insights 2008;2:253264. French L, Pavlidis P. Informatics in neuroscience. Brief Bioinform 2007;8:446456. Hemphill JC, Andrews P, De Georgia M, Medscape. Multimodal monitoring and neurocritical care bioinformatics. Nat Rev Neurol 2011;7:451460. Frisoni GB, Redolfi A, Manset D, Rousseau ME, Toga A, Evans AC. Virtual imaging laboratories for marker discovery in neurodegenerative diseases. Nat Rev Neurol 2011;7: 429438.

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All of these articles provide information in the form of a table. The use of tables in these

articles is to group information that is not directly relevant with the rest of the article, but felt like it needed to be mentioned. In Emerging Subspecialties: Neuroinformatics (the table shown above) displays a list of ongoing projects and resources for Neuroinformatics research. This table also helps the author appeal to ethos because it shows that the author did research on the topic they are writing about. With all these similarities there are a few differences between the articles. For instance, with Teleneurology Application there are two different font sizes. The abstract of the article has a specific font while the rest of the article has the same font style as the other two articles. This was probably done so readers are not mislead on what part of the article is the abstract. There must have been a situation along those lines that they felt that the need to change the font to show the difference between the abstract from the rest of the article. This same article

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provides a detailed glossary providing a definition for some of the medical terminology. For terms such as eConsultation, hub-and-spoke system, and telemedicine. Since this is not every day language for most people, the neurology discourse community probably realized that a glossary would be beneficial for it nonmembers so they can really understand and even learn some of the common terminology used in this field. These articles were not too difficult to find and they are free. This tells us that this discourse community is open community. Meaning that if you are interested in neurology this a discourse community that is somewhat easy to join. These documents easy enough to read if you have some type of background using medical jargon. I also noticed that these article were written by well-established doctors within their field of study. Meaning that there must be some type of a hierarchy to who is allowed to write and publish articles within this discourse community. A person like myself would not be able to write and publish an article until I work my way up the ladder through some type of apprenticeship in the community. Since this is an online article you must have internet to be a part of this community. This provides a barrier people have to pass to be apart of this community. The barrier that excludes some people is internet because not every has access to the internet.

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Works Cited Clardy, Stacey L. Emerging Subspecialties in Neurology: Neuroimmunology. Neurology 80(7) (2012): 670-676. Medline. Web. 20 Sept. 2013. Hannawi, Yousef MD; and Smirnakes, Stelios M. PhD. Emerging Subspecialties: Neuroinformatics. Neurology 80 (2013): 166-168. Medline. Web. 20 Sept. 2013 Wechsler, Lawrence R. MD; Tsao, Jack W. MD; Levine, Steven R. MD; Swain-Eng, Rebecca J. MS; Adams, Robert J.MS,MD; Demaerschalk, Bart M. MD, MSc; Hess, David C. MD; Moro, Elena MD, PhD; Schwamm, Lee H. MD; Steffenson, Steve MD; Stern, Barney J. MD, FAAN; Zuckerman; Steven J. MD, FAAN; Bhattacharya, Pratik MD, MPH; Davis, Larry E. MD; Yurkiewicz, Ilana BS; Alphonso, Aimee L. BS. Teleneurology Applications: Report of the Telemedicine Work Group of the American Academy of Neurology. Neurology 80 (2013): 670-676. Medline Web. 20 Sept. 2013 Devitt, Amy J., Anis Bawarshi, and Mary Jo Reiff. "Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities." 65.5 (2003): 541-557. Web. 20 Sept. 2013 Swales, John M. "2.2 Speech Communities and Discourse Communities." Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge [England: Cambridge UP, 1990. 23-24. Print. 20 Sept. 2013 Devitt, A.J. Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept. College Composition and Communication, Vol. 44 1993, pgs.573-584. Print.

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