When Discourses Collide

Jason Palmeri is an Associate Professor of English at Miami University, and previously worked in a law firm focused on medical malpractice. The primary audience for this text seems to be scholars and other rhetoricians in his field, as well as medical and legal teams, especially ones that collaborate. Palmeri talks about how each group within the law firm has a different genre, or standard response or expectation, as to what their documents should look like. The nurses fill their documents with a lot of medial detail, but also short, choppy sentences. On the flip side, the attorneys make their documents very grammatically proficient, but like to focus on a few tangible events or medical situations. This is seen when the nurse consultant believed that the UTI being the cause of death should be the main focus, clashed with the attorney saying that the gangrene should be the focus because it was easier for someone not in the medical field to tie to the death. The main argument of this text is that discourse may clash with each other in three ways when they have to collaborate with each other. Discursive conflict is when there is a disagreement about which discourse convention should be used, epistemological conflict is when there is a disagreement between what constitutes as evidence, and bypassing is when two discourse communities have a different definition for the same word. This text says that rhetoric in these fields are very important, but very different. These clashes are not necessarily positive or negative, but just the result of the clashing discourses. While in a medical setting, the rhetoric a nurse or doctor would use is very short, detailed, and objective. However, in a legal setting, the rhetoric an attorney would use is very persuasive and based more so on how it is framed rather than how much detail there is. Palmeri says that rather than trying to eliminate or maximize conflicts, organizations must find strategies to productively use conflicts between discourse groups to further the organization’s goals.