Marking Territory by Lynda Walsh and Politeness, Power, and Activity Systems by Stephen Bremner Essay

Reading Commentary

Marking Territory by Lynda Walsh is an article responding to a research on the intermingling of administrative writing-style expressions and the feelings of stakeholders towards worldly objects. The author seeks to find out the various communication challenges that the Mexican Wolf Blue Range Reintroduction Project (MWBRRP) encounters.

A number of remarks, recorded randomly within a span of five years about the project, form the basis of the research. These comments on the other hand reveal the kind of attitude that the stakeholders depict towards the project and more so disclosing the communication styles of the administration that might be contributing towards the project’s prevailing challenges.

For instance, New Mexico and Arizona reintroduced the Mexican Gray Wolves following the implementation of the Endangered Species Act. However, it did not take long before the number reintroduced decreased by almost half. Challenges in monitoring the exact wolf-killing cases and exaggerated reports by the media among other factors are the major cited contributors of these variances.

Human reactions seem to play a major role in the failure of the wolf project. Failure to decompensate for any killing serves as one the many human factors contributing to the insurmountable challenges facing the wolf project.

Walsh argues that the realized death is not a product of the environment, but of the rhetorical landscape. Issues concerning communication and submission, agencies’ interpretations as well as stakeholders’ attitudes, are the major barriers of the expected success.

Therefore, according to these deductions, it is inferable that attitudes towards worldly forms coupled with those towards generic forms determine the rhetorical field of stakeholders’ interactions. However, based on the wolf scenario, Walsh’s stand that the physical environment is not a factor worthy considering is not valid given the evident effects that it has on animals.

For instance, the kind of animals expected in the dry areas must differ significantly from the ones in cold areas. The author ought to leave a chance for this possibility rather than declaring it very impossible to the wolves. In addition, the fact that the wolves have never recovered from extinction indicates an imperfection in the field of communication as per the author’s arguments.

The big question remains; is it possible to identify the prevailing barriers of the perfection, or the causes of the imperfection? Too, ‘should the barriers be found, will they solve the issue of extinction to any other affected species or it will only be restricted to the wolf family only?’

Politeness, Power, and Activity Systems is another article by Stephen Bremner that checks into details the challenges that writers encounter in their endeavor to strike a balance between the demands of their respective institutions and those of their society. A study of linguistics was done to help make inferences based on the choices they made.

The results revealed that the linguistic choices made were in favor of both the writers’ community and his/her institution of work or study. A study of these two factors based on politeness reveals power as a determining factor.

People ranking high seem capable of using directive words in their dialogues unlike their counterparts who are lower in the hierarchy. Therefore, there exists a strong positive correlation between power and politeness as revealed in the making of requests.

The author argues that these are not the only factors that explain the choices made. To account for varied readers, each with varied needs and interests is another challenge faced in the process of request making by writers. The author declares the writers’ job a complicated and a challenging business. These observations are true given that every task bears its own challenges.

However, the findings may not be accurate enough since they have aroused some possible questions. Statistically, before one makes a general inference about any issue, it calls for the incorporation of several parameters that can assist in improving the accuracy of the deduction.

Employing one only may not be enough. Therefore, should the author’s findings differ from other researchers’ findings that use several parameters, what then should be the author’s response on the issue of power and politeness?

Moreover, to make the study of politeness and request making perfect, some factors need critical considerations. However, to what extent should one consider these factors before validating the relationship between power and politeness?