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.