Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
ix.genre knowledge = "an individual's repertoire of situationally appropriate responses to recurrent situations"
29. "genre conventions are products of discourse communities and are thereby 'windows' into the functioning of such communities. as fairclough (1992) noted, 'a genre implies not only a particular text type, but also particular processes of producing, distributing, and consuming texts... changes in social practice are both manifested on the plane of language in changes in the system of genres, and in part brought about by such changes (p. 126)"
45. question guiding the science-study: "what kinds of knowledge (of the genre, of research networks or the research front) must scientist-authors draw on to make the case for novelty?"
58-9. conclusion: what science is--to the writer experimentation is real & write-up conventions entail creating a "phony story" to explain what went on; to the journal expecting a certain presentation of material, there is "no such distinction between laboratory activity and rhetorical accommodation," and "far from being a phony story...the larger narrative [contextualizing the experimentation within necessary background] is, in a sense, the real story"; "science [is] an inductive, cumulative activity" reinforced & defined by repeated practice & rhetorical patterning.
79. kress & choice: "even in a situation of great constraint and awareness of convention, i can act unpredictably, assessing in a particular instance the consequences of my action differently to what would normally be predicted"; & so giddens "duality of structure"--our actions make it & our made by it
98. abstracts (& other reproduceable forms) have both "general features" (found in both successful and many unsuccessful submissions) and "distinguishing features" (found only in successful submissions) (& ccccs, those meanies, don't publish the accepted ones so that future submitters can see what distinguishes winning entries)
150. "sociolinguistic studies of genre activity as part of larger processes of enculturation can reveal the subtexts, conflicts, compromises, and negotiations in addition to those more centripetal forces in conventional language use"
152. they also like lave & werner's concept of "legitimate peripheral participation"
153. resistance to explicit teaching is often associated with teachers' reluctance to return to the prescriptivism of teaching the "rhetorical modes"
155. aligns different researchers with their positions regarding language acquisition & genre--some agree that "when the patterns of interaction and language system of [children's] home and community are at variance with that of school culture" children will struggle with new genres & should be explicitly taught the new genres to help them gain access to the school's cultural system; others hold that "what is most important is that teachers secure for children the opportunity to develop their understanding of new concepts through whatever conventions are most 'natural' to them"
158. kress on christie's egg stories: "the critical issue is not whether children do or do not have the freedom to experiment with different generic conventions, but rather whether or not children's innovations can succeed within the broader culture": "neither these nor Joel's innovations are likely to succeed, because the child-writers are the least 'authorized' writers in the culture, and their innovations can be quite disregarded....this is why childish innovations fail: not because they do not constitute perfectly plausible solutions to textual/cognitive problems, but because they are supported neither by a stable social occasion, nor by 'authority' (41-42)."
160. although individual creativity is important & valuable, genres are not "simply 'mind-forged manacles.' on the contrary, we would argue that genres are essential elements of language just are words, syntactic structures, and sound patterns. in order to express one's individual thoughts, one must use available patterns for speech, that is to say, genres, in one way or another. virtually every communicative interchange between people, whether in speech or in writing, involves generic structure; in any language there are large numbers of established genres from whcih to choose. furthermore, far from being rigid templates, genres can be modified according to the rhetorical circumstances"
161. "students are manacled only when teachers fail to expose them to a broad range and appropriate use of curriculum genres"
163. also, they like vygotsky's "construct of the zone of proximal development"--together w/vygotsky, they think "a genre approach to the teaching of writing does not fit many language arts and composition teachers' conception of their role, given their training, ideological loyalties, and professional allegiances," and so "rethinking the training" of these professionals "as well as the current curricula in language arts and university writing courses may be what is called for"