Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
par 3. each of the 4 docuents examined differs from the others in "content and tone," which hamilton suggests is "because each represents a different communication genre" using different media to convey the same general message to a different audience for a different reason, or with a different expectation toward that audience's needs or expectations. from alan gross: "in scientific writing, arrangement functions epistemologically, while style functions ontologically" and it's likely not just true of science; "looking at [each of these documents] in terms of genres based on their function...is one way to begin to understand something about their epistemology and ontology."
par 7. from berkenkotter & huckin, the "five principles of genre theory: dynamism...situatedness...form and content (including a 'sense of what content is appropriate' to a particular situation), duality of structure (applying genre rules simultaneously constitutes and reproduces the genre) and community ownership (genres reflect community norms, epistemology, ideology, etc.)(4)"
par 9. "a genre exists only within a context, even as genres construct context" & most (not all) of her examples were (in varying ways) constructed for/constructed by the context of "government"
par 12-3. each text begins "with a display of signifiers that demonstrate[s] their credibility in relation to the topic"--"what chaim perelman and lucie olbrechts-tyteca (1969) refer to as 'argument[s] from authority'"; "timing also plays a significant role in each of these documents"
--then she goes on to detail differences in purpose/audience & how textual features & rhetorical bents--inc. the presence of absence of epideictic language, and the presence or absence of the name of an identifying author (an authorless document from a goverment agency has more authority for being authorless; the idea conveyed is that the entire organization owns & supports the words, rather than that they're the words of any particular (potentially fallible) writer)--reveal them in each document. i kept taking this off my list & finally put it back on because it's so pragmatically useful--it's one of the few demonstrations i have of people taking genre theory and doing something with it, using it not only to talk about text but to learn something concrete about individual texts--& the fact that its subject is popular & governmental publications about a topic having nothing at all to do with education or rhetoric, which shows how wide-flung its applicability can be--makes it all the more useful as a model/example of why this stuff is good.