1. Mirabelli describes the purpose of this chapter as his exploration of waiters and waitresses and how they interact with customers. Specifically, how they “read” texts, how they communicate and how they present themselves. Mirabelli aims to aid people in gaining a further understanding of the lives of service workers, and hoping they can earn more respect and recognition for the skill that these workers do actually have and use on a daily basis.

A waiter uses literacy when using the menu because a menu is a genre itself. The waiters and waitresses have to be able to have some knowledge of the menu to be able to help the customers when they have a special request or question. Also, it is helpful to know the process of how the food is prepared to be able to reciprocate to the customers how it is made to be able to answer their questions and assist them when they need to modify something.

Mirabelli describes how waiters “get the jump” in fine dining restaurants by having authority and influence on what the customers can order. The way the menu is portrayed to the customers could impact what they would want to order. How waiters and waitresses describe food and knowing what products will sell can highly encourage what the customers will order.

2. The author, Tony Mirabelli, intends to provide his readers with a better understanding of service workers and how their job does indeed require skill and knowledge, even though people have seen them at times as “mindless”. The author was once a waiter himself, so I believe he is responding to personal events in the sense that he personally knows that the job required literacy. I think Mirabelli is also responding to social events in the fact that waiters and waitresses can be seen in a negative light, when the job really requires a lot of skills to keep a healthy environment.

I believe the intended readers the author is trying to address are fellow servers and people that come into contact with these service workers, so possibly customers. I think he is trying to relate to waiters and waitresses on a personal level and then bring recognition to customers and those that interact with servers so they are aware of the type of work these servers perform. The author uses personal examples of his experience and his fellow workers when working in a restaurant to get his point across to his readers.

Mirabelli appeals to reason by relying on personal experience and to show his truth. He somewhat uses emotion to get his point across by talking about his personal encounters with customers and his fellow employees interactions with customers as well, and he shows how they felt during these interactions. The author does not necessarily rely on his reputation or authority to make his point to the readers, he focuses more on personal experience, opinion and fact.

The text is structured and could be considered as a persuasion text. The author begins his text with talking about how people can look down upon servers, and the purpose of this text is to convince his readers to have a better recognition and appreciation for service workers. I think the author’s use of personal examples really assists with him trying to get his point across to his readers. I have been a server for many years, so I was able to relate to the author and agree with his statements made. I feel as if many of the readers were able to see from the author’s perspective, allowing them to also relate and be convinced of servers having literacy. If this was to fail with any of the audience, I would feel as if it would be someone who has been privileged their whole life and who has never had a service job.

3. The writer is Tony Mirabelli, a former waiter. His intended audience would be fellow waiters or waitresses, or potential customers. The issue that the author is trying to bring a light to, is the negative outlook on servers and he is aiming to bring a sense of recognition and respect to service workers. The gap would be the use of personal experience and clear examples of how service workers are indeed literate.

4. The discourse community that Mirabelli is functioning in could be a community of service workers. The genre expectations would be to offer facts, beliefs and opinions to persuade the readers to share the same beliefs or opinions as the author. The author offered factual evidence, personal beliefs and opinions based on experience to convince his reader of the point that he was attempting to get across.

The method of preferred communication is written communication, providing an identical message to a large amount of people. The stated goal of the discourse community is to provide the readers with a server’s perspective and give them the ability to earn respect from those who interact with service workers.

The lexis Mirabelli uses is simple. He seems to come from an evaluative and informal standpoint. Mirabelli uses a lot of personal experience and did an experimental procedure within his workspace to test his beliefs and get his point across. I believe Mirabelli received feedback in such a way that service workers would appreciate his work, or those that did not see the situation from his perspective now do and can appreciate and respect service workers. There is also a chance of those who do not agree with his opinion and can provide the author with negative feedback. The threshold level of membership that Mirabelli had to achieve to participate was extremely active. Mirabelli had to be able to strongly relate to service workers, to provide his readers with a strong argument, and he was able to do so because of his experience as a service worker.

5. This is discourse, for a server discourse community. This is an example of a discourse community because all of the members of this community are able to relate to each other on a personal level and it has all of the six characteristics Swales provides to define a discourse community. All of the members have to possess a particular form of language that is appropriate for the work space and to maintain a specific atmosphere for all of the other members.