What is a Discourse Community Discussion using this two articles https://compositionforum.com/issue/37/swales-retrospective.phpand the pdf attached 1.use t

What is a Discourse Community Discussion using this two articles https://compositionforum.com/issue/37/swales-retrospective.phpand the pdf attached 1.use the course description and answer the first question about discourse community (post)2. after that i will send the post of other peers in the group for the two response. 3. finlly you can do the rejoiner Understanding Discourse Communities
Dan Melzer
This essay is a chapter in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 3, a
peer-reviewed open textbook series for the writing classroom.
Download the full volume and individual chapters from any of these sites:
• Writing Spaces: http://writingspaces.org/essays
• Parlor Press: http://parlorpress.com/pages/writing-spaces
• WAC Clearinghouse: http://wac.colostate.edu/books/
Print versions of the volume are available for purchase directly from Parlor
Press and through other booksellers.
Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 2020 by Parlor Press. Individual essays © 2020 by the respective authors. Unless
otherwise stated, these works are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND
4.0) and are subject to the Writing Spaces Terms of Use. To view a copy of this
license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/, email info@creativecommons.org, or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain
View, CA 94042, USA. To view the Writing Spaces Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.org/terms-of-use.
All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, please contact the author(s) of the
individual articles, who are the respective copyright owners.
Cover design by Colin Charlton.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on File
7 Understanding Discourse
Communities
Dan Melzer
Overview
This chapter uses John Swales’ definition of discourse community to explain
to students why this concept is important for college writing and beyond.
The chapter explains how genres operate within discourse communities,
why different discourse communities have different expectations for writing, and how to understand what qualifies as a discourse community. The
article relates the concept of discourse community to a personal example
from the author (an acoustic guitar jam group) and an example of the
academic discipline of history. The article takes a critical stance regarding the concept of discourse community, discussing both the benefits and
constraints of communicating within discourse communities. The article
concludes with writerly questions students can ask themselves as they enter
new discourse communities in order to be more effective communicators.
L
ast year, I decided that if I was ever going to achieve my lifelong
fantasy of being the first college writing teacher to transform into an
international rock star, I should probably graduate from playing the
video game Guitar Hero to actually learning to play guitar.* I bought an
acoustic guitar and started watching every beginning guitar instructional
video on YouTube. At first, the vocabulary the online guitar teachers used
was like a foreign language to me—terms like major and minor chords,
open G tuning, and circle of fifths. I was overwhelmed by how complicated it all was, and the fingertips on my left hand felt like they were going to
fall off from pressing on the steel strings on the neck of my guitar to form
* This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and are subject to the
Writing Spaces Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/, email info@creativecommons.org, or send a letter to Creative
Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. To view the Writing Spaces
Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.org/terms-of-use.
100
Understanding Discourse Communities
101
WRITING SPACES 3
chords. I felt like I was making incredibly slow progress, and at the rate
I was going, I wouldn’t be a guitar god until I was 87. I was also getting
tired of playing alone in my living room. I wanted to find a community of
people who shared my goal of learning songs and playing guitar together
for fun.
I needed a way to find other beginning and intermediate guitar players, and I decided to try a social media website called “Meetup.com.” It
only took a few clicks to find the right community for me—an “acoustic
jam” group that welcomed beginners and met once a month at a music
store near my city of Sacramento, California. On the Meetup.com site, it
said that everyone who showed up for the jam should bring a few songs to
share, but I wasn’t sure what kind of music they played, so I just showed up
at the next meet-up with my guitar and the basic look you need to become
a guitar legend: two days of facial hair stubble, black t-shirt, ripped jeans,
and a gravelly voice (luckily my throat was sore from shouting the lyrics to
the Twenty One Pilots song “Heathens” while playing guitar in my living
room the night before).
The first time I played with the group, I felt more like a junior high
school band camp dropout then the next Jimi Hendrix. I had trouble keeping up with the chord changes, and I didn’t know any scales (groups of
related notes in the same key that work well together) to solo on lead guitar
when it was my turn. I had trouble figuring out the patterns for my strumming hand since no one took the time to explain them before we started
playing a new song. The group had some beginners, but I was the least
experienced player.
It took a few more meet-ups, but pretty soon I figured out how to fit
into the group. I learned that they played all kinds of songs, from country
to blues to folk to rock music. I learned that they chose songs with simple
chords so beginners like me could play along. I learned that they brought
print copies of the chords and lyrics of songs to share, and if there were any
difficult chords in a song, they included a visual of the chord shape in the
handout of chords and lyrics. I started to learn the musician’s vocabulary I
needed to be familiar with to function in the group, like beats per measure
and octaves and the minor pentatonic scale. I learned that if I was having
trouble figuring out the chord changes, I could watch the better guitarists
and copy what they were doing. I also got good advice from experienced
players, like soaking your fingers in rubbing alcohol every day for ninety
seconds to toughen them up so the steel strings wouldn’t hurt as much. I
even realized that although I was an inexperienced player, I could contribute to the community by bringing in new songs they hadn’t played before.
WRITING SPACES 3
102
Dan Melzer
Okay, at this point you may be saying to yourself that all of this will
make a great biographical movie someday when I become a rock icon (or
maybe not), but what does it have to do with becoming a better writer?
You can write in a journal alone in your room, just like you can play
guitar just for yourself alone in your room. But most writers, like most
musicians, learn their craft from studying experts and becoming part of a
community. And most writers, like most musicians, want to be a part of
community and communicate with other people who share their goals and
interests. Writing teachers and scholars have come up with the concept of
“discourse community” to describe a community of people who share the
same goals, the same methods of communicating, the same genres, and the
same lexis (specialized language).
What Exactly Is a Discourse Community?
John Swales, a scholar in linguistics, says that discourse communities have
the following features (which I’m paraphrasing):
1. A broadly agreed upon set of common public goals
2. Mechanisms of intercommunication among members
3. Use of these communication mechanisms to provide information
and feedback
4. One or more genres that help further the goals of the discourse community
5. A specific lexis (specialized language)
6. A threshold level of expert members (24-26)
I’ll use my example of the monthly guitar jam group I joined to explain
these six aspects of a discourse community.
A broadly Agreed Set of Common Public Goals
The guitar jam group had shared goals that we all agreed on. In the Meetup.com description of the site, the organizer of the group emphasized that
these monthly gatherings were for having fun, enjoying the music, and
learning new songs. “Guitar players” or “people who like music” or even
“guitarists in Sacramento, California” are not discourse communities.
They don’t share the same goals, and they don’t all interact with each other
to meet the same goals.
Understanding Discourse Communities
103
The guitar jam group communicated primarily through the Meetup.com
site. This is how we recruited new members, shared information about
when and where we were playing, and communicated with each other outside of the night of the guitar jam. “People who use Meetup.com” are not a
discourse community, because even though they’re using the same method
of communication, they don’t all share the same goals and they don’t all
regularly interact with each other. But a Meetup.com group like the Sacramento acoustic guitar jam focused on a specific topic with shared goals
and a community of members who frequently interact can be considered a
discourse community based on Swales’ definition.
Use of These Communication Mechanisms
to Provide Information and Feedback
Once I found the guitar jam group on Meetup.com, I wanted information
about topics like what skill levels could participate, what kind of music
they played, and where and when they met. Once I was at my first guitar jam, the primary information I needed was the chords and lyrics of
each song, so the handouts with chords and lyrics were a key means of
providing critical information to community members. Communication
mechanisms in discourse communities can be emails, text messages, social
media tools, print texts, memes, oral presentations, and so on. One reason
that Swales uses the term “discourse” instead of “writing” is that the term
“discourse” can mean any type of communication, from talking to writing
to music to images to multimedia.
One or More Genres That Help Further the
Goals of the Discourse Community
One of the most common ways discourse communities share information
and meet their goals is through genres. To help explain the concept of
genre, I’ll use music since I’ve been talking about playing guitar and music
is probably an example you can relate to. Obviously there are many types
of music, from rap to country to reggae to heavy metal. Each of these
types of music is considered a genre, in part because the music has shared
features, from the style of the music to the subject of the lyrics to the lexis.
For example, most rap has a steady bass beat, most rappers use spoken
word rather singing, and rap lyrics usually draw on a lexis associated with
young people. But a genre is much more than a set of features. Genres arise
out of social purposes, and they’re a form of social action within discourse
WRITING SPACES 3
Mechanisms of Intercommunication among Members
WRITING SPACES 3
104
Dan Melzer
communities. The rap battles of today have historical roots in African oral
contests, and modern rap music can only be understood in the context of
hip hop culture, which includes break dancing and street art. Rap also has
social purposes, including resisting social oppression and telling the truth
about social conditions that aren’t always reported on by news outlets. Like
all genres, rap is not just a formula but a tool for social action.
The guitar jam group used two primary genres to meet the goals of the
community. The Meetup.com site was one important genre that was critical in the formation of the group and to help it recruit new members. It
was also the genre that delivered information to the members about what
the community was about and where and when the community would
be meeting. The other important genre to the guitar jam group were the
handouts with song chords and lyrics. I’m sharing an example of a song I
brought to the group to show you what this genre looks like.
Figure 1: Lyrics and chord changes for “Heart of Gold” by Neil Young with a
fingering chart for an E minor 7 chord
Understanding Discourse Communities
105
A Specific Lexis (Specialized Language)
To anyone who wasn’t a musician, our guitar meet-ups might have sounded like we were communicating in a foreign language. We talked about the
root note of scale, a 1/4/5 chord progression, putting a capo on different
frets, whether to play solos in a major or minor scale, double drop D tuning, and so on. If someone couldn’t quickly identify what key their song
was in or how many beats per measure the strumming pattern required,
they wouldn’t be able to communicate effectively with the community
members. We didn’t use this language to show off or to try to discourage
outsiders from joining our group. We needed these specialized terms—this
musician’s lexis—to make sure we were all playing together effectively.
A Threshold Level of Expert Members
If everyone in the guitar jam was at my beginner level when I first joined
the group, we wouldn’t have been very successful. I relied on more experienced players to figure out strumming patterns and chord changes,
and I learned to improve my solos by watching other players use various
techniques in their soloing. The most experienced players also helped educate everyone on the conventions of the group (the “norms” of how the
group interacted). These conventions included everyone playing in the
same key, everyone taking turns playing solo lead guitar, and everyone
bringing songs to play. But discourse community conventions aren’t always
just about maintaining group harmony. In most discourse communities,
new members can also expand the knowledge and genres of the community. For example, I shared songs that no one had brought before, and that
expanded the community’s base of knowledge.
WRITING SPACES 3
This genre of the chord and lyrics sheet was needed to make sure everyone could play along and follow the singer. The conventions of this
genre—the “norms”—weren’t just arbitrary rules or formulas. As with all
genres, the conventions developed because of the social action of the genre.
The sheets included lyrics so that we could all sing along and make sure
we knew when to change chords. The sheets included visuals of unusual
chords, like the Em7 chord (E minor seventh) in my example, because
there were some beginner guitarists who were a part of the community. If
the community members were all expert guitarists, then the inclusion of
chord shapes would never have become a convention. A great resource to
learn more about the concept of genre is the essay “Navigating Genres” by
Kerry Dirk in volume 1 of Writing Spaces.
WRITING SPACES 3
106
Dan Melzer
Why the Concept of Discourse Communities
Matters for College Writing
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, I didn’t understand that each academic discipline I took courses in to complete the
requirements of my degree (history, philosophy, biology, math, political
science, sociology, English) was a different discourse community. Each of
these academic fields had their own goals, their own genres, their own
writing conventions, their own formats for citing sources, and their own
expectations for writing style. I thought each of the teachers I encountered
in my undergraduate career just had their own personal preferences that all
felt pretty random to me. I didn’t understand that each teacher was trying
to act as a representative of the discourse community of their field. I was
a new member of their discourse communities, and they were introducing me to the genres and conventions of their disciplines. Unfortunately,
teachers are so used to the conventions of their discourse communities that
they sometimes don’t explain to students the reasons behind the writing
conventions of their discourse communities.
It wasn’t until I studied research about college writing while I was in
graduate school that I learned about genres and discourse communities,
and by the time I was doing my dissertation for my PhD, I got so interested
in studying college writing that I did a national study of college teachers’
writing assignments and syllabi. Believe it or not, I analyzed the genres
and discourse communities of over 2,000 college writing assignments in
my book Assignments Across the Curriculum. To show you why the idea of
discourse community is so important to college writing, I’m going to share
with you some information from one of the academic disciplines I studied:
history. First I want to share with you an excerpt from a history course
writing assignment from my study. As you read it over, think about what
it tells you about the conventions of the discourse community of history.
Documentary Analysis
This assignment requires you to play the detective, combing textual sources for clues and evidence to form a reconstruction of past events. If you
took A.P. history courses in high school, you may recall doing similar document-based questions (DBQs).
In a tight, well-argued essay of two to four pages, identify and assess
the historical significance of the documents in ONE of the four sets I have
given you.
Understanding Discourse Communities
107
Questions to Consider When Planning Your Essay
• What do the documents reveal about the author and his audience?
• Why were they written?
• What can you discern about the author’s motivation and tone? Is
the tone revealing?
• Does the genre make a difference in your interpretation?
• How do the documents fit into both their immediate and their
greater historical contexts?
• Do your documents support or contradict what other sources (video, readings) have told you?
• Do the documents reveal a change that occurred over a period of
time?
• Is there a contrast between documents within your set? If so, how
do you account for it?
• Do they shed light on a historical event, problem, or period? How
do they fit into the “big picture”?
• What incidental information can you glean from them by reading
carefully? Such information is important for constructing a narrative of the past; our medieval authors almost always tell us more
than they intended to.
• What is not said, but implied?
• What is left out? (As a historian, you should always look for what is
not said, and ask yourself what the omission signifies.)
• Taken together, do the documents reveal anything significant
about the period in question? (Melzer 3-4)
This assignment doesn’t just represent the specific preferences of one
random teacher. It’s a common history genre (the documentary analysis)
that helps introduce students to the ways of thinking and the communication conventions of the discourse community of historians. This genre
reveals that historians look for textual clues to reconstruct past events and
that historians bring their own knowledge to bear when they analyze texts
and interpret history (historians are not entirely “objective” or “neutral”).
WRITING SPACES 3
You bring to this assignment a limited body of outside knowledge
gained from our readings, class discussions, and videos. Make the most of
this contextual knowledge when interpreting your sources: you may, for
example, refer to one of the document from another set if it sheds light on
the items in your own.
WRITING SPACES 3
108
Dan Melzer
In this documentary analysis genre, the instructor emphasizes that historians are always looking for what is not said but instead is implied. This instructor is using an important genre of history to introduce students to the
ways of analyzing and thinking in the discourse community of historians.
Let’s look at another history course in my research. I’m sharing with
you an excerpt from the syllabus of a history of the American West course.
This part of the syllabus gives students an overview of the purpose of the
writing projects in the class. …
Purchase answer to see full
attachment