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Genre Analysis
Background: In unfamiliar writing situations, genre analysis can help academic writers choose writing conventions that are appropriate for their purposes. As the writing of a particular academic discipline becomes more familiar, experienced academic writers develop their understanding of how and why certain genres and conventions are used. To investigate how expert writers use conventions to achieve their purposes, this assignment asks you to analyze important writing choices in a journal article related to your major or intended writing intensive course.
Prompt:
How do expert writers in the disciplines use structure, reference, and language conventions to achieve their purposes? Describe the purpose and audience of a journal article from a discipline related to your undergraduate goals; explain why one significant convention in the article is an effective choice for the article’s purpose and audience; discuss what undergraduate writers in the disciplines can learn from your analysis.
Text Features
· Introduce the title and author of the article to be analyzed
· Describe the article’s purpose and audience
· Explain why one of the article’s genre conventions is an effective choice
· Use summary, paraphrase, quotation, description, and/or images to provide detailed evidence of the convention analyzed
· Discuss one way your analysis can inform undergraduate writers
· Include in-text citations and a references page using an appropriate citation style
Process Steps
· Locate a journal article from a discipline related to your undergraduate plans or intended writing intensive course
· Identify evidence of the article’s purpose and audience
· Identify genre conventions that seem important for the article’s purpose/audience
· Write a rough draft that explains one significant convention in the article
· Revise your draft based on feedback from peers and the instructor
Intended writing courses:
GOVT 165. Politics of the Underrepresented. = 3 Units
Examines the phenomenon of political underrepresentation in the U.S.A. It will identify significant affected groupings, examine the conditions which have resulted in such underrepresentation, evaluate the effects of underrepresentation on the lives of affected groups, and consider relevant political strategies. Emphasis on particular groups may vary with instructor.
Please use one convention ( language, structure, visual)
I
‘There are some things that you just can’t imagine happening in your
life. This is one of them.’ So spoke Mitt Romney on 2 February 2012, at
the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. We can reasonably infer that
his statement of disbelief contained some recognition of the situation’s
inherent absurdity. The leading candidate for the Republican presidential
nomination had flown to Las Vegas to receive the blessing of a famous
hotel and casino mogul, tabloid king, marketer of eponymous steaks,
vodka, a university, and a reality-TV programme in which he intoned
‘you’re fired’, from a leather armchair, for 14 seasons.
At the time, however, Donald Trump was also associated with an
important political idea: that Barack Obama did not legitimately occupy
the office of the presidency. The reason, never coherently stated, was
nonetheless obvious. Trump mouthed functional gibberish about a
missing birth certificate, but the only salient truths about the president
were that his skin was black and his African father had been born a
Muslim. Romney’s own father, George, had been governor of Michigan,
had allied himself with Martin Luther King, Jr, had refused to support
Barry Goldwater in 1964 because of Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil
Rights Act, and ran for president in 1968 as a representative of the liberal-
to-moderate Republicanism that used to thrive in the North. Mitt clearly
Closing Argument
Donald Trump’s America
Dana H. Allin
Dana H. Allin is Editor of Survival, and Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy and Transatlantic Affairs at the IISS.
Portions of this closing argument previously appeared on the Survival editors’ blog, ‘Politics and Strategy’.
Survival | vol. 58 no. 2 | April–May 2016 | pp. 221–228 DOI 10.1080/00396338.2016.1161919
222 | Dana H. Allin
revered his father and has striven to emulate his essential decency, and
so we should charitably assume that, in embracing the endorsement of a
noxious purveyor of racist conspiracy theory, he had decided that there are
trade-offs in life necessary for advancing the conservative political ideals in
which he believes.
Four years later, on 3 March 2016, Romney delivered a speech in Salt
Lake City, Utah. This time he called Donald Trump a ‘con man, a fake …
a phony, a fraud’.1 Now something unimaginable really was happening.
Trump had won ten out of 15 state nominating contests, and looked well on
his way to winning the Republican Party nomination for president. Leading
Republicans were speaking seriously of the end of the party of Abraham
Lincoln – not just an aesthetic or moral demise, but its actual collapse. The
night of Romney’s speech, on the Republican candidates’ debate stage in
Detroit, Trump assured his supporters and other viewers that there was ‘no
problem’ with the size of his penis.2 This was in the first ten minutes of the
proceedings, which did not become more edifying as the night progressed.
II
In the film of national life, this is the dream sequence. It is a dream from
which America has been struggling, in leaden panic, to wake itself since
sometime last summer. Or it is the reality-TV version of The Great Gatsby
– except that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby was truly, if shadily, self-made,
not the mediocre steward of an inherited fortune; Gatsby’s strivings for
lost love and green-light redemption followed a lyrical trajectory; and
he was a character in a novel. As a third alternative, Robert Kagan, the
neoconservative historian and public intellectual, proposes Greek myth.
‘Today’s Republican Party is our Oedipus’, Kagan wrote in late February.
‘A plague has descended on the party in the form of the most successful
demagogue-charlatan in the history of U.S. politics.’3
For all of his unusual success, however, Trump is a known charac-
ter in history. His American antecedents include Henry Ford, Charles
Lindbergh, Father Coughlin and George Wallace. In contemporary Europe,
the late Jörg Haider of Austria’s Freedom Party offered a similar mixture of
xenophobia, media savvy, appeal to middle-class anxieties, and attacks on
Donald Trump’s America | 223
the complacency and corruption of establishment political parties. Haider’s
successor, Heinz-Christian Strache, ploughs the same swampy fields, as
have France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter-successor Marine.
The big difference is that the European far-rightists are mainly third-
party forces, challenging but not supplanting the establishment parties.
Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, a Trump-like demagogue, was an exception, and
both Poland and Hungary are today governed by rightist, illiberal parties.
The general pattern in Western Europe, however, is that while far-right
parties pose significant dangers, the mainstream has a way of uniting to
fight back, as in 2002, when French socialists fell behind Jacques Chirac in
the second round of voting for president rather than risk a Le Pen victory.
In an entrenched two-party system like America’s, radicalism is more
likely to take hold if it takes over one of the parties. Here, too, there is pro-
logue. The writer Peter Beinart has compared the Tea Party conquest of the
Republican Party to what had happened to Democrats after vice president
Hubert Humphrey lost narrowly to Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential
election.
Between 1968 and 1972, grassroots activists—many of them incubated in
the anti-war movement—took over the Democratic Party, state by state.
In 1970, activists rewrote Michigan’s party platform so that it advocated
reparations to North Vietnam. In Washington state, they demanded
amnesty for draft evaders and a ban on the building of missiles.4
George McGovern, the Democratic nominee in 1972, was really a con-
ventional, Midwestern liberal in the mould of Humphrey – and a Second
World War hero to boot – but he was driven left by the zeal of this move-
ment and his own anger about the truly senseless war in Vietnam. My own
most vivid memory of the campaign is how the McGovern team lost oper-
ational control of the Democratic nominating convention; the candidate
had to deliver his acceptance speech well after midnight, a time when few
Americans were awake to hear a message that they would have tuned out
anyway. Nixon, running for re-election, trounced the hapless Democrat,
who lost every state except Massachusetts.
224 | Dana H. Allin
Yet the Democrats quickly re-centred themselves. Their next nominee,
Jimmy Carter, came from the right of his party, although from the left of
the great civil-rights struggle in his native South. After Carter lost his re-
election bid to Ronald Reagan, his party put forward two sedate Northern
liberals, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. And after both lost, the
southerner Bill Clinton led his party in accepting that it would have to
engage the national debate on terms that had been set by Reagan. This
meant taking more seriously middle-class anxieties about urban crime, and
it meant purging the party of residual pacifism. Clinton was lucky on both
counts. Crime fell sharply for reasons mainly unrelated to policy, and he
inherited a uniquely benign international environment.
It was arguably under Clinton that Republican right-wing radicalism
took off. ‘Movement conservatism’ had started with Goldwater. Reagan
was a creature of it, but his presidency was pragmatic. So was that of the
classic New England moderate, George H.W. Bush. During Clinton’s
presidency, however, the Newt Gingrich ‘Contract with America’ became
the foundational text of the first Republican majority in the House of
Representatives since the 1950s, promising a ‘historic change [that] would
be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with
the public’s money … the beginning of a Congress that respects the values
and shares the faith of the American family’.5 Gingrich had already prom-
ised a ‘civil war’ against liberals, saying in a 1988 speech to the Heritage
Foundation that it ‘has to be fought with a scale and a duration and a
savagery that is only true of civil wars’.6 In 1990, his political action com-
mittee advised Republican candidates to ‘speak like Newt’, by describing
Democrats with words such as ‘decay, traitors, radical, sick, destroy,
pathetic, corrupt and shame’.7 It was an approach that gave spirit to the
later impeachment proceedings against Clinton.
For their presidential nominees, Republicans still put forward conven-
tional conservatives, if not moderates: Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John
McCain and Mitt Romney. Bush as president presided over the radical
misadventure of Iraq, and he authorised forms of torture for terrorist
suspects. Yet he later appeared, in behaviour if not words, to recognise that
the torture was a mistake, and he remained faithful to other fundamental
Donald Trump’s America | 225
liberal principles. Paramount among these, he recognised and worked
against the danger of an anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11.
III
Barack Obama was the first Northern liberal since John F. Kennedy to
win the presidency. He came to office in a time of economic crisis and
near catastrophe, and with brief Democratic majorities in both houses of
Congress he was able to apply the traditional liberal remedy of stimulus
spending, together with financial and industrial rescue packages. In enact-
ing expanded access to health insurance, he completed a liberal agenda
that Harry Truman had proposed six decades earlier. He used his execu-
tive powers to regulate carbon emissions and to exercise considerable
discretion regarding the status of illegal immigrants. All of these meas-
ures offended the philosophical principles of a Republican Party that had
moved significantly to the right.
And yet – it is impossible to ignore the racial divide that coincides
with these ideological disagreements and which has constituted the
central drama of American history. To the poisonous legacy of slavery
there is now added the cultural, economic and religious panic induced by
Hispanic immigration and growth, and the association of Islam and jihad-
ist terrorism. With credit to George W. Bush, the anti-Muslim backlash did
not occur on his watch, but it started darkly, almost inexplicably, with the
2010 proposal in New York City for a ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ that was not
really a mosque and was definitely not at Ground Zero. (Gringrich, again,
took an agitating lead.) Net immigration from Latin America has, since
the economic crisis, become negative, but the growth of Hispanic popula-
tions continues. Lower-middle-class whites are stuck in an economy of
stagnant real wages, even as the wealth of the rich multiplies prodigiously;
they have experienced an increase in mortality reminiscent of post-Soviet
Russia; and they are watching their country’s complexion, and even its
language, change around them.
And so Republicans have had a lot of anger to ride. The right–populist
Tea Party faction advanced impressively in Congress two years after
Obama’s election, and two years after his re-election, installing some very
226 | Dana H. Allin
right-wing representatives and senators, including Marco Rubio and Ted
Cruz. But the Tea Party has proven an inadequate vessel to contain the
anger – fear and loathing, really – which has now metastasised into the
phenomenon of Donald Trump.
Robert Kagan argues that his party, like Oedipus, brought the plague
upon itself. Trump, he insists, is the natural consequence of the ‘party’s
wild obstructionism — the repeated threats to shut down the govern-
ment over policy and legislative disagreements, the persistent calls for
nullification of Supreme Court decisions, the insistence that compromise
was betrayal, the internal coups against party leaders who refused to
join the general demolition’. Trump’s bigotry has also been ‘enabled’,
Kagan insists, by the party’s attacks on immigrants, its trafficking in
Islamophobia, and by its drumbeat of ‘Obama hatred, a racially tinged
derangement syndrome that made any charge plausible and any opposi-
tion justified’.8
Republican leaders, to their credit, are genuinely dismayed by Trump’s
reckless demagoguery, which could further poison America’s already
polarised politics and ruin America’s reputation. But they are also worried
about his heterodox opinions, which are attracting lower-middle-class
whites who resent multi-racial liberalism but who also are unmoved by
conventional conservative orthodoxies: low marginal tax rates; a deci-
mated welfare state; unfettered free markets including free trade; and, at
least implicitly, a large supply of cheap immigrant labour.
Trump thus threatens his party’s orthodoxy and its decorum. Does he
pose a broader threat? Elsewhere in this issue, Michael J. Boyle writes of
a growing challenge to the post-war liberal order, citing politicians such
as Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, as well as the possible emerg-
ing illiberal alliance of such powers as Russia, China and even India and
Brazil.9 Anne Applebaum speculated recently that we could be two or
three elections away from the demise of the West: with help of another
terrorist attack or major scandal, Trump could become president of the
United States and Marine Le Penn president of France. Britain could leave
the European Union and commitment to alliances and principles could
more generally fade away.10
Donald Trump’s America | 227
Who knows? As Applebaum also notes, Europe came back from ‘years
of lead’, terrorism from the Red Brigades, the Red Army Faction and the
IRA without, in the end, sacrificing democracy or the rule of law. The
United States around the same time overcame a fierce southern backlash
against the enactment of civil rights for black people. If Trump wins the
nomination, Hillary Clinton appears likely to defeat him.
Some heightened vigilance seems like a good idea, however. Kagan
was among the 100 Republican foreign-policy analysts and operatives
who signed an open letter, circulated on the same day as Romney’s
speech, vowing that they will not support a Trump campaign if he wins
the nomination.11 But Kagan in his February op-ed intimated strongly
that this would not be enough. ‘For this former Republican, and perhaps
for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party
cannot be saved, but the country still can be.’ On the reasonable, though by
no means certain, assumption that Trump continues to be successful, the
central drama of the next six months will be how many Republicans follow
Kagan’s renunciation. Some have spoken instead of backing a third-party
candidacy, which would probably have the practical effect of ensuring
a Democratic victory, and which also might split the Republican Party
irrevocably. Trump’s fellow candidates, however – Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz
and John Kasich – were asked at the end of the 3 March debate whether
they were still committed to supporting the party’s nominee, even if it is
Trump. They all said yes.
Notes
1 Mitt Romney, speech at the University
of Utah, 3 March 2016, available at
http://time.com/4246596/donald-
trump-mitt-romney-utah-speech/.
2 Gregory Krieg, ‘Donald Trump
Defends Size of His Penis’, CNN,
4 March 2016, http://edition.cnn.
com/2016/03/03/politics/donald-
trump-small-hands-marco-rubio/.
3 Robert Kagan, ‘Trump is the
GOP’s Frankenstein Monster. Now
He’s Strong Enough to Destroy
the Party’, Washington Post, 25
February 2016, https://www.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/
trump-is-the-gops-frankenstein-
monster-now-hes-strong-enough-to-
destroy-the-party/2016/02/25/3e443f28-
dbc1-11e5-925f-1d10062cc82d_story.
html.
4 Peter Beinart, ‘Palin is the New
McGovern’, Daily Beast, 20 September
228 | Dana H. Allin
2016, http://www.thedailybeast.com/
articles/2010/09/20/palin-the-gops-
mcgovern.html.
5 Newt Gingrich et al., ‘The Contract
with America’, 27 September 1994,
available at https://www.udel.edu/htr/
Psc105/Texts/contract.html.
6 Sheryl Gay Stolberg, ‘Gingrich Stuck
to Caustic Path in Ethics Battles’, New
York Times, 26 January 2012, http://
www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/us/
politics/the-long-run-gingrich-stuck-
to-caustic-path-in-ethics-battles.html.
7 Ibid.
8 Kagan, ‘Trump is the GOP’s
Frankenstein Monster’.
9 Michael J. Boyle, ‘The Coming Illiberal
Order’, Survival, vol. 58, no. 2, April–
May 2016, pp. 35–66.
10 Anne Applebaum, ‘Is This the End of
the West As We Know It?’, Washington
Post, 4 March 2016, https://www.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-
trump-and-the-end-of-nato/2016/03/04/
e8c4b9ca-e146-11e5-8d98-
4b3d9215ade1_story.html.
11 ‘Open Letter on Donald Trump From
GOP National Security Leaders’,
War on the Rocks, 2 March 2016,
http://warontherocks.com/2016/03/
open-letter-on-donald-trump-from-
gop-national-security-leaders/.
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SAMPLE GENRE ANALYSIS
Genre provides writers with the concept, form and action by helping to achieve the purpose of the writing. In the scholarly article Nursing student’s perceptions of patient dignity authors, Evridiki Papastavrou, Georgios Efstathiou, and Christos Andreou, use some genre conventions to achieve their reason in writing this nursing article. The writing describes how nurses threat their patients in hospitals. The main purpose was to understand and illustrate how nurses promote dignity toward patients and explain the importance of patient dignity. The authors have created a research study exploring the experience of nursing students working in hospitals. Students who have practiced nursing for one year or more were asked to explain how dignity was promoted by nurses towards patients. Most of the responses students gave were negative. The study discovered that dignity was humiliated by nurses towards patients as also by patients toward nurses. However, the main focus of the study was around nurses’ behavior. Students gave a lot of examples when patients’ dignity was poorly promoted, but said a little about nurse’s dignity. In the study authors have used two genre conventions, structure and reference, to support and achieve their purpose of writing this scholarly article.
The convention of a structure is used in the article by Papastavrou, Efstathiou, and Andreou. Structure keeps the article organized and easy to read. Nursing articles usually use APA citation style for the structure. APA style format includes sections in the following order: abstract, introduction, method, results, discussion, conclusion, and references. Since the article written by Papastavrou et al. was a nursing research study, the authors used APA style to organize their findings of the study. The organization allowed readers to find the information provided understandable and well organized. The authors structured their study in APA format using APA’s order beginning with an abstract and concluding with references. APA format requires an introduction section of an article to introduce the problem under study. Similarly, in the introduction section of Papastavrou’s et al. article, authors included the main purpose of the study and importance of the information provided. It explained why dignity is being studied stating that it was a problem in hospital life, as in the following claim: “patient dignity has been the subject of considerable debate” (Papastavrou, Efstathiou, and Andreou, 2016, p. 93). It also explains the meaning of dignity in order for readers to have the same understanding of this term as authors have. According to Papastavrou et al. dignity is described as “respect, protecting privacy, emotional support, treating all patients equally and maintaining body image” (p. 94). This determination helps the readers understand the operational definition of dignity. Therefore, the reader will be able to use the term, dignity, same way authors are using it in the article. The next quote gives an explanation of the importance of dignity behind the hospital’s walls. “Respect of human dignity … is conceived as an essential component and is acknowledged as a core attribute of nursing care” (p. 93). The authors have used those examples in order to make a reader believe that dignity is something that a nurse should take care of in healthcare settings. They state that nurses should know what dignity is and should use it properly toward their patients. Also, the authors referred to different countries, such as United States, Australia, Asian countries, and Canada, as an example for patient dignity during nursing care (p. 94). This reference allowed the authors to prove that this topic is important not only at one particular place but in many countries. The introduction was structured in a way to make the reader understand the meaning and importance of dignity.
Going farther into the article, Papastavrou, Efstathiou, and Andreou (2016) structured a step by step explanation of their study. This is included in the method section. Then structure continues into the findings section where the results of their study are explained. Further, the authors continue their ideas by describing and analyzing research results and earlier studies. At the end, the conclusion is provided to explain the further reactions of this particular research. They specified how the information provided by them will be useful in future studies and in future nursing life. A short report to submit to the “Directory of Nursing Services in Cyprus” (p. 101) was created in order to improve everyone’s dignity inside the hospital. Throughout the article, authors tried to convince readers that nurses should change their attitude towards patients. They have provided claims that patient dignity is important but based on their findings nurses promote it poorly to the patients. The APA structure of the research article used by authors helps the readers understand what the authors wanted them to know in a more powerful way.
So far, the genre convention of structure was described in the paper. The second powerful genre convention used by authors in this academic research article is a convention of references. At the very end of the paper, as usually used in the APA format journal articles, authors listed many references they have referred to in the text. The list of references includes articles authors used to refer throughout the text. Those are the sources that have studied similar topic as discussed in the article by Papastavrou, Efstathiou, and Andreou. Authors are referencing different articles in order to check how their study relates to earlier findings. Mostly, different sources are used in the introduction and discussion sections of Papastavrou et al. article. Those are the two places where they explain the importance of patient dignity and discuss their observations from the study they have created. In the discussion section Papastavrou et al. (2016) stated “Students recognized the vulnerability of some patients to dignity loss, supporting Baillie and Gallagher’s and Jacobson’s findings” (p. 100). Using Baillie and Gallagher’s and Jacobson’s study, authors pointed out that the students were talking about the same thing what other researchers have talked about; therefore their own study is supported by the earlier study. Also, the above quote allows the reader to see the picture of a poor nurses’ behavior towards patients. With the picture in mind and referenced study, the reader will have a clear understanding of poor nursing promotion of patient dignity and believe the finding.
Throughout the discussion section, there are repetitions used by authors. Such repetitions are the phrases which are used to announce the usage of information from the previous study. The examples are: “in previous studies”, “a number of cases stated that”, “supported by”, “that is in line and supports previous studies”, “this are different from the literature supporting that”, and “this has not been previously studied” (Papastavrou et al., 2016, p. 99-10). Listed phrases help authors to point out that they are using not only their own finding of their study to illustrate how nurses promote dignity toward patients, but yet use support from different other sources.
To make the study more credible or significant, the authors referenced organizations and famous people. In the introduction paragraph, they wrote that “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides a legal framework for the Member States of the United Nations, supporting dignity as a fundamental human right” (Papastavrou et al., 2016, p. 93). Reading this particular statement most of the readers would agree on the definition of dignity because the Declaration of Human Rights has established its importance. Even if the reader would not be familiar with The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they would still believe the claim made by Papastavrou et al. because the name suggests that those rights are to protect people in everyday life. Going farther into the article, the authors present “Contemporary nursing philosophical accounts of dignity” (p. 93) and “Standards of nursing practice” (p. 100). Those references helped writers to illustrate what are the norms nurses should follow in order to correctly promote patient’s dignity. They also provide the explanation about the importance of dignity in the hospitals. Giving more support for the importance of dignity, in the introduction section of the paper writers went back in time and referred to “the Ancient Greek and specifically … Aristotle’s philosophy and Sophocles’ tragedy ‘Antigone’” (p. 93) to give a greater acknowledgment for their study. Referencing to Ancient Greek Aristotle and Sophocles will give a credit to the article since they are very famous in the philosophical thinking. Referring to earlier studies, human rights organizations and great thinkers led the authors to their finishing point of achieving their main goal of the study. This way, the reader of the article will be able to understand how nurses promote patient dignity and why it is important to have a great dignity in the hospitals.
In the process of writing the article, authors Papastavrou, Efstathiou, and Andreou have used two genre conventions in order to identify how nurses promote patient dignity and the importance of dignity in the hospitals. The genre conventions used by writers are structure and reference. While reading any scholarly article it is important to know how the authors write in a particular discipline. Each discipline uses a particular genre style in writing. For example, Papastavrou’s et al. (2016) article described above is writing in the discipline of nursing. Understanding genre conventions used in the discipline of nursing is beneficial in a way that it gives a reader an easier path of identifying information given by authors. A convention of structure allows skimming over the information a reader is most interested in or need to know.
References
proclaim the credibility of the article. If no or little-referenced sources are used in the discussion, there is a great chance of having poor evidence and low credibility. Genre analysis is useful because it provides the readers with knowledge of genres that are used in the particular discipline.
References
Papastavrou, E. , Efstathiou, G. , & Andreou, C. (2016). Nursing students’ perceptions of patient dignity. Nursing Ethics, 23(1), 92-103
