Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Click here for more information

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Journal of Business and Technical Communication
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via HighWire
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by GOODWIN, J. T.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
 Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

"Cover your Tracks"

A Case Study of Genre, Rhetoric, and Ideology in Two Psycholegal Reports

JILL TOMASSON GOODWIN

University of Waterloo

Expert legal reports exhibit what Carolyn Miller calls the "pragmatic dimension" of genre, namely, a capacity to engage in two very different kinds of discursive activities simultaneously: The first, what I call the strategic function, "helps virtual communities, the relationships we carry around in our heads, to reproduce and reconstruct themselves," and the second, what I call the tactical function, "help[s] real people in spatio-temporal communities to do their work and carry out their purposes" (75). This article examines two psycholegal reports, showing how these strategic and tactical activities work together in a way that is complementary and ideological: complementary, because the relationship is one of foreground to background, with the strategic activity of the report predominating—and thus covering over—its tactical operations; ideological, because both activities serve to naturalize and reproduce the status of experts and of the law generally.

Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Vol. 10, No. 2, 167-186 (1996)
DOI: 10.1177/1050651996010002003


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
Business Communication QuarterlyHome page
D. A. Jameson
Implication versus Inference: Analyzing Writer and Reader Representations in Business Texts
Business Communication Quarterly, December 1, 2004; 67(4): 387 - 411.
[Abstract] [PDF]


Home page
Journal of Business CommunicationHome page
T. Clark
The Impact of Candid Versus Legally Defensible Language on the Persuasiveness of Environmental Self-Assessments
Journal of Business Communication, July 1, 1998; 35(3): 368 - 382.
[Abstract] [PDF]