Robert Mahoney Professor Walcott ENC 1101 (11:30am-12:20pm) 7 November 2012 Mirabelli, Ann.

"Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers." Writing about Writing: A College Reader. By Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 538-556. Print. Summary
Mirabelli starts his article by giving us a webpage which is a worker prudced website associated with the service industry. He explains the whole website and then dives into an example which maps out the rest of his article, waiters and waitresses. He explains the assumptions and stereotypes of waiters and watresses which are that they are ignorant and stupid and that waiting on tables contributes little to society. He begins with the Literary and Contemporary Theory where he cites Gee as a supporting argument. He then follows with his methodology in which he explains how he setup his entire experiment, how he gathered his data, and then how he came to his conclusion. He explains that he studied two restaurants, a private and corporate, but that he only implemented the private restaurant into this chapter. Then he goes into his experiment by starting with Lou's Restaurant where he says he used to work during the data collection process. Following the summary of the restaurant, he moves onto the most important aspect of the article, the menu. He names a few food items off of the menu and then gives us real time experiences that he and other waiters had with the menu. After all of the data he provides us with, he sums up his entire article with the conclusion.

Analysis
Unlike the previous articles written, Mirabelli implements and mentions all of the other writers in this chapter. He brings in a little bit of everyone's insight to either argue or back up his analysis. Most notably he brings in Swales' "genre" where he explains the menu of the restaurant and how it is the most important aspect of this specific discourse community. One thing I didn't like about his experiment was the fact that he participated in his own discourse community that he was greatly familiar with and most likely biased for. Though he did get great first hand information, you can't fully understand the discourse unless you're an outsider looking in. While he was able to access deeper information being in the discourse, I believe he could have recieved the same data if he would have asked a member of a separate restaurant to sit down and have an interview. Otherwise I think the methodology worked well. Personally I don't entirely agree with the stereotype of waiters and waitresses, but if you're well into your adulthood and still waiting tables then there's simply no work ethic coming out of you; this excludes any disabled or young adults working through college.