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"Cover your Tracks"

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

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.

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