Anthea Meng

The Lazy Man’s Genre

When you are watching a movie, you are generally looking to be entertained. You enjoy

seeing visuals and actions laid out in front of you. You’ll hear music and dialogue that make you

feel a certain way. What you are learning or thinking about is right in front of you. However,

when you're reading an article, the visuals or sounds are taken away and the words on the page

are up to your interpretation. Since these two different genres will appeal to different audiences,

different conventions or styles will be used.

The article “Comparing Racial and Immigrant Health Status and Health Care Access in

Later Life in Canada and the United States” explores race and immigrant disparities in healthcare

across the United States and Canada. The article studies differences in healthcare between native

and foreign-born Whites and non-Whites. Throughout the article, the authors use certain writing

conventions to cater to those belonging to their discourse community. Discourse communities, as

defined by John Swales, a scholar in linguistics, are “groups that have goals or purposes, and use

communication to achieve these goals.”. Each discourse community includes the following

conventions, “mechanisms of intercommunication among members, specialized language, and a

threshold level of expert members”.1 For this article, the audience belongs to the discourse

community of Anthropology and their purpose is to study humans. First, the mechanisms of

intercommunication are research papers, researchers or experts communicate and gain

knowledge from each other through reading papers belonging to their discipline. This is

showcased through the conclusion of this article, where the authors offer potential research ideas,

“the next Canada–U.S. survey of health should further develop comprehensive measures of race

1 Melzer, Dan. “Understanding Discourse Communities.” Essay. In Writing Spaces, Vol. 3.

Parlor Press, 2020. pg 102.
Anthea Meng

and nativity”.2 Next, specialized language is needed “to make sure [researchers are] all playing

together effectively”.3 For this discourse community, a specialized language that is used is terms

regarding statistical analysis because when you are studying humans you will spend a lot of time

analyzing graphs and data. An example of this in the article would be saying that “the results are

reported as odds ratios” or mentioning “logistic regression”.4 Similarly, this brings up the

threshold level of expert members. To understand the analysis performed in the article, you will

need to understand different concepts and jargon for statistics. For example, you may need to

know what “SES” is or how “the analysis [is] conducted using the svy:logit function in STATA

9.0.”.5 Throughout this article, there is a lot of statistical analysis that would not be understood

by the general public, but would be understood by those belonging to the Anthropology

discourse community.

In contrast, documentaries aren’t catered to a certain discourse community but instead are

catered to the general public. There are various mechanisms of intercommunication and no

certain specialized language or threshold of expert members. You don’t need to acquire a set of

knowledge to understand or analyze data because you don’t have to interpret your own

2 Prus, Steven G., Rania Tfaily, and Zhiqiu Lin. “Comparing Racial and Immigrant Health
Status and Health Care Access in Later Life in Canada and the United States.” Canadian Journal
on Aging / La Revue canadienne du vieillissement 29, no. 3 (2010): 383–95.
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0714980810000358. pg 392.
3 Melzer, Dan. “Understanding Discourse Communities.” Essay. In Writing Spaces, Vol. 3.
Parlor Press, 2020. pg 105.
4 Prus, Steven G., Rania Tfaily, and Zhiqiu Lin. “Comparing Racial and Immigrant Health
Status and Health Care Access in Later Life in Canada and the United States.” Canadian Journal
on Aging / La Revue canadienne du vieillissement 29, no. 3 (2010): 383–95.
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0714980810000358. pg 386.

5 Prus, Steven G., Rania Tfaily, and Zhiqiu Lin. “Comparing Racial and Immigrant Health
Status and Health Care Access in Later Life in Canada and the United States.” Canadian Journal
on Aging / La Revue canadienne du vieillissement 29, no. 3 (2010): 383–95.
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0714980810000358. pg 386.
Anthea Meng

conclusions from statistical evidence. The evidence is already laid out in front of you. The

purpose of a documentary is to teach an audience by entertaining, which results in different

conventions than those you would see in an academic article. To captivate an audience,

documentaries use images, videos, music, and a certain tone in narration. Images or videos may

be used to evoke pathos, while music may be used to set the mood. Therefore, because of the

various conventions used, when a script for a documentary is written, filmmakers will often

create a table to organize their visuals and audio scene by scene. They may include 2 columns:

visuals and audio. In the visuals column, you may see a description of a shot, video, images, or

text displayed. In the narration column, the author may include music used, narration, dialogue,

or video transcripts. Additionally, each scene will be separated row by row. The purpose of a

script is to organize the documentary so that it will be easier to edit and cut all the footage that is

gathered. The script serves as a list of chronological actions that are made in the film. A reader

should be able to visualize the documentary from the script. The script is also used to ensure that

the film is organized in a way that makes sense to an audience.

In order to effectively translate my academic article into a documentary, I first took the

advice of Karen Rosenburg in “Reading Games”, and “consider[ed] the audience”.6 I asked

myself in each of the genres “when the writer sat down to write [my] assigned reading, to whom

was he or she implicitly talking to?”.7 As previously stated, the audience of an academic article

would be the Anthropology discourse community, while the audience of a documentary was the

general public. From this, I realized that the audience watching my documentary “won’t

6 Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.” In Writing
Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 2, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 210–220.
Parlor Press, 2011. pg. 213.
7 Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.” In Writing
Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 2, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 210–220.
Parlor Press, 2011. pg. 213.
Anthea Meng

understand all of the chatter you hear on street corners” and I had to help them “find and

understand [the] way”.8 To do this, I had to summarize the data and analysis without using the

statistical jargon that is present in the article. I decided that I would forgo the regression analysis

and use the percentages that were collected because the percentages alone were shocking

statistics that could be understood by a general audience. I would use the statistics of whites

compared to non-whites in each respective country and compare them to showcase the huge

disparity of the United State’s health care system. For example, I shared that “while only 5.3 %

of native-born white seniors did not have regular doctors, the percentages were 12.2% and 23.6%

for native- and foreign-born non-Whites respectively”. Additionally, I noticed that because of the

different audiences, the two genres would have different purposes, resulting in different biases.

The academic article would remain unbiased, while the documentary would be biased. The

academic article serves to share data with other members of the discourse community, while the

documentary will serve to showcase the huge disparity in health care with those of different race

or immigrant status. Throughout the academic article, the authors use only facts and evidence, to

ensure that the tone remains unbiased. For example, when the authors form a conclusion, they

say “we must be careful in concluding that the results of the current study are caused by deep-

seated racism in the United States”.9 to assert that they want the reader to establish their own

opinions. On the other hand, documentaries have a goal they are trying to accomplish in their

film. To ensure that my “goal” was completely backed up, I had to ignore certain data that would

disprove or weaken my claim. I only presented statistics that showcased a huge disparity in the

8 Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.” In Writing
Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 2, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 210–220.
Parlor Press, 2011. pg. 213.
9 Prus, Steven G., Rania Tfaily, and Zhiqiu Lin. “Comparing Racial and Immigrant Health
Status and Health Care Access in Later Life in Canada and the United States.” Canadian Journal
on Aging / La Revue canadienne du vieillissement 29, no. 3 (2010): 383–95.
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0714980810000358. pg 391.
Anthea Meng

United States but showcased little disparity in Canada. I had to remain completely biased

throughout the documentary and only use evidence that catered to my claim. As a result, I would

also only use biased videos. For example, I used a quote where Senator Bernie Sanders argued

that there was a substantial difference in health care based on socioeconomic status. Similarly, I

used interviews with the British public and their complete shock at the cost of US healthcare.

This was a powerful clip that proved that the issue of health care disparities is something that

shouldn’t even exist because it is shocking to citizens of other countries.

Finally, I also referenced Rosenburg to determine which sections of the academic article I

wouldn’t and would use. For example, Rosenburg shares that “an abstract is like an executive

summary” and will “encapsulate the main points of the article”.10 Since there is “a whole lot to

accomplish in one paragraph, authors often use specialized jargon to convey complex ideas in

few words, make assumptions of prior knowledge, and don’t worry much about general

readability”.11 Because of this, I decided to take time to translate the abstract into simple terms

that could be understood by the viewer and use the abstract as my introductory narration.

However, my main section of focus was the conclusion because that is usually where the “main

argument or idea”12 is discovered. I wanted to encapsulate the main points by using the strongest

statistics and evidence. From this section, I was able to understand and pull most of the statistics

that I would use in my documentary.

10 Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.” In Writing
Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 2, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 210–220.
Parlor Press, 2011. pg. 215.
11 Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.” In Writing
Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 2, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 210–220.
Parlor Press, 2011. pg. 216.

12 Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.” In Writing
Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 2, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 210–220.
Parlor Press, 2011. pg. 218.
Anthea Meng

Although both academic articles and documentaries have the purpose of teaching their

audience about a topic, they differ in their audience or discourse community, resulting in

differences in conventions used, like biases. In order to translate an academic article into a

documentary, you need to first cater to a general audience by simplifying words, translating

statistics, and adding additional conventions like visuals and audio, to entertain your audience.
Anthea Meng

Bibliography

1. Melzer, Dan. “Understanding Discourse Communities.” Essay. In Writing Spaces, Vol. 3.

Parlor Press, 2020.

2. Prus, Steven G., Rania Tfaily, and Zhiqiu Lin. “Comparing Racial and Immigrant Health
Status and Health Care Access in Later Life in Canada and the United States.” Canadian
Journal on Aging / La Revue canadienne du vieillissement 29, no. 3 (2010): 383–95.
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0714980810000358.
3. Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.” In

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 2, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel

Zemliansky, 210–220. Parlor Press, 2011.