What is Discourse?

According to Swales a discourse community is created with six defining characteristics that are “made up of individuals who share a broadly agreed upon set of common public goals; further, it has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, uses it participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, [that] has or uses one or more genres that help group achieve its shared goal, has acquired some specific lexis and has a reasonable ratio of novices and experts” (Swales, 795). To explain Swales’ concept, I have chosen to apply his six characteristics, necessary and sufficient for identifying groups as a discourse community, to analyze my united states history one class, taught by Mrs. Medley, along with some feedback I retrieved from both a fellow student and my professor.

Linguist James Paul Gee introduces the concept of literacy discourse by defining language as both what an individual says and how they present it. Literary language an important factor to maintaining academic discourse, because as Gee suggests this influences discourses being used correctly . Furthermore Gee suggests that in order to follow the intended guidelines correct discourse “must say or write the right thing in the right way while playing the right social role.” (pg.6) Indeed, within my academic experience using discourse here at Wayne State University, I agree with Gees definition of student’s adaptation of behavioral roles set by the institution. For example, students at Wayne State are expected to achieve a steady progression

Just like everyone starved for a safe community, the Discourse Community serves a place to build trust, respect, and communication skill. According to Merriam Webster dictionary, the word discourse means to express oneself especially in oral communication. Discourse community should be a place where one can live comfortably as it own self and not concealing its’ negative side. It should be a place where everybody treated each others like a family and where one can express its true feeling. Bethel Worship group is a community that I joined three years ago and still an active member there. Bethel Worship group is one of the department that Bethel Baptist Church If a person wanted to join a certain group, then “a person must learn the typical ways people in that community communicate and argue” (P30). This paper will prove that I successfully joined the Discourse Community through my logical appeal, emotional bonding, and my credibility.

Collectively as a society most people support the improvement of mankind; we support the advancement of medicine, technology, education, etc. But at what point do we stop moving forward, or is it human nature to constantly improve and push the limits? It seems like us humans can achieve anything we sent our minds to-after all in a span of a few decades we went from simple flying machines to taking our first steps on the moon. In a smaller span of time, humans might take the next big leap for mankind.

According to John Swales (1990), there are six characteristics that are adequate and important for recognizing a discourse community. Firstly, a discourse community has standard public objectives that they strive to achieve. Members of a discourse community all share the same common goals they are anticipating to attain, and they do not have individuals with separate goals. For instance, the Salvation Army public goals are “to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and to meet human needs in His name without discrimination.” They offer spiritual, physical, and emotional service to the public, as well as the opportunity to donate. Secondly, a discourse community has various techniques of communication for members to correspond with each other. For

A discourse community is a group of people involved in and communicating about a particular topic, issue, or in a particular field. According to the criteria conveyed in “The Concept of Discourse Community” by John Swales, Christianity can be considered as a discourse community because of its common goals, medium of communication, participatory mechanisms, specific genres, and its threshold level of members.

According to (Deapul.edu, n.d.), a discourse community is a group of individuals that communicate and covey their message in the professional and public domain. This format of communication depending on the job field is known as discursive practices (Deapul.edu, n.d.). These communications practices can include communication avenues specific to the field. This can include journals, books, research articles, case studies, public outreach, and lectures. Each field utilizes their own specific jargon that conveys their message. In order to gain membership in a discourse community, an individual must demonstrate

A discourse community is defined as a group of people involved in and communicating about a particular topic, issue, or in a particular field. We all belong to multiple discourse communities.To earn a position of a discourse community one must possess accurate knowledge, establish reliability of members to be accepted and learn to persuade other members of the community. The discourse community that I identify with personally and the profession I plan to pursue is the world of film production. However, there are many jobs that need to be done on a film set leading to there being multiple discourse communities within the film industry, what I want to focus on specifically is the DP, otherwise known as the “director of photography”. According to “The Concept of Discourse Community,” by educator and researcher John Swales, a discourse community is defined by six characteristics.

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.

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

Discourse is often defined as ‘language above the sentence’ (Cameron, 2001), and the analysis of context is examining the language, context and co-text presented, whether through a spoken or a written form. This essay is explaining some of the characteristics commonly noted in spoken discourse, including, but not limited to, structure, alignment and turn-taking. Prior consent was sought before any recording took place in an attempt to limit the ethical issues which may arise. The main ethical issue is what Labov (1972) coined as ‘the Observer’s Paradox’, which is when a participant is aware that they are being recorded, and therefore may act in a different way than they do naturally. In order to limit this paradox, the transcription in this

The effect of colonialism, more specifically, the methods of savagery and brutality through which the colonizer engaged, is examined in this section of The Discourse. Cesaire delves into the deliberate and subconscious actions of the colonizer in order to reveal the inner workings of a mind able to devise such strategies. He emphasizes that the practices associated with colonialization has had a boomerang effect on the colonizer, ultimately fashioning a savage from a being that was once civil. Nazism, Cesaire argues, was tolerated as long as its victims were non-European, however, once it became a weapon used against Europeans, it was then deemed immoral. Colonial dictum likened to Nazism, made victims of those who were once accomplices.

When I first came to RIT, I had never even heard of discourses before, let alone write an entire essay on it in roughly a week. I suppose then that this could be considered a separate discourse itself. When I was in high school, our teachers had us focusing on completing essays solely based on discovering the author’s purpose and using literary elements to support our thesis statements. There it did not matter what our background was; we had to get through the work and were almost required to write it to a perfect state, otherwise it would not be considered as college material. Upon arriving at college, the classwork attitudes changed drastically. Here near perfectionism was not stressed and the backgrounds of students were taken into consideration for classes. With so many discourses present it a classroom, one would think that it would be difficult to accommodate everyone, but for me, it is a discourse that is surprisingly easier to adjust to. Instead of having everyone adjust to one specific discourse, everyone is permitted to their own discourses and contribute to the community. Similarly, Williams explains how these discourses impact conflicts that could arise between students and teachers in the academic classroom. In “Home and Away: The tensions of community, literacy, and identity,” Bronwyn T. Williams argues to researchers and teachers so that they understand that because everyone comes from different backgrounds. They all will not learn the same way and have

When I first started to read the Gee article, I skimmed the reading and ended up not taking any content away from the article. But I went back and read everything word for word and took notes and now it has brought to my attention questions and new ideas to explore. Of course, the first question that I had was, what does Discourse mean? According to Gee, Discourse is a combination of acts, such as, speaking, writing, doing, being, valuing and the list goes on. But there is a difference between the Discourse I just explained above and then discourse, with a lower-case d. Discourse, with a lower-case d, means connected stretches of language that make sense. The idea of Discourse is interesting, it explains everything else that we do in the world.

A lift pitch, lift discourse or lift articulation is a short synopsis used to rapidly and just characterize a procedure, item, administration, association, or occasion and its quality suggestion.