Your assignment is to study your future profession's discourse practices, especially as reflected in its written products. (If you are already in your profession, you may report on it.) The report will need to tell the reader something about the profession more generally to give the reader background, but the topic of the report is your profession's discourse. The word "report" is made up of "re," which means again or back, and "port," which means carry. So you are to investigate your profession--by searching for background on the web, by interviewing a professional about her or his discourse, by collecting representative documents from that profession, and by analyzing one of those documents carefully to show an example of written discourse in the field--and to "carry back" that information in the form of a report.
You should think of yourself as part of a research team that is building information about different discourse fields. Each member of the team researches discourse in a field and submits a report. If your research and report is well done, the report may be added to an archive of research reports like those below. You may also cite these reports in your report where you find them pertinent.
In order to be an active participant in this research team, you need to have enough general knowledge about the research perspective of the team. The team is working with the concepts of "discourse fileds" and "genres." These theoretical concepts help guide the team members in their research so that they are looking at the same kinds of things in different situations.
So, before you actually begin field work, you need to build a background by reading some of the basic theory. The lined readings below will give you a suitable background in the field. You don't have time to read all of the linked articles or to look up all the others available online, but you should read about a quarter of those listed below (I have bold faced those that are most easily read. You should be sure to read some about discourse communities and some about genres, and you should try to summarize each in two or three setences so that you are sure you understand them. These summaries will eventually be useful in writing the literature review, which is part of the final report.
Key Concepts for Definition
So, then, this project involves doing research into two areas: the scholarly literature on discourse communities and genres, and the discourse practices in the professional discourse community you plan to join. A discourse community is a group of people who interact with each other often, and in the case of your assignment, I'm collapsing the idea of a discourse community with your future professional community. People in different fields develop different language practices. Some use face-to-face discourse predominantly; others use the phone; others email. Some use only short, informal written documents; others use a combination of short and long documents, formal and informal. Some have developed special genres to get their own particular kind of work done. This class is a writing class, so we are particularly interested in the "textual" practices of your field. But it is appropriate talk about the way people speak and about the relationship of speaking to writing in a field to set the context for discussing textual practices. Because textual practices are important for this paper, you should be careful to collect texts, so that you can classify them into genres, and to select a promising document for rhetorical analysis.
The next step in this kind of research is to generate research questions something like the following:
A literature review’s purpose is really to show what other people have said, generally, about a topic you wish to contribute to. Therefore, lit reviews usually sound like a series of summaries introduced by a general statement, something like the following:
Here is another example of a literature that was embedded in a proposal.Researchers in sociology, English, and linguistics have developed a body of theory about discourse communities. As firstname Borg says, “quotation here” (citation here). Communication within these communities takes place in different locations and through different media; that is, each discourse community has its own forums. Forums, according to James Porter, can be analyzed by . . . . (page #). Furthermore, communication within these communities tends to become typified. As people in these communities seek to respond to others in situations that have often occurred before, they find that certain structures have already been developed to fit the occasion. These, according to Carolyn Miller, are genres, or “typified responses to recurrent situations” (page #). Thomas Huckin and Carol Berkenkotter have analyzed the nature of genres within specialized discourse communities, or disciplines. They claim that, “blah, blah, blah” (page #).
An advanced paper--say a graduate paper or a professional journal article--would require and extensive literature review. You would have to not only read the material listed above, and you would also need to check the theoretical literature that has developed in recent years. Here is a portion of one of my papers that constitutes a literature review on modern approaches to genre. This lit review was part of a chapter for a book consisting of a collection of essays being pulled together by someone else. The book has never been published, so I can't send you to the full paper.
Obviously, you can't do that kind of extensive research for this assignment, but you should be able to write one to three paragraphs summarizing the theory in your own way and citing a handful of these theorists. Perhaps one of the best discussions of how lit reviews work is Swale's Discussion of Introductions.
Qualitative Research. Having gathered some preliminary information about your field, you need to talk to people who are mature representatives of the field. The data you've collected on the web may help you generate informed questions for the interviews and questionnaires. Look at the web data as a body of artifacts that need to be interpreted by an insider. As an outsider or novice, you may construct all sorts of erroneous explanations of what the documents are, what function they serve, what situations they spring from. This outsider, or ettic, knowledge needs to be supplemented with or corrected by insider, emic, knowledge.
The first task is to find someone to interview. Remember that people are busy, and they don't have to give you time for the interview; they are doing you a favor when they agree to be interviewed. Look for experienced people who closely match your future profession. You might find them in your home academic department. You might find them by looking up companies in the yellow pages. You may have friends or family in your field.
When you contact the person you wish to interview, it is important to tell her or him what the purpose of the interview is, how long it will take, and whether or not you will be asking for supplementary information. You should also assure the interviewee that you will share the write up of the interview when you are finished. Make the interview easy for this person: offer to come to their place of work (you should expect to do this); work around their schedule; if possible give them a list of some questions prior to the interview.
When you conduct the interview, thank the person for giving you time; remind them what the purpose is, and follow a list of questions you have developed. If you want to tape the interview, ask permission to do so; otherwise, take notes. Make sure to note the time, date, and location of the interview. Get the person's name, correct spelling, title, and company affiliation. Stick to your promise about time--don't go over. At the end, thank the person and let them know when they can expect to see your write up.
Developing a list of questions is the hardest part of an interview. When you interview someone, you are assuming the position of an uninformed person approaching an authority; therefore, it is appropriate to treat the person as an expert. On the other hand, you should not expect the interviewee to guess about the kind of information you need. Based on your preliminary research, write questions that will generate information for your research report. It is a good idea to start with questions that solicit general information and then move on to specific information. Although you may have a list something like the one below; you should feel free to generate follow up questions on the spot if you find that you are getting richer information than you expected.
Interviewing is one method of "qualitative" research. We call research qualitative if its primary purpose is to get information from one person or a small number of people. The emphasis is on understanding.
Quantitative Research. Quantitative research differs from qualitative because it attempts to generate numerical data based on larger populations of people. Although you do not have to create and circulate a questionnaire for this assignment, a more extensive research project could conceivably move on to questionnaires after the interview stage. Questionnaires contain specific questions based on the information you have already generated. The information you have already should generate uncertainties about some things--how common is this practice? does everyone do this? what variations are there at this point? do different kinds of people do different things? Questionnaires are aimed at answering these questions and at trying to find out commonalities and variances. In advanced research, they are aimed at determining correlations between different points of data, a process that involves discerning patterns among the data. Take a statistics class if you want to investigate this kind of research further. If you want to play around with trying to create some quantitative information, you might try to analyze the data contained in a file of interview transcripts.
Questionaires generate more reliable information the greater the pool of people who participate in the survey. Because questionaires generate numbers and percentages, the certainty of the data increases with numbers, assuring the researcher that she didn't fall into a little ghetto of unrepresentative data. Quantitative research is not one of my areas, so I would encourage you to look around on the web for some help. I googled the phrase "quantitative research" and came to a pretty good site almost immediately. See http://www.ryerson.ca/~mjoppe/ResearchProcess/SurveyTechniques.htm if it is still up. When I googled the phrase "survey design," I came to http://www.surveysystem.com/sdesign.htm, discussion that looks pretty good to me.
Although quantitative research can lend authority to your claims in a report, it tends to look for the "middle" rather than to investigate the whole field. As a result many researchers characterize themselves as either qualitative or quantitative researchers. Now and then, you find someone who does both.
Textual Analysis. As you continue to gather information for your discourse-in-your-field report, you should move gradually to more and more specific infomation. Your search of the web to get background information is introductory and very general. Your interview, though particular in that you focused on one person, is general in that you were still trying to paint the background of discourse practices in your field. If you conduct a survey, you can add detail to this background, but you would still be painting the background. Now, however, we descend from general information to the analysis of a specific instance of discourse, or you could say that now that we have painted the background, it is time to place the object of up-close analysis in the foreground. The object of up-close analysis could be almost anything--the practices of one person, the practices of one firm, the genre that gets one kind of work done across the profession--but for the class assignment, the object for close analysis is one of the documents from the field that you collected in your portfolio. The document may be long or short, but it should be neither too long nor too short. It should be just right.The purpose of this analysis to answer the questions, "What does close analysis of one representative document, tell me about discourse in this field? What do I learn about the writer's purpose, the audience's likely reading response, the document's function in getting work done, the common topics of discussion, and the knowledge taken for granted?"
Analysis is the process of taking something apart. You might think of it as dissection. Your subject (or patient) is laid out on the operating table, anesthetized, ready for you to apply the scalpel. The kind of reading you do when you analyze is quite different from the kind of reading you do in order to gather information or to be entertained. Now you are looking for seams, for repetitions, for structure, for strategies--you are assuming the perspective of a scientist. You are not, however, assuming the role of a critic: that would be the next stage. First you read to understand; then you read to analyze; then you read to criticize. We won't be getting to the third stage in this assignment.
Rhetorical criticism is the process of analyzing a document or speech using categories developed from rhetorical theory and research. In other words, it is simply the process of putting on the spectacles of rhetoric and looking at the subject (or patient).
Rhetorical theory has been collecting insights for 2,300 years now, accumulating knowledge by fits and starts, so the ole vessel has become quite encrusted with barnacles. We can't begin to investigate the many facets of rhetorical theory for this class. We'll look only at the most general and elementary concepts, the types of persuasion that come from emotion (pathos), reason (logos), and character (ethos). Read each of these linked explanations so that you understand the terms. You can then begin to look for them in the document you are analyzing. For instance, you could look at the arguments in your document, using Toulmin's system as described in the "logos" link just above.You can also look at some of the categories Geisler talks about. Although the first few categories she talks about are more in line with the situation (date, venue, organization, author), her later categories are internal to the text (sentences and paragraphs, sections, genre components, metadiscourse). Let me just say that an analysis of sections is pretty closely related to the rhetorical concept of arrangement, the art of arranging arguments in a strategic order to affect the reader's reactions, and analyzing metadiscourse is the art of looking for the writer's signals about certainty, tone, interpretation.
Some times, it is a good idea, after conducting an analysis of the text, to conduct a discourse-based interview. As the linked discussion explains, a discourse-based interview is the process of taking comparable texts written by the same author to the author and asking questions about her decision to compose things one way in one text and another way in the second text. This kind of interview gets at the writer's sense of rhetorical appropriateness.
Finally, here are a couple examples of close textual analysis. Steve Katz analyzed the rhetoric of New Crops, New Century, New Challenges by Dan Glickman when he was Secretary of Agriculture. This link, a rhetorical analysis of David Raup's speech, is an extended rhetorical analysis of one document using more esoteric concepts derived from rhetorical theory, namely epideictic theory and its relationship to representation, legitimacy, and authority. The important thing to see about these samples of rhetorical analysis is that they describe the theoretical perspective in the lit review and then apply the theory to close textual analysis (quoting directly from the document to support the claims).
The overall pattern has already been dictated because this is an empirical research report. So you have sections that act like containers waiting for you to fill them--the introduction, the literature review, the methods, the results and discussion, and the conclusions. Nevertheless, you now need to look at this pattern more carefully and begin to fill in the details.
Look at the examples of the reports listed at the top of this page to see how others have composed their papers under the constraints of this pattern.