Jeffrey Le

10/23/14
Learning to Serve
1. Mirabelli started his article by citing a website called www.bitterwatress.com talking
about the stereotype of how waiters are illiterate. I think its different because he just cut
to the chase and said what the article is about.
2. He focused on the restaurant discourse community because he wanted to break the
stereotype of waiters being dumb. He wanted to know why waiters have that image in
the first place. His discourse community was unique in my opinion and its not typical.
3. Literacy to him is embedded into social practice and being literate is to have control of a
socially accepted association among ways of using language. Multi - literacies is
basically the awareness of linguistic diversity.
4. Maribellis question seems to be What do waiters do? and What does it take to be a
waiter he wanted to know about the profession after the introduction paragraph. His
research was observing a waiters manipulation skills with his customers and their
literacy.
5. He focused on the menu because it is the most important thing to know of in a restaurant.
Its an effective focus because everyone had to know it. It answers his question regarding
the multi-literacy of the waiter he was observing.
6.

I agree because you have to know body language ti figure out what people are actually
saying in their heads. You can use this to manipulate people by knowing the menu and
just giving information about to the customers because they will think that you know
what you are serving.

Article Reflection
I feel like this ethnography assignment is going to be difficult because I have no idea what my
discourse community is going to be. I learned a few things from this article like multi-literacy,
which is cultural awareness and linguistic diversity. This article helped me when it comes to
preparing for my observations. I also have to keep in mind that when Im observing a discourse
community, it is a different culture, so I have to be wary of multi-literacies, Itll help my
observations because my perspective wouldnt be extremely biased as I am an outsider of the
community.