I’ll preface this by saying I really struggled with this reading. It was writing for the public, but a public of which I am not a member. I think Miller’s idea of seeing genre in the context of social action as opposed to formal qualities is about the importance she places on content as opposed to classification for classification’s sake. Social action permits an observer to develop a more intimate understanding of whatever writing/media is being classified. It is limiting to let a simple label to inform our understanding of a “…genre as typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations”. Rather, it has to be an amalgam of form and substance. I really liked how Miller described form here. She says, “A work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence. Form shapes the response of the reader or listener to substance by providing instruction, so to speak, about how to perceive and interpret…” It made me think about the NPR piece we listened to this past week. As a regular listener, I expect those interviews to follow similar procedures, especially when it comes to breaking up the monotony of the correspondent with music, sounds from the location (like the scrubbing of the headstones or the crunch of leaves while walking through the cemetery). It is somewhat gratifying to expect something and for that expectation to be validated. Some of this concept goes back to what we were discussing earlier in the course about how an audience rarely wants to be preached to or commanded. You can lead them in a direction and make limited suggestions that allows them to “decide” for themselves. By providing the structure of a form that is navigable as well, it might make a thesis or campaign goal resonate more strongly and be that much more effective in persuading an audience.
After reading this post, I do have a new and certainly a deeper understanding of Miller’s article. I totally agree with the opinion in the post that “really struggled with this reading”. That’s what I felt either. My initial understanding for the article was that Miller was more talking about how people’s social actions take place in the genre of writing. Therefore, we should consider more our target group’s potential responses regarding the writing so we know how to make our writing more persuasive for the public.
However, after reading this post, I started to think from another direction and try to understand how audiences’ minds can be affected or even changed by using different kind of forms. Just like what is saying in the post, “you can lead them and make limited suggestions that allows them to decide for themselves”. I learned a lot from this sentence. It’s very true that we can utilize how we deliver to make some impacts on people. For example, for some people, music is really a more effective way to let them understand because resonance can be found in the music. But, we have to notice that this kind of impact can only be “limited”. Most people have their thoughts and minds that might not be changed easily. Therefore, utilizing appropriate forms and structures do have influence on minds of audiences but not always neither fully.
I definitely agree on your first point. Miller is overly verbose and adds unnecessary complexity to her dissertation that would dilute her message if it were aimed at a regular reader. I also agree with the idea that Miller’s point was that the content is the best way to define a piece. If our campaign pieces are designed to call the public into action, is that message not more important that the classification it falls under? You also made a good point with gratifying the reader. It would probably be effective in our campaign pieces to give the reader information to lead them towards the conclusion that we want to make, before we outright state ours. This way, the reader will make a conclusion themselves and, at the end, they will be happy to have their newly developed opinions validated.