Understanding Genre through the Lens of Advocacy: The Rhetorical Work of the Victim Impact Statement

Abstract

Through interviews with judges and victim advocates, courtroom observations, and rhetorical analyses of victims’ reactions to proposed sentences, the authors examine the features that judges and advocates think make victims’ arguments persuasive.The authors conclude that this genre, recently imposed upon the court, functions as a mediating device through which advocates push for collective change, particularly for judicial acceptance of personal and emotional appeals. This study understands genres as responsive to changes within the activity systems in which they work and extends knowledge about genres that function as advocacy tools within internal institutional systems.

Toward a Typology of Activities

“…They tend to focus internally (Cameron & Quinn, 2011) and to define the outcome in terms determined by the actors who pulse the object, not by the community stakeholders who receive it-for instance, by the company that owns the assembly line rather than by the customers who receive the products. In Propen and Schuster's (2010) case, judges and victim advocates knew and accepted the limitations of their roles. Judges in particular valued the ability to make two trust-building moves via the available genres in the courtroom: They could display ''objectivity and neutrality'' in their work via the sentencing guidelines yet still show compassion by taking the VIS into account (p. 27).…”

Emotions and the Criminal Law

“…This proposal was meant to empower the victim, bring her back to the court as more than a mere witness, and give her an opportunity to express what she felt in the wake of the crime. Yet the empirical research regarding the impact these statements had on jurors and judges inconclusively points to opposite directions (Nadler and Rose; Gordon and Brodsky; Propen and Lay Schuster), giving rise to sceptical fears that harsher sentences could be given because of VISs, that similar cases will be decided differently depending on the victims’ capacity to persuasively communicate emotions, and that race and social class affinities between jurors and the victims will bias the proceedings against the defendant. The emotional experience of harm varies so widely across persons so as not to be a reliable guide to deciding the severity of harm and culpability (Nadler and Rose).…”

Contemporary Research Methodologies in Technical Communication

“…Activity theory, which was introduced to professional communication via Bazerman (1988), Russell (1995Russell ( , 1997a, and Berkenkotter and Huckin (1993), has been widely used in technical communication to study how genres are durable, suasive, and mediatory within specific activity systems (Fraiberg, 2013;Kain & Wardle, 2005;McCarthy, Grabill, Hart-Davidson, & McLeod, 2011), across linked activity systems (Gygi & Zachry, 2010;McNair & Paretti, 2010), and in broader networks (Ding, 2008;Propen & Schuster, 2010;Sherlock, 2009;Spinuzzi, 2008Spinuzzi, , 2012. (For more detailed overviews of studies involving genre and activity theory, see Russell, 1997b; Activity theory posits a clear asymmetry between communicators and their tools and technologies.…”