Cassie Lagner- “When Discourses Collide”

The author that wrote this piece was Jason Palmeri. Jason Palmeri is an associate professor of English at Miami University (Ohio). He researched and taught the histories of composition, rhetoric, english education and many more. He likes to revisit many older composition writings as shown in the reading with all the dates. I feel his main audience would be people of his field. Maybe a person doing a research paper on the topic between attorneys and nurses but mostly people who are educated enough and just want to learn more. I feel this way because I feel he went into great detail about all the differences between attorneys and nurses and how they do professional writings in the field they work in and in their everyday lives. This text refers to discourse communities quite often in that nurses and attorneys can have two very different views of the same topic because of their professions and what they do in them. For example I really understood the part where he talks about how a nurses sentences are very choppy and not complete sentences compared to the sentences of an attorney. They explained this by demonstrating that a nurse does not have time to write full sentences when a patient is talking, so in order to get all the information they need to write however they feel is best. However, for an attorney, they need to right in full sentences because their writing styles are a lot more professional in that these writings could be shown to a judge or decide the decision of a court case. I felt that shows a discourse community because they are both doing the same thing, which is writing information for their profession, but they both have a different style of portraying the work. The main argument of this text, as I already sort of showed, was to show how the same topic can be demonstrated completely different depending on the environment you are a part of. This text shows the importance of rhetoric because it shows how rhetoric is shown differently between two professions. I felt that reading was a lot less dense than past ones because it was easy to follow and read.