Differences Between Planned And Unplanned Discourse

9. Syntax is the study of sentence structure. Observe the length of the sentences in the first and last paragraphs of the speech. What differences do you find? How do these differences affect the tone of the speech?

In his essay “The Concept of Discourse Community,” John Swales, an educator and researcher, establish the definition of a discourse community. He argues that there is a difference between a speech community and a discourse community. According to John Swales, there are six defining characteristics for a group to be a discourse community. He then gives an example and discusses further issues regarding the concept of a discourse community. While the purpose of this essay is to acknowledge the readers about the characteristics of the discourse community with some explaination about each characteristics. He also establishes a formal tone to the readers. This work is significant because it provides some usefull information about discourse community so that the readers can know which discourse community they belongs to.

According to Gee, our words and actions must be congruent if we want to make sense (5). In Gee’s own words: “It is not just what you say, but how you say it” (5), and, “It is not just how you say it, but what you are and do when you say it” (5). Gee then operationalizes the term Discourse to mean “ways of being in the world” (5), which is made up of “saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations” (5).

Gee’s entire assessment of discourses is the highlight of the essay. According to him, discourses cannot be imbibed or simply learnt in traditional classrooms, they cannot be taught to a person but rather they are what one learns through his experiences and social interactions. Since his experiences may encompass a great variety of social interactions and discussions with people from different spheres, these discourses are not very singular and may have conflicts among themselves. It is eventually the amalgamation of discourses that a person experiences that ultimately shape

Everyone has discourses, but not everyone knows what a discourse is. In the article, Gee explains what discourses are, and how they are obtained. So what are they? Discourses are basically things that you are knowledgeable in that make you, you. For example, some of my discourses include being a Lacrosse player, being an American man, and being an Engineering student. While some are easily obtainable, some discourses are simply impossible to obtain, but they are forever changing as you discover new things about yourself.

Life is like a massive highway that have infinite routes anyone can choose take to reach some type of designated goal. Those various routes lead to distinct exits, where one can discover a group or groups that share similarities dealing with viewpoints, beliefs, or understanding towards a particular goal. These groups can be identified as discourse communities. According to, “The Concept of Discourse Community,” in the textbook, Writing About Writing, John Swales stressed that in order to be classified as a discourse community the group has to have all six defining characteristics. Swales emphasized, “A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals, mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, utilities and hence processes one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, acquires specific lexis, and has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discourse expertise” (Swales, 221-222). Keeping this key detail in mind, there is numerous type of discourse out there.

1. What is the discourse community you are studying? The discourse community that I chose was bearded dragons and other animals of similar characteristics. a. What academic majors, departments, and disciplines is it related to?

The second level grammatical-rhetorical analysis aims to investigate the relationship between grammatical choice and rhetorical function in written English for science and technology. Discourse analysis as interaction represents the third level of language description. Most importantly, interactional analysis outlines the concept of interpretation of discourse by the reader or listener. Discourse analysis appears to have steadily moved from surface-level analysis to a deeper description of language use. However, in the context of language teaching for specific purposes, applied discourse analysis seems to represent a rather narrow description of language in use and is inadequate in its explanation. In order to introduce a thick description of language in use, it is necessary to combine socio-cultural and psycholinguistic aspects of text-construction and interpretation with linguistic insights to answer the question: why are specific discourse-genres written and used by the specialist communities the way they are? Genre analysis as an insightful description of English for specific purpose texts has become a useful and powerful tool to arrive at significant form-function correlations which can be utilized for a number of applied linguistic purposes.

Two definitive works done by Swales and Porter has helped established on the definition and criteria of a discourse community. While Swales was the primary source of information for Porter’s own piece, Porter can develop a more in-depth view on discourse communities.

Swales’ second defining characteristic of a discourse group stresses the significance of communication; simply put, “A

John Swales (1990), professor of linguistics, defines a discourse community as an exclusive group of people brought together by a common goal. According to John Swales (1990), every discourse community has six characteristics that makes them a discourse community. Overall the group must have a shared goal, in which they communicate with each other through different genres and lexis they have developed; genres are different types of communication that the group employ and lexis is the specialized language utilized by that particular discourse community. They also tend to have a hierarchy within the group and require individual group members to truly participate to be counted as a part of the discourse community. (p. 471-73)

The information that these articles provided will help tremendously in writing my discourse community essay. I will use the information from the Wardle and Swales in my essay

Discourses are the “social and cultural practices through which individuals and groups use language to establish their identities…they provide ways of being, thinking, acting and using language so that people can identify themselves in social and cultural networks” Discourses affect peoples views on all things, for example, two different

Fairclough (1995) clarifies that discourse is not only written and spoken language, but it also visual part that has meaning (p.54).

Specialists in descriptive grammar (linguists) examine the principles and patterns that underlie the use of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. In contrast, prescriptive