Critical Discourse

Tobacco has and still is the most important public health issue faced in Australia and internationally. (Jochelson, 2006). Many countries such as North America, England, Australia, Canada and Ireland have introduced policies regarding smoking in public areas and restriction of smoking in indoor areas. (Thomson, Wilson & Edwards, 2009). The government, community leaders and policy makers work towards introducing policies that will stop consumers from smoking in public areas. (Pizacani, maher, Rohde, Drach & Stark, 2012). Government intervention should extend public smoking bans so that second hand smokers can be safe, a better environment and less death incidents relating to smoking.

In his text James Paul Gee attempts to paint a big picture of discourse to the audience. He starts with giving the definition of the word discourse and following that with how it fits into the English language as well as examples. In the continuing section he shows that discourse has more than one meaning and goes on to explain what it could also mean. An important part of this text was what he explained speakers/writers and listeners/readers do. This is an idea that both the orator and the audience is doing a job and what is said or understood has to do with each other as well as multiple other factors. Gee emphasizes the fact that both the orator and the audience are designers who like artist and or musicians design our language to say and

A discourse community is a social group of people that share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating through written texts and share common goals, such as academia. There is usually some type of discussion, which is called discursive practices. Usually, these discursive practices involve genres, which are types of texts that are recognizable to the readers and writers. In the essay, The Concept of Discourse Community, John Swales give you some things to look for and consider when trying to figure out what is happening in any situation where language and texts play a part: What are people doing here? Do they share goals? How do they communicate with one another? How do newcomers learn what to do here? (Swales 215) I

Your task is to do a close reading of a public document, summarize it, and then analyze its rhetorical situation. Use the sample rhetorical analysis from the textbook (pages 57-60) as a flexible guide—not as a rigid model. Your analysis will contain a few more features than the one found in the book. How you organize your analysis will depend in part on the writing you choose and in part on the decisions you make about how to arrange the parts of your analysis.

The movie, “Thank You for Smoking” is a comedy with a tobacco industry lobbyist, Nick Naylor as the lead. The movie has an eerie comic theme which tackles the serious issue of the addicting substance of tobacco, or to be more specific, nicotine. The idea which the movie was trying to portray was that this lobbyist was a great speaker who is able to manipulate many a feeble-mind. A lobbyist, to begin with, is one who is employed to persuade all-concerned of the employer’s concern(s), in this case, the marketing of tobacco products.

In Vanguard’s documentary, Sex, Lies, and Cigarettes: Secrets of the Tobacco Industry by director, Alex Simmons, Vanguard sends correspondent, Christof Putzel to Jakarta, Indonesia to investigate the tobacco industry there. The documentary talks about how America no longer allows cigarette and tobacco ads and commercials, instead the country focuses scare tactic ads that stop people from smoking or keeps them from starting. The tobacco industry is losing millions of dollars in America so they’re moving overseas to poorer countries like Indonesia to make their money there. Putzel goes to see what all the tobacco industry is doing and how they’re corrupting the young people like ‘the smoking baby’, Aldi, as well as students of the country.

Therefore, we find the Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Act from 1992, the Tobacco Regulations from the year 2007 that amended the 1987 law or the Public Health (Tobacco) Act of 2008. With these policies, the Australian government wanted to reduce the sale and consumption of these carcinogenic products that are killing an average of 15,000 Australians a year and costing the Australian society and economy approximately $31.5 billion a year.

Discourse acts as walls that constrain actions and speeches which can take the form of power (Raby, 2002, pg 430). The

Discourses are defined by the perceptions received through information given by various resources. To specify, the resources are the media, television, images, magazines or websites. There are many aspects of discourses, which inhibits a different outcome as according to context. Discourses are conversations between different types of people or social groups (Gee, 2015) For instance, identity can conform around the discourses that surround cultural and social influences. Whereas knowledge and power becomes interlinked, causing systems of hierarchy to occur. Discourses has occurred in both historical and political contexts through the media. This in turn, made the discourses more dominant and influential in society. Capital discourse are

The National Tobacco Campaign is an anti-smoking campaign that was introduced under the Australian Government Department of Health and Australian National Preventative Health Agency; it aims to assist smokers to quit. The National Tobacco Campaign was introduced in 1997 when statistics indicated a stalling in the steady decline of tobacco usage. It is amongst Australia's most concentrated and persistent mass media tobacco-control campaign. An advantage of this campaign was the cooperation in its expansion and operation between the national, state and territory governments and non-government organisations. This case study intends on outlining how this campaign was executed. Information on the National Tobacco Campaign can be found on http://www.quitnow.gov.au/internet/quitnow/publishing.nsf/Content/home.

Discourse has many definitions and can be interpreted several ways. The one that got to me the most was when Gee says, “To enact identities people people have to talk the right talk, walk the right walk, behave as if they believe and value the right things, and wear the right things at the right time and right place. Identity is a performance” (Gee 102) This explanation brought discourse to life. It shows how people constantly must put in the effort to maintain a certain identity, but once they have it they will be subjected to other people assuming details about them that are usually present in other individuals with the same identity. “Discourses is in their hands for the time and place and as they act it out, they can change it, as can any

Dunmire (2012) overviewed a body of research known as political discourse analysis. She started by situating her work within the linguistic and political turns that took place within the human and social sciences. Adopting an inclusive conception of politics and discourse, Dunmire (2012) studied political discourse in terms of their theoretical and analytical frameworks and the socio-political issues.

The effectiveness of tobacco tax policy solely lies on the pricing strategy implemented by tobacco companies that is, tobacco companies can decide to take up the tax increase to ensure that it does not affect consumers as an increased price, therefore subverting the the effectiveness of the tobacco tax policy (a method referred to as ‘undershifting’); passing it onto cosumers in full; or rather increasing prices on top of the tax increase (a method referred to as ‘overshifting’ that thereby increases both the effect of the tax increace and the industry’s profits) (Gilmore, Tavakoly et al. 2013).

. However, before I do any of this I must first define a few terms that will be essential throughout this analysis. Coming from a critical rhetoric background, I will apply some terms and theories from various scholars in that field as well to give a better understanding of the material being studied.

From a conceptual point of view, discourse analysis in international relations has outlined a common set of standards for the other fields of language and social sciences. Discourse is a rather new field of analysis in the world of social research, and it does not yet have a precise and compact theoretical body. Accordingly, discourse analysis has to rely on the practices and concepts taken from other fields such as sociology, semantics, psychology, linguistics etc. Due to its vast source of knowledge, discourse has analytical richness in its field. In the study of international relations, three types of discursive approaches are considered, which are - descriptive approaches, autonomous approaches, and functionalist approaches. Autonomous approaches have no established relations with each other, but separately they provide a significant contribution to the study of discourse (Obeng and Hartford). The descriptive analysis approaches are a set of explanatory perspectives that are based on language and relevant fields. This method includes a grammatical style, which is concerned with understanding how words and sentences are formed. The descriptive method can be subdivided into three different practices of grammar and linguistics, which are - Morphology, phonology, and syntax. A descriptive methodology is a stylistic approach to grammar that is mainly used in poetry. This approach aids discourse analysis by specifying the suitability of a particular discourse to a specific