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Revision
Annalia Foster
Pavel Zemliansky
ENC 1102H
14 March, 2016
Medical Genre Analysis
The medical research article I am analyzing is about how oxaliplatininduced oxidative stress provokes toxicity in isolated rat liver mitochondria.
The purpose of this experiment was to investigate the dose-dependent
damage caused by oxaliplatin on isolated mitochondria under in vitro
conditions. Oxaliplatin is a common chemotherapy drug used to treat cancer.
It is thought to cause more harm than good because of the many illnesses it
causes. More research done on this topic would be beneficial because it is a
general consensus throughout any medical discourse community that the
point of medicine is to help, not to harm. The doctors and other medical
professionals can read this article and use the information to treat their
patient with a lower dosage of this toxin or use a different drug for
treatment.
To properly analyze any genre, discourse community and rhetorical
situation must be completely explained as discourse community and
rhetorical situation work to build and identify a genre. Both components are
taken into consideration when analyzing a scientific genre such as a medical
research article.

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A discourse community can have multiple genres that serve different

purposes. A discourse community itself is made up of people with similar
interests and a cluster of ideas. Herzberg defines discourse as a means of
maintaining and extending the groups knowledge and of initiating new
members into the group (21). Swales explains how this factors into discourse
communities in six points. The first is that a discourse community has a
broadly agreed set of common public goals. These may be high level or
abstract. The goal of medical researchers is to contribute to the body of
knowledge that will benefit the health of the public, which is why they
publish their research. Not all people that share these goals are considered a
part of the same discourse community, though. To be included in the
community they must participate in the intercommunication among its
members which is the second point. Meetings, newsletters, conversations,
etc. are considered mechanisms of intercommunication. Peer reviewed
journals are a means of intercommunication among scientists sharing their
work. Those peer reviewing and those who comment and converse based on
the published content are communicating in this discourse community.
Bizzell counters the notion of intercommunication by saying that they all fit
a social-class-based or ethnically-based discursive practice which makes
them part of a discourse community (25).
The third point includes the existence of participatory mechanisms that
primarily provide feedback and information. Without circulating information
within the community the members would not know what is going on within

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the organization, thus meaning that the members wouldnt evolve with the
discourse. The physicians doing the medical research are the ones
participating in their discourse community. They do this by publishing their
research. The fourth point focuses on how discourse communities utilize and
possess one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.
These genres act as tools to develop discoursal expectations. The medical
discourse community has many different genres that range from daily
patient care records to difficult research projects. Each piece of writing has
its own standard structure.
The fifth point refers to each discourse community having a specific
lexis. A lexis is regular jargon that people in a certain field use that is not
common in regular conversation. For example, surgeons have a lexis that
includes surgical terms that other medical professionals dont use. This lexis
is often learned while being in the discourse community and during
education before-hand. The final point describes a ratio between novice and
expert level members that ensure the survival of the discourse. Once the
expert level members leave the community, for whatever reason, the novice
members then have the chance to become experts and modify and evolve
the discourse. In the medical field, expert doctors train novice doctors to
carry on the discourse. Over time the upcoming doctors modify the discourse
to fit the new needs of the community.
Rhetorical situation and genres go hand in hand. Rhetorical situation is
made up of exigence, rhetor, audience, and constraints. Exigence, in short, is

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the need for the discourse to occur (Grant-Davie 266). Sometimes the
discourse is called upon to resolve a situation or to persuade. In the medical
community, the exigence for research and publication is to learn more about
certain diseases or conditions. For example, when diseases start to effect a
large amount of people, such as the Ebola outbreak, there is a call for
research and conversation on this topic.
The rhetor is a fundamental part of the rhetorical situation because
they compose the work. They must balance their thoughts, satisfying the
audience, accomplishing the exigence, and write within the constraints all
inside a genre. Usually a genre has widely known guidelines that assist the
rhetor but also can make it more difficult. For almost all of the writing
medical professionals do, there are relative guidelines. The rhetor just has to
decide on how the content will satisfy these guidelines.
The audience may be the most difficult because there is an intended
audience, an imagined audience, and a real audience. The intended
audience is who the writer is writing to. Usually the work is intended for
members of the rhetors discourse community since the work would be
written in a genre specific to that community. The imagined audience is the
audience that isnt mentioned and must be deduced by the audience as well.
The real audience is the people that actually read it. For example, scholarly
articles that are written for their discourse community reach that community
but other people read those works to get to know more about that discipline.
The final component of rhetorical situation is constraints. A genre can

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naturally impose constraints, but the rhetorical situation usually sets the
constraints for the work on a deeper level concerning the rhetoric.
After knowing what the article is about and the purpose it serves one
can then consider the genre it was written in. A genre is a tool used to
express a cluster of ideas in a discourse community and develops due to
rhetorical situation (Grant-Davie). Based on that definition, it sounds like the
only genres that exist are those that have to do with academics and writing
but there are so many things that are considered a genre that shape our
daily lives. A genre is a response to a recurring situation. Bitzer says that
comparable situations occur, prompting comparable responses; hence
rhetorical forms are born and a special vocabulary, grammar, and style are
established.(251) Once a genre is created for the first call for that specific
discourse, it then sets the standards for addressing that discourse again.
Each genre has specific characteristics that belong to it and has its own
layout and expectations but it is far more complicated that filling in the
blanks of a template.
The basic structure for the genre I am analyzing starts with an abstract
that gives its background and aims, methods, results, and conclusion. The
function of this section is to frame the rhetorical situation. Other sections
such as introduction, background, methods, results, and discussion were
included. The introduction usually contains an explanation as to why the
experiment was being done, not only on the scientific side but it gave
reasons to persuade the reader that it was beneficial. The methods and

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results sections are objective because they contain factual information that is
not bias. The methods are chronological and extremely detailed. They
include the chemicals used and the many conditions carried out during the
experiment. These details are written in the lexis of the medical discourse
community because they are the intended audience. It is not part of this
genre to simplify the language for others that will be viewing the articles
because that would make the concepts not as concrete and objective. The
results are explained in the same way. Numerous details with jargon are used
to plainly state exactly what the experiment yielded. They were
accompanied by eight different graphs that showed the quantitative data.
The discussion part of the article is another place where rhetoric comes in.
There, it is stated whether the hypothesis was correct or not. Then the
results are analyzed by the experimenter which can cause a bias in the
writing. The results are linked by the experimenter to the desired use of the
experiment. Often when writing a research article, experimenters try to use a
correct hypothesis to prove that the experimental results support the bigger
picture of why they were doing the experiment. They convey it as proving a
scientific point, but the act of doing so is persuading the readers opinion
which is subjective and not factual. The writer is persuading the reader to
view the results a certain way. They are often trying to persuade that their
results are useful for a larger, more important cause than just the acquisition
of knowledge. This genre balances both objectivity and subjectivity better
than other medical genres.

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See, genres develop overtime. Devitt points out that they respond
appropriately to situations that writers encounter repeatedly. (252) A writer
might encounter a different situation but may need to use the same genre.
The genre can then be modified by the writer to fit the rhetorical situation
while still retaining the identity of the genre.
The development of a genre can expand how much information about
a topic that it covers. This causes the genre to evolve for more effective
communication. Mastering the function of communication regarding genres
can help people to better reach their goals using their work. If one is to write
with authority in a genre it will not only ease communication, but it will prove
more effective to the audience it is received by. Genres evolve for more than
just communication though. A joke is a genre. The best ones, which can be
considered the most useful or evolved, have a punchline that makes the
other person laugh. This is a genre in everyday life. The specifics given about
how genres provide information and how they are structured applies to the
things we dont write down but are still considered genres. These genres are
what are used to start and maintain a discourse community.
Matthew Allan states that scientific genres are not only objective but
subjective. I agree. Some scientific genres such as research articles include
rhetoric because they are used to persuade others that their findings are
important. Other scientific genres are almost completely objective. I have
examines genres in the medical discourse community. Physicians dont have
many genres that help them to communicate with the other members of

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their discourse community, but the accepted constraints of these genres is

that they must be concise and accurate. Patient information is usually the
discourse that is being communicated and if it is communicated incorrectly it
could be detrimental to the patients health and treatment. Experimental
results and claims must be communicated effectively too so that people
have the most up to date information on illnesses, treatment, etc. Even
though these genres contain components of rhetorical situation it doesnt
change the fact that they must be objective to function. The fundamental
function of all genres is to communicate the information in the most efficient
way possible regarding the discourse. For medical discourse the objective
approach is aided by the genre, thus still making the form of the information
vital to how it is communicated.
Rhetorical situation is what defines and develops discourse
communities. They are created based on an exigence and have an intended
audience. That audience has criteria or constraints that define it. The rhetors
of the discourse are those who fit the criteria given to them by the exigence
of the community. They are in that discourse community for a reason and
rhetorical situation develops this reason as time goes on. These two things
are so important when analyzing the genre because usually the genre is the
tool used to convey information, but now they are being used now to define
what a genre is and its function.

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Works Cited
Allen, Matthew C. "The rhetorical situation of the scientific paper and the appearance of
objectivity." Young Scholars In Writing 2 (2015): 94-102.
Dirk, Kerry. "Navigating genres." writingspaces 1 (2010): 249. Online.
GrantDavie, Keith. "Rhetorical situations and their constituents." Rhetoric Review 15.2 (1997):
264-279.
Swales, John. "The concept of discourse community." Genre analysis: English in academic and
research settings (1990): 21-32.