Summary: In the article "Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities", Amy J. Devitt, Anis Bawarshi, and Mary Jo Reiff have individual articles placed in one. Devitt's "Where Communities Collide: Exploring A Legal Genre" talks about how ballot questions, jury instructions, and tax forms are all designed to bring specialist and non-specialist communities together and how they function. They function in complex linguistic, informational, and rhetorical situations. Bawarshi's "Using Genre to Access Community: The Personal Medical History Genre as "Form of Life", talks mainly about the members of the medical community and the languages they use. She focuses on specific textual and how it helps to identify the discourse community by relating it to something we have all experienced in our lives. Finally, in Reiff's " Accessing Communities Through The Genre of Ethnography: Exploring A Pedagogical Genre", she talks about how students gain experience with genre analysis because of ethnography. She also says that students that research are more likely to become more active social figures that recognize how people merge their language genres.
Conversation: This article is like that of Swales' for the mere fact that he talks a lot about how you can identify what makes a discourse community and how it is. Each the readings contain specific information about how you can determine what makes these communities how they are.
Opinion: I really liked reading these articles because it takes different particular discourse communities and then talks more about them to the point I could relate to them. Plus, they show how each of the communities can be identified quickly as well.
Good response, Rae'ven. Your summary is quite thorough, as it captures the relevant material and main points discussed by each author.
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