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Alan Wardle's Discourse Community Analysis

Decent Essays

When one has authority in a discourse community they need to know how to use it appropriately. In Wardle’s reading she gives an example of this about a guy named Alan joining a discourse community within his workplace. As we know, Alan was a computer support specialist in the humanities department, who was young and just out of college. Alan left his first job because he thought that he was not granted any responsibility (291). He then found another job within the university working on computers. Right off the start Alan was making decisions as being the only computer specialist within the start of his new position. As Wardle states, Alan did not have to necessarily prove his knowledge like most people who start a job (292). The first mistake …show more content…

In the discourse community he was apart of all of them had a “highly literate, hyper-aware language users, who valued professional, grammatically correct, Standard English in written communication” (Wardle 295). Another one of Swales points in his criteria is that a discourse community has some sort of lexis, meaning a language specific to that discourse community (Swales 222). Alan’s form of communication to his community was email, however, his co-workers were older than him and saw the way he would write his emails as informal and inappropriate (Wardle 294). Alan did not adapt to the change and even resisted from changing his ways of composing emails. Alan believed since he had authority they would adapt to his style. As a result he was not able to communicate with his community, which is necessary for a discourse community to function. With Alan choosing not to participate it resulted in “disturbances and breakdowns in work processes” (Hasu and Engestrom 65)(Wardle295). As we can tell from Wardle’s story about Alan and Swales criteria for a discourse community, it might not be always difficult to obtain authority but is difficult to use that authority within your discourse

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