Blog 11: Palmeri

The author of “When Discourses Collide” is Jason Palmeri, who is an associate professor of English at Miami University. At the time that this piece was written, he was a doctoral student of English at Ohio State University. The text was published in a Journal of Business Communication, so the primary audience is most likely academics in the field of business communication, as well as academics in the field of rhetoric.

The text implies that rhetoric is writing with a purpose, such as to provide facts or persuade an audience. The text implies that genre is similar to the rhetorical context/discourse someone is writing in, for example a legal deposition or a medical report.

The main argument of the text is that the difference in discourse communities between nurse consultants and attorneys can lead to miscommunications and disagreements. Another aspect of the main argument is that writers on the team can help mediate the conflicts by helping to “translate” the objective medical facts into persuasive legal language and combine the two aspects of the case into a cohesive narrative.

The text discusses how certain styles of writing are more important to/ appropriate for the different discourses of law and medicine, and writers are important to manage this conflict, because they know how to adapt works of rhetoric to fit the audience and conventions of what genre they are writing in. Rhetoric is very important in all fields, and each field has different expectations for what is acceptable writing within that discourse. Palmeri highlights the way the discourse communities people belong to and their past experience with these discourses impacts the way they write, including the tone they use (objective or persuasive), their word choice (complex medical terms or more layman’s terms), the grammatical conventions they follow, the detail they go into, and many other aspects of their writing style.