The genre element in the systems analyst’s interview

It has been estimated by those who work in the computing industry that sixty per cent of their time is taken up in communication and only forty per cent is spent on technical work. There is then a clear need to develop the communicative abilities of those in the computer industry. Well designed communication courses for people in computing would benefit from linguistic descriptions of the discourses of this industry. A linguistic description of the structure and genre of the systems analyst’s interview should provide the basis for some of these courses. This paper discusses the genre of the two major types of interviews used by systems analysts and identifies the genre element as the unit of discourse structure that links the lower level and higher level units of discourse structure within systemic linguistics. It draws upon data collected from the depth phase of a national systems analysis project. It is argued that for a full linguistic description of the structure of lengthy speech events within a systemic linguistics framework it is necessary to take both a top down (generic) and bottom up (discourse units) approach.