Adriane Conner Genre Analysis

To start of my Genre analysis of my discourse community of Clinical Research of Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair, I will first explain my definition of genre based of my readings of tis discourse community. When going through and getting a feel for what this discourse community is really about and how they speak to one another it was quite easy for me to get a grasp of their definition of genre. They see their genre as those who know the ends and outs of the subjects at hand with in the discourse community will easily understand the genre while those who dont know the subjects or those who dont specialize in the subjects/topics will not be able to understand their genre and ultimately can never become a member of their discourse community. In the analysis of the genre of my discourse community I found it relatively easy to find their genres due to the availability of UCF library and the fact that they pay for databases and articles to be readily available to UCF students. These articles all talk about Neurorehabilitation and neural repair. They have different subtopics all talking about different tactics on how to repair the brain after injury or neural disorders. The people who would read this are neurosurgeons or neurologists or anyone who is interested in the topic and have the articles available to them. Those who cannot read these articles are those who dont have the resources to get them. Those who can understand these articles are of course those who deal with this subject in medicine. If you dont understand concepts of medicine, it will be highly difficult for you to understand this discourse communitys genre. This text has a lot of words about research and the things that could ultimately help with the repair of the brain and neurons seeing that it is a research based discourse community looking to find ways to better repair the brain, spinal cord, and over all nervous system. They bold lots of topics and subtopics and have many picture visuals to show and further explain all the words in the article. Each article is at least ten to fifteen pages long and includes references from other articles throughout the text. One big thing that really stands out is its use of graphic pictures to further explain the subtopics of each article. In all the articles they all start with an introduction introducing the problem or topic that is being researched. They start off describing what is happening and what needs to be fixed saying things like Upper-limb motor deficit following stroke is common (Vliet et al., 622) or things like there has been increasing awareness of changes in sleep following traumatic brain injury (Ponsford et al., 613) which all introduce what the research article will be talking about, explaining, and ultimately finding the solution to the problem or topic being researched. Immediately following the introduction, each article goes into the methods of how the research is/was conducted going into moderately great detail on how the methods will work in the best interest of the topic/problem that is being solved. These methods not only include explanation through words but also through visuals. Quite a few pages of each article consists of graphs, chats, visual pictures of the results, etc., which all depict the data in a way that the discourse community can understand. If one is not part of this discourse community or dont know anything about the topic at hand, they would not be able to understand the genre of this discourse community at all. In other words basic knowledge would not suffice in the understanding, comprehending, and easily penetrating the genre and the discourse community. For example, Kern et al, talks about electrical stimulus rescues paraplegic patients. If you didnt know what paraplegic meant or anything that has to do with lower motor neuron lesion (Kern et al., 709) you would be completely lost in this discourse community and wouldnt be able to

Adriane Conner understand or comprehend anything that the discourse community was conveying to each other within the discourse community itself. In simpler terms, from the outside looking in you will remain an outsider when it comes to this discourse community and its genre. After going through the intro, the methods, and the results, a conclusion is made showing how the whole process of the research helped solve the problem and why, giving a full run down of why the method worked and how it is solving the problem today. This part of the articles can only be truly understood by those of the discourse community and can never be understood by those outside the discourse community or those with no background of comprehension in the subject matter of each article of genre for the discourse community. All in all, my discourse community is one that is complex and its genre can only be understood to those who specialize in it, or have background knowledge of the topics that they cover within the discourse community.

Works Cited

Helmut Kern, Ugo Carraro, Nicoletta Adami, Donatella Biral, Christian Hofer, Claudia Forstner, Michaela Mdlin, Michael Vogelauer, Amber Pond, Simona Boncompagni, Cecilia Paolini, Winfried Mayr, Feliciano Protasi, Sandra Zampieri . Home-Based Functional Electrical Stimulation Rescues Permanently Denervated Muscles in Paraplegic Patients With Complete Lower Motor Neuron Lesion. Neurorehabilitation & Neural Repair, Volume 24, Number 8 (October 2010), pp. 709-721, http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=4BFAB8F95D6E968ADE42 Jennie Ponsford, Diane Parcell, Kelly Sinclair, Monique Roper, Shantha Rajaratnam. Changes in Sleep Patterns Following Traumatic Brain Injury. Neurorehabilitation & Neural Repair, Volume 27, Number 7 (September 2013), pp. 613-621, http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=4A77ABC2500E311FBE3F Paulette van Vliet, Trudy Pelton, Kristen Hollands, Leeanne Carey, Alan Wing. Neuroscience Findings on Coordination of Reaching to Grasp an Object. Neurorehabilitation & Neural Repair, Volume 27, Number 7 (September 2013), pp. 622-635, http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=4A46825E2A600A01A514

Adriane Conner