“Everything Is in the Lab Book”: Multimodal Writing, Activity, and Genre Analysis of Symbolic Mediation in Medical Physics

Writing and genre scholarship has become increasingly attuned to how various nontextual features of written genres contribute to the kinds of social actions that the genres perform and to the activities that they mediate. Even though scholars have proposed different ways to account for nontextual features of genres, such attempts often remain undertheorized. By bringing together Writing, Activity, and Genre Research, and Multimodal Interaction Analysis, the authors propose a conceptual framework for multimodal activity-based analysis of genres, or Multimodal Writing, Activity, and Genre (MWAG) analysis. Furthermore, by drawing on previous studies of the laboratory notebook (lab book) genre, the article discusses the rhetorical action the genre performs and its role in mediating knowledge construction activities in science. The authors provide an illustrative example of the MWAG analysis of an emergent scientist’s lab book and discuss its contributions to his increasing participation in medical physics. The study contributes to the development of a theoretically informed analytical framework for integrative multimodal and rhetorical genre analysis, while illustrating how the proposed framework can lead to the insights into the sociorhetorical roles multimodal genres play in mediating such activities as knowledge construction and disciplinary enculturation.

Generationsanklager – konflikt, følelser og ungdomsaktivisme

Compared to rhetorical defenses the rhetoric of accusations has not garnered much attention from rhetorical critics over time. Two common threads in existing approaches to accusatory rhetoric are a link to an underlying affirmative motive and a view of accusations as a rhetorical genre. However, these threads have not been fully developed so far. This article takes its point of departure in Carolyn Millers rhetorical theory of genre and Celeste Michelle Condit’s work with angry public rhetorics in order to reveal the social motive of the accusatory genre. The argument here is that the main motive can be found in a desire for corrective action, but is further supported by a definitory and moral motive. This is then used as a basis for treating generational accusations as a specific form of accusation as well as analyzing it in relation to Greta Thunberg’s rhetorical accusations of older generations in the climate change debate

Embodied Genres, Typified Performances, and the Engineering Design Process

Using rhetorical genre theory, the authors theorize the engineering design process as a type of embodied genre enacted through typified performances of bodies engaged with discourses, texts, and objects in genre-rich spaces of design activity. The authors illustrate this through an analysis of ethnographic data from an engineering design course to show how a genred repertoire of embodied routines is demonstrated for students and later taken up as part of their design work. A greater appreciation of the interconnection between genre and design as well as the role of typification in producing embodied genres can potentially transform how writing studies conceive of and teach both design processes and genres in technical and professional communication settings.

A Rhetorical Genre(?)

The chapter is a case study of Byzantine learned rhetoric in action, and some of the complications that one faces when one applies the concept of “genre” to Byzantine rhetoric. The test case is the invective, in Greek ψόγος, from the perspective of Byzantine rhetorical education and practice. After a series of general observations on rhetorical definitions of the “invective,” as well as on the fact that the invective resembles more a rhetorical “mode,” which is present in a variety of “genres,” than a “genre” per se, the chapter reviews a few representative related texts from the middle and late Byzantine period.

Evaluating animentary’s potential as a rhetorical genre

Multimodality scholarship has hitherto mainly focused on the combination of static visuals and written language (see Bateman et al., Multimodality: Foundations, Research and Analysis -- A Problem-Oriented Introduction, 2017; Tseronis and Forceville, Multimodal Argumentation and Rhetoric in Media Genres, 2017; and Forceville, ‘Multimodality’, in press, for discussion and bibliographies). However, drawing on visuals, written language, spoken language, music and sound, film is a multimodal medium par excellence. In this article, the authors specifically focus on documentary film. Documentary can be considered to be the cinematic equivalent of audiovisual rhetorical discourse, aiming to persuade its envisaged audience of something. Obviously, it is crucial for the credibility of documentaries that they are seen as indexically rooted in reality. But, recently, documentary film has witnessed the flourishing of a subgenre that may seem to challenge this indexicality: the ‘animentary’ – a documentary that consists to a considerable extent of animated images. While the completely constructed nature of animation means that animentaries’ indexical relation between audiovisual representation and represented world is loosened, or even absent, animentaries also – and importantly – enable perspectives on reality that live-action documentary cannot. This article analyses how the visual, verbal, sonic and musical modes function rhetorically in four feature-length animentaries that share the theme of ‘war’: Waltz with Bashir (dir. Ari Folman, 2008), 25 April (dir. Leanne Pooley, 2015), Chris the Swiss (dir. Anja Kofmel, 2018) and Another Day of Life (dir. Raúl de la Fuente and Damian Nenow, 2019). The authors conclude that the written and spoken verbal modes play a crucial role in safeguarding animentaries’ referential relation to reality.

Writing in the New World

Over the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish American poetry and poetic theory experience a crucial moment of affirmation. Literary networks strengthen their circle of influence, and several authors, both creole and settlers, are able to promote their careers, further facilitated by the printing press. Books such as Miscelánea austral (Lima, 1602/1603) by Diego Dávalos y Figueroa, Grandeza mexicana (Mexico City, 1604) by Bernardo de Balbuena, and Parnaso antártico (Seville, 1608) by Diego Mexía contain a number of texts which lay the foundations for a new American poetics. They constitute a canon of New World authors who fashion themselves at the centre of a transatlantic exchange, both as followers and innovators of the peninsular literary tradition of the Renaissance. Framed within the rhetorical genre of “defences of poetry” and “defences of women”, these poets put forward an engaging critical representation of their own poetic identity.

Genre Expectations and Viewer Reaction to Our Planet: Are Audiences Motivated to Act More Sustainably?

As more people turn to documentaries to learn about environmental issues it becomes even more important to consider the ways in which genre and its representational patterns, such as the use of images, affect viewers. Re-examining the multiliteracies framework and grounded in rhetorical genre studies, this paper explores the first two episodes of Our Planet, a Netflix docu-series that catalyzed strong responses based on two jarring image sequences. The purpose of this paper is to examine how our familiar understandings of particular genres impacts our understanding of particular issues and what happens when the familiar patterns of a genre are challenged.

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls National Inquiry:

In this paper we present a rhetorical genre analysis of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) National Inquiry. We focus on the concepts of meta-genre and genre hybridity in the context of social change to explore the dynamics of the MMIWG Inquiry as an instantiation of the “truth commission” (TC). Following Giltrow (2002), we treat meta-genre as advice and criticism from genre participants about how a genre should be performed. We apply Gready’s analysis (2011) of the TC as a hybrid genre that has emerged in the context of transitional justice and post-modern governance: the hybrid incorporates three sub-genres: the state (public/national) inquiry, the human rights report, and the official history (rewritten and archived). Our goals are to examine what the concepts of meta-genre and genre hybridity offer to help explain the difficulties of national inquiries/truth commissions in general, and specifically to help illuminate the problematics of the MMIWG Inquiry. Our qualitative analysis focuses on public and media metageneric commentary on the MMIWG Inquiry, including the Commissioners’ responses, in both mainstream traditional media and social media. Our findings show that meta-generic commentary on the MMIWG Inquiry falls into five main categories or themes, each deriving from stakeholders’ expectations raised by the tributary genres. By far, the most dominant theme is criticism of the Inquiry for its recolonizing legal framework: the ideology of colonialism that inhabits the TC’s state inquiry tributary genre is the object of significant meta-generic criticism. The other four recurrent themes are the perception that the Inquiry should be a criminal investigation, criticism of the Inquiry for its restriction to an “advisory” role only, calls for the inquiry to have a human rights framework, and the expectation that the inquiry is to facilitate meaningful reconciliation. We suggest that, as a recurring and constitutive feature of genre, and, as an arena of negotiation over how genre is to be performed, meta-genre can function as a kind of oversight and challenge that, as an index of social change, inhabits genre as a response to its own inertia. We also suggest that the TC genre creates genre confusion through its conflation of the widely divergent and broad exigences of its tributary genres. We conclude that, at the time of this writing, stakeholders’ diverse expectations, the TC’s problematic hybridity, and the MMIWG Inquiry’s colonizing, statist, legal framework constrain the impetus for change, rendering the Inquiry “truth-lite” (Gready, p. 50) and low impact, and affording only “thin reconciliation”.

Health awareness as genre: the exigence of preparedness in cancer awareness campaigns and critical-illness insurance marketing

Dominant understandings of genre-as-form have limited our abilities to perceive health awareness: we recognise, and expect, health awareness campaigns from governmental and non-profit agencies. Inversely, we often fail to recognise, or name, health awareness as such when it comes from other sources, such as commercial marketing or advertisements for products. However, rhetorical genre theory centres attention on action brought about by form and, as such, rhetorical genre provides tools for recognising instances of health awareness often escape our notice. One such example is critical-illness insurance marketing. In this article, I argue that critical-illness insurance marketing draws on the same appeals found in cancer awareness campaigns. Through a comparative analysis, I show that Colorectal Cancer Canada and critical-illness insurance marketing represent unpreparedness, rather than cancer, as the exigence, or the problem to be overcome through public discourse, and as such, share a genre of what I call ‘health awareness as preparedness’.