Professional Citation Practices in Child Maltreatment Forensic Letters

Abstract

Using rhetorical genre theory and research on reported speech, this study investigates the citation practices in 81 forensic letters written by paediatricians and nurse practitioners that provide their opinion for the courts as to whether a child has experienced maltreatment. These letters exist in a complex social situation where a lack of clarity exists as to which professional group (healthcare providers, police, social workers) is primarily responsible for gathering accounts of children’s injuries. Yet physicians need these accounts into order to compare them to actual injuries. The study documents the direct and indirect citations that occur in the letters, observes documentation strategies, notes the instances in which partial breakdowns in citation occur, and points to the linguistic factors contributing to these breakdowns.

Intertextual Voices of Children, Parents, and Specialists in Individual Education Plans

“…In addition to the aforementioned explicit linguistic markers, intertextuality can also be constructed implicitly without quotations and reporting clauses and without specifically indicating the source of the information (see Linell, 1998). Schryer et al (2011) refer to this kind of insufficiently attributed citations as incomplete or partial expressions.…”

“…Based on the studied IEPs, this is not always the case even though in the majority of the document forms, sections for the child's and the parents' viewpoints were included. In writing an IEP, participation can be enhanced, for example, by referring directly to the child's viewpoint (see also Schryer et al, 2011).…”

Time, the Written Record, and Professional Practice: The Case of Contemporary Social Work

“…In terms of scope or focus, empirical research in writing/literacy studies can be characterized as being “topic-oriented” (Snell et al, 2015, p. 7, after Hymes, 1996), that is, as exploring a particular dimension to a sociocultural practice rather than claiming to explore a “culture” or “society” in its entirety, for example, by focusing on a particular domain (e.g., writing in educational institutions—school, college, university, etc., a key preoccupation of writing studies). This can often involve focusing on one specific textual practice within a particular domain (e.g., Wickman’s 2010 study of laboratory notebooks in chemical physics; Noy’s 2015 study of visitor books in museums) or a micro-textual (linguistic or rhetorical) practice (e.g., Schryer et al’s 2011 study of citations in forensic letters).…”

Borrowed Authority

“…The use of citation as a means of establishing and maintaining authority has deep and broad interest for a number of different fields—anthropology (Goodman, Tomlinson, & Richland, 2014), information science (Halevi & Moed, 2013), rhetoric (Connors, 1999), writing studies (Swales, 2014), professional health communication (Schryer, Bell, Mian, Spafford, & Lingard, 2011), and scientific and technical writing (Cronin & Shaw, 2002)—to name just a few. This is partly because, as Swales (2014) has pointed out, if performed according to a discourse community’s norms, citation constitutes participation in a given system of knowledge and expertise.…”