Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
287. genre study extends traditional textual analysis by asking questions like: "how does place affect the meaning of the text? do these textual regularities derive from some common social action? how does the hierarchic fusion of form and substance accomplish this social purpose? if genres are best seen as texts in dialogue, how is this interaction maintained or created in these texts? in what sense is the genre a response to, or a product of cultural or institutional constraints? in what sense is the genre shaped by its discipline, its field of knowledge?"
288. the "functions of" the assignments the law students in her study produced were "signaled by their setting"; "on the most basic level, in writing these essays students were fulfilling an implicit institutional contract" for an "obligation [that] entailed a very specific kind of writing"; "the distinctive form of the law essays also contributes to their meaning, providing what miller calls 'meta-information.' the greater complexity of the syntax suggests an analysis of experience that is hierarchical in structure, specific propositions are seen in the context of others, and relationships of cause, effect, condition, and especially concession are highlighted." field's ontology is revealed by its generic expectations
289. as they learn these practices, "the student writers begin to look at and interpret reality in certain prescribed ways"; "this then was the social action undertaken in their writing"
290. "their writing both attests to their entry into such a community and more significantly enabled or actualized that entry"; "the students' initiation into this new discourse community was accomplished collaboratively. the instructor as well as the teaching assistant played active roles in the interactions….the professor modeled both the lexicon as well as the persuasive strategies or lines of reasoning that are conventionally accepted as valid in the discipline…. in framing the assignments he specified the data to be analyzed and formulated the questions to be addressed, eliciting thus from the students the kind of thinking which ultimately found expression in their essays"; "in other words, the instructor, the teaching assistant, and the student were all active agents in a complex collaboration which resulted in the students' performance as members of a new discourse community"; "to view the interaction as an initiation rite is enlightening. writing is not elicited so that teachers can find out what students know: it is elicited so that students can thereby know things and do things that they could not and did not know or do before"
291. "for the students we observed, the recurrence was synchronic rather than diachronic—a fact which highlighted the creation of the genre as a social action in response to a communally interpreted disciplinary and cultural exigence. the inventive power of a genre is thus respored in consonance with the reinvention of rhetoric"