...In this article, I will be introducing what a discourse community is and how I’m a part of one. A discourse community is a group of people who share common interest and common goals. In the article, we have been reading over the past couple of weeks John swales stated “A speech community typically inherits its membership by birth, accident or adoption; a discourse community recruits its members by persuasion, training or relevant qualification”. (Swales, 220). Swales also defines discourse community as a group that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals. A discourse community consist of a genre, intercommunication, and lexis. In a discourse community Members of a discourse community generally communicate to provide information and feedback to one another and discourse communities need at least one genre of communication intended to further their goals. The discourse community I feel I belong to is the track community. In the track community, I belong to we show every aspect of being a discourse community. Throughout the rest of my essay I will show how I belong to...
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...So what is a discourse community? When you google discourse community, you read, “It is a group of people sharing a common goal using communication to reach that common goal.”Getting more into detail what exactly is a discourse community, we have John Swales’ academic essay, ‘The Concept of Discourse Community’, which breaks it down into six characteristics: “1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals. 2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members. 3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback. 4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims. 5. In addition...
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...To maintain order in a community, one must adapt to the way of life in that community. In this sample discourse community analysis, the author speaks about joining the band community, and what kind of things he/she had to adapt to, and learn in order to successfully be part of said community. The author begins to build his/her credibility by effectively using the following strategies: diction, point of view, and tone. With the use of these devices, the author is able to appeal to their classmates on a more personal rather than professional level. In this essay, the author talks about having to learn about “the pyramid of sound,” which he/she states is very important in the band community. When describing the importance of this skill, the...
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...Now when reading thru the “Concept of a discourse community “ I found it a very difficult piece to write about. Really just reading thru it I found myself having to go back over it many times. So for this paper we were soppose to analize a part of the writing. So I decided to go over thse 6 chartestics that swalles talked about. Like I said swales came up with a set of guidelines that a discourse community has to meet to be actulla considered as a discourse community. The six characteristics that are to be included in a discourse community are common goals, participatory mechanisms, information exchange, community specific genre’s, a highly specialized terminology and a high general level of expertise (Swales, John. "The Concept of Discourse Community." (1990): 119-28. Print.)....
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...What would you say is Swales’ overall thesis for this article? What is he trying to prove? I believe Swale's overall thesis is that, the current definition for discourse community is vague and suggestive; centered around some main ideas but is still not well defined. I believe he is trying to prove that a specific set of characteristics must be present in order to define a discourse community. What discourse communities do you belong to professionally and personally? What discourse community do you hope to belong to in a future profession? Name at least one from each category. Professionally, I belong to the retail discourse community because I am currently working at Victoria's Secret. Personally, I belong to the discourse community of business...
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...Robert Kelly Holly Kopcha ENGL 2089 106 3/6/2016 Marching Band The marching band is a community all their own. They all speak to each other in a language that is all their own. It was always easy to spot someone in school who was a “band kid” because of the way they carried themselves or the way they talked or the people they associated with. Kids in the marching band hang out with each other during and outside of school. They are a community all their own with unique characteristics. The marching band has specific goals that they set for themselves as well as for the group. Individually the members of the marching band have their own goals that they need to accomplish for the ultimate goal of making the group better. Each member will practice their music at home or in the practice rooms during class in order to get better at memorizing and accenting their music. They do this to help the group sound better when they are at competition. Band member also have a goal to memorize their drill sheets. This helps them to where they are supposed to be on the field at a certain time. Doing this helps the group look more unified in their formations. The group’s goals are to perform well at competitions and ultimately win a trophy for their school. To obtain this goal the group will practice for 2-4 days a week. Depending on the day or what needs work they will either work on drill or their music. Drill is the position in which the person should be in a specific time during...
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...Micro-Ethnography discourse communities exist worldwide from communities who represent single mothers, to employees working within the workforce, to those who commute to work every day where they may be involved in either leadership or support roles, to those who participate in sports, or those who simply participate in extracurricular activities such as a church group or simply groups of people whom share the same goals, language, interests, or practices, or religion. Social discourse communities encompass any group of 2 or more members which share a common set of goals or duties or simply share a similar group dynamic. Within Gee’s “What Is Literacy?” Gee identifies the broad definition of a discourse. Gee writes, A socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking and acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or “social network. (1) Most can easily identify with many separate discourses as a result from their raising such as in “Speaking in Tongues” or as a result of their education and adaptability to their environments as in “First They Changed My Name”. Human’s ability to adapt uses our “Get in where you fit in” mind set. Acting as one’s camouflage allows us as humans to avoid sticking out and instead encourages our abilities to blend in with the crowd and not be treated differently or singled out from the majority. While working within a very upstanding company, I was recently promoted to Environmental...
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...My discourse community is the music community. I am very dedicated to music and this is something I quite literally want to do with my life. I don’t want to be like Prince, or Akon, or even Beyoncé; I want to be the artist that does her own thing. I’m a rookie. I’m not entirely sure where I am going but the factor that I hold onto is expression. Sometimes, I imagine myself on stage, singing to the crowds, not a care in the world but just losing yourself. That is a day dream. There are quite a few factors on being a successful musician. I took a poll from my classmates and told them to rate my options from 1 to being the most important and 3 being the least important. My options were, ‘real talk’, ‘dedication’, and ‘good audio’. In all of them...
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...subjects that interest or relate to them. Everyone has their own way of writing, but their way was influenced by another source whether they know it or not. Individuality in writing is influenced through transferability. Technical writing is something that is learned. In school everyone was taught how to format an essay or different types of writing like poems or stories. Anything that I did in class I was always given a template of how the instructor wanted the paper to be written. This would have word count, the format, and what the paper should be about. All throughout school we learned the fundamentals of writing starting with letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, to structures of writing like essays and poems. The thing that is learned from writing is technical. As my English education grows the technical side is less focused on while the content is the most important thing. Content is the writing that I am doing now. The content portion of writing is not learned but influenced by others. My writing becomes influenced through examples like essays. In this English class, I believe that that’s how these three previous essays worked out. The Scholarly Discourse Unit paper was a paper that had us synthesize how we thought the writers Gee, Swales, and Porter connected to each other. I used transferability to apply the knowledge that I got from each of the three sources and created an argument that I could synthesize with each other. This paper gave me the opportunity to express...
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...87 .,~. Peer Tutoring and the "Conversation of Mankind" by Kenneth A. Bruffee The beginnings of peer tutoring lie in practice, not in theory. A decade or so ago, faculty and administrators in a few institutions around the country became aware that, increasingly, students entering college had difficulty doing as well in academic studies as their abilities suggested they should be able to do. Some of these students were in many ways poorly prepared academically. Many more of them, however, had on paper excellent secondary preparation. The common denominator among the poorly prepared and the apparently well prepared seemed to be that, for cultural reasons we may not yet fully under stand, all these students had difficulty adapting to the traditional or "normal" conventions of the college classroom. One symptom of the difficulty was that many of these students refuSed .help when it was offered. Mainly, colleges offered ancillary programs staffed by professionals. Students avoided them in droves. Many solutions to this problem were suggested and tried, from mandated programs to sink-or-swim. One idea that seemed at the time among the most exotic and unlikely (that is, in the jargon of the Sixties, among the most "radical") turned out to work rather well. Some of us had guessed that students were refusing the help we were providing because it seemed to them merely an extension of the work, the expectations, and above all the social structure of traditional classroom learning. And...
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...Preface/Unit Reflection I had many thoughts about my audience and the format of this essay before I started, but as I haven’t done essays in a long time (business majors usually focus on projects, not essays), I decided that I wanted to write my first project in a straightforward fashion. I feel that I need to get the rust off my writing, so to speak I chose to write to the rest of the class because 1) They will be peer reviewing it, so it’s convenient for them that they are the target audience and 2) I could express my thoughts in a straightforward fashion that my audience can relate to very well, as they are in the same position as I am. I wrote this essay as if I was writing to an intellectual friend who is also taking this class, is very interested in English and entrepreneurship, and wanted to see how the two topics coincided through the lens of genre analysis. I assumed that the reader knew the definitions of materiality, genre and genre analysis, and discourse community, as the intended reader is in this class and has done the readings. Surprisingly, I learned a lot about my field through reading and writing for this unit. I really loved the challenging readings, as it seemed as if I were “getting smarter” reading them. Pushing my brain processing abilities is great for my brain’s capabilities, which I value. As I wrote, I would constantly think of new ideas about my field, such as the materiality of online articles in an entrepreneur’s life, and think hard. I appreciate...
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...When beginning Higher Education, students at University face some unique clashes. According to Bizzell (1986) those three clashes are Clashes of Dialect, Clashes of Discourse and Clashes of worldwide views. For new students who have never encountered University life before, it is said to be a completely different environment, one which can be very intimidating. Students find themselves out of their comfort zone and facing new challenges which can be very overwhelming. Angela Thomas-Jones (2012) stated “beginning your own studies at university requires a culture adjustment in order to succeed. It is a new culture that needs to be given time to adapt to. Becoming familiar with the knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, values and practices of the university culture is the key to successful acculturation”. Some of the reasons why these clashes may have meaning to many students is due to the pressure individual students put on themselves to achieve good grades, be successful and be accepted amongst peers. Throughout my essay I will discuss in detail each of the three clashes outlined by Bizzell (1986). The first clash mentioned by Bizzell (1986) was the Clash of Dialect. This refers to the language being used by students within the university community. The basic writers are those students who experience the greatest distance between their home dialects and Standard English, the preferred dialect in school (Bizzell 1986). The dialect within university is something that students need to adapt...
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...Brianna Hicks Debbie Weaver ENC 1102- Section BW64 07.15.15 Discourse is in the Stars I am one of those people that looks to the stars for answers. I crave my daily horoscope and knowing where my moon and star align. I love knowing who or what I would be based on the characteristics of my zodiac sign. One of my favorite zodiac blogs is zodiac signs by Crystal Melbourne, a professional astrologer. I look at her Tumblr blog daily and sometimes multiple times during the day. It wasn’t until two weeks ago when I joined this class that I thought about how it can be categorized as a discourse community. A discourse community is a group of people that share a set of beliefs and understandings. In this essay, that we all as a class are required to write, I will be dissecting the different parts of this Tumblr blog that make it a discourse community. Before going too far into the rhetorical situation of this blog, I will give a little bit of background for those newbies out there who have no clue what astrology or a horoscope is. I will also give you some of the important language that will be found throughout this essay. First off, astrology is the study of the positions and relationships of the sun, moon, stars, and planets in order to judge their influence on human actions. A horoscope is a diagram of the heavens, showing the relative position of planets and the signs of the zodiac, for use in calculating births, foretelling events in a person’s life, etc. Zodiac is an imaginary...
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...Composition Pedagogy, Race, and the African American Student: An Annotated Bibliography Bernstein, Susan Naomi. “Writing and White Privilege: Beyond Basic Skills.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 4.1 (2004): 128-31. Evaluating the relationship between white, middle-class privilege and both standardized testing and standard conventions of writing, Bernstein offers a classroom strategy for underprivileged students (either from racial or class position or both) to counter the negative effects of academic standards in relegating them to remedial positions in order to acquire basic writing skills before being granted access to the university at large. Encouraging her students to explore their previous educational experiences related to both testing and writing through a workshop format, as well as to evaluate their own imaginative writing and the reading of creative texts, Bernstein found that these can be used as means of critical resistance to their remedial designations. Ultimately, though, she concludes that it is not the student’s responsibility alone to resist relegation but also educators as well, who need to address and seek to resolve the conditions that produce “basic writers” even before their arrival at the university, and this, according to the author, will produce an awareness and restructuring of white privilege in determining academic success. Campbell, Kermit E. “ ‘Real Niggaz’s Don’t Die’: African...
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...Constraints * Exigence 2. How can a reader use the rhetorical situation to analyze an argument essay? How can a viewer use the rhetorical situation to analyze an image? How can a writer use the rhetorical situation during the planning phase of writing a paper? They can all use TRACE to analyze all of those objects. 3. Why is the audience important in argument? What types of positions might an audience initially hold? What possible outcomes are associated with arguments directed to each of these audiences? The audience is important because without the audience you have no argument. You’re trying to convince people of your beliefs, hence why you need an audience. The audience may initially be a friendly audience, an undecided audience, a neutral audience, a hostile audience, an unfamiliar audience, or a linked audience. Possible outcomes are convincing people to your cause, pushing people away from your cause to the opposing side, people could remain bias, and people could become angry and/or violent towards you and your argument. 4. What is a discourse community? To what discourse communities do you belong? How does a discourse community help establish common ground for its members? A discourse community is a group of people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals. I belong to several discourse communities of which I don’t know how to label them. It helps to establish common ground for its members...
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