...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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...The definition of a discourse community is a group of people that have the same interest, shared the same goal with one and another, have the same language/ vocabulary, and have communication with one and another. According to John Wales the author of The Concept of Discourse Community. Discourse community can be anything, but it must meet his six characteristics that includes; common goal, intercommunication, members, lexis, information and feedback, and genre. If a group can meet the six characteristics it can be consider as a discourse community. After reading the article, I have realized that there are a lot discourse community among us without we even acknowledge it, for an example; like a book club,a sport club, a culinary club,and a yoga club. The one that I am going to use as an example for the discourse community is my Asian Community. The common goal that my discourse community has is to bring all the Asian youth to become one unity with one and another. My Asian community is a very small discourse community, but despite the size we have one big goal which is to achieve for all the Asian youth to stand together as a unity no matter what languages we speak. This group started because a friend of mine from high school had an idea to bring all Asian students in my high school to just spend quality time together, talk about each other cultures, and relate with one another. She felt there is a distance between all of us in school, and fortunately this group grew bigger...
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...The Humane Society as a Discourse Community According to the Linguist John Swales, a discourse community is “a group that has goals or purposes, and uses communication to achieve these goals.” One example of a discourse community is the Humane Society of Memphis and Shelby County. The Humane Society of Memphis and Shelby County is a non-profit organization that cares for over 6,000 animals each year. The Humane Society has numerous goals and ambitions, but one strong mission. The mission is to assure a better life for companion animals by providing shelter, finding loving homes and promoting respect for their place in our lives. The discourse community of the Humane Society of Memphis and Shelby County uses both written text and graphics to communicate between its rhetors and readers. The Humane Society of Memphis and Shelby County has been living out its mission and goals since it was founded in 1933. One of its main goals, which is continuously being fulfilled by the members in its discourse community, is to place adoptable animals in “forever homes.” Their goals are to serve the people and animals of Memphis and surrounding areas by providing several services, such as low cost spay and neuter programs, humane sheltering for lost, abandoned and neglected pets, return of lost pets to families, humane education, pet therapy services, strengthening the human-animal bond, providing disaster preparedness, and adoption services. The community and its members are made...
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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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...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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...ENG 101 Bailey Writing Project 4 When Gee mentions the phrase dominant discourse he means a particular way of talking and thinking about a subject, created by those in power. This type of discourse is popular because it is admired and repeated a lot. So the dominant discourse Gee discusses is certainly used by a particular class, the upper class. The people in this upper class are usually white people. With dominant discourse, there are certain ways of talking and thinking that won’t be accepted so there is a need to conform to the same patterns of thinking and talking amongst the people conversing within this type of discourse. In the article, Gee gives an account of a conversation that was taking place in a bar. While the dialogue was taking place, the reader is shown what is and what is not appropriate as far as discourse is concerned. The type of discourse that an individual participates in is a learned behavior. Although it cannot really be taught from the media, the discourse of the individual is learned through their surroundings on a continual basis. Discourse can “rub off” on a person through their parents, the area in which they live, the community and how they act and speak and so on. My discourse was influenced by my parents, the school I went to and my friends and teammates. A big part of it was definitely school and my sports teams. I will be honest and say that my public high school was not the best as far as education goes so the people that attend there...
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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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...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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...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 it was traditional classroom learning that seemed to have left these students unprepared in the first place. What they needed, we had guessed, was help of a sort that was not an extension but an alternative to the , traditional classroom. To provide that alternative, we turned to· peer tutoring. Through peer tutoring, we reasoned, teachers could reach students by organizing them to teach each...
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...I believe that my discourse community helped with picking a topic before writing and researching for this annotated bibliography. My previous education never prepared me for writing an annotated bibliography. However, I feel my professor made this process very difficult and unrealistic in developing writing skills for this assignment. I thought some assignments were a bit pointless, they required a lot on my part to stay focus with the course lessons or withdrawal from the class. After applying the rules of a discourse community help me to identify my topic’s discourse community for my research, I felt stronger towards my opinion because the topic was interesting and related to my career field. However, I learned the importance strategies for...
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...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 my ideas but what I had to write about was more about the three sources rather than using those three sources too support my ideas. Writing may be learned at first but...
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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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...conversation of assimilation into a discourse community has been a long standing presence in academic conversation. Especially if you give the church the title of a discourse community. The church to which I would be referring to is Titus Harvest Dome Spectrum Church. Titus Harvest Dome (THD) is a large religious group (large church) that is located around a suburban area. From what I researched, I have found that the assimilation into Christianity can be related to the social aspects that surround them, as well as in them. Such as, the area the church is located in, or the population that lives there. Daniel Olson states in his research that smaller religious groups find more committed members through leaving and joining the group, compared to larger religious groups. Although Rahsaan Maxwell and Erik Bleich uses Muslims as his topic, presents relatable assimilation reasoning that Muslims who were born in France, was a French citizen, and spoke French would identify themselves as French. These researchers and others that I mention in the Annotated Bibliography, all mention how the social aspects of what surrounds a community has an effect on the process of joining/assimilating into the community, in this case it is the THD community. However, there has not been inquiry on how this would relate to the genres used by larger religious groups...
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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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...Deficit Ideology and the Scornful Gaze: Thoughts on Authenticating the Class Discourse in Education Paul C. Gorski Founder, EdChange Assistant Professor, Integrative Studies George Mason University http://www.EdChange.org gorski@EdChange.org December 2010 Unlearning Deficit Ideology and the Scornful Gaze 2 It is popular in the education milieu today to talk about the dangers of assuming a deficit perspective, approaching students based upon our perceptions of their weaknesses rather than their strengths. Such a perspective deteriorates expectations for students and weakens educators’ abilities to recognize giftedness in its various forms (Ford & Grantham, 2003). The most devastating brand of this sort of deficit thinking emerges when we mistake difference—particularly difference from ourselves— for deficit. If one concentrates best while sitting still it may be difficult to imagine that somebody else—a student or colleague, perhaps—concentrates more effectively while pacing or tapping a pencil. Similarly, if one always has lived among people who speak a certain language variation, such as what people commonly refer to as “standard English,” she or he might mistake somebody’s use of a different variation, such as the Appalachian variety spoken by my grandmother, as an indication of intellectual inferiority or, worse, deviance (Collins, 1988). Over the past ten or so years a critical discourse challenging the deficit perspective has emerged among educators. Some insist...
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