Blog #5 Discourse Community

This academic writing has a rather long winded clarification piece as in introduction. Unfortunately Swales fails to give me a definition in bold font so I had to peruse this paper and come up with a rough definition.
 

Discourse Community- A select group of individuals that have a certain  parlance that is exclusive to said group and they use this to meet specific goals... As Swales makes it out to be.

The upside to the paper is that Swales did not put the six characteristics incognito as they are numbered  and displayed below.

1, A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goal
2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among
its members.
3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to
provide information and feedback.
4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres
in the communicative furtherance of its aims.
5. In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some
specific lexis.
6. A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable
degree of relevant content and "discoursal" expertise.

This seems to be a sort of rough checklist to make a certain group qualify for the esteemed title of "Discourse Community".


There are many discourse communities that come to mind when one thinks of the topic. One that stands out to me is the current Blacks Live Matter community. The goal of this organization has been made clear through all the forms of media that they want to raise awareness against police brutality against Africa Americas. The BLM group uses various means of intercommunication and mechanisms  such as posting on social media, having peaceful and violent protests and raising awareness to events that occur. The community utilizes many genres to appeal to ethos, but mostly pathos as a way to communicate. BLM has also developed a specific lexis in the phrases they shout at protests. BLM is a discourse community that has a main goal as Swales spells it out to be. There are a large number of other discourse communities that can be easily identified in today's society.

Blog #4 Editorial

Hello Fellow Bloggers,

This fourth blog assignment involved reading editorials that attempted to shed light on a certain subject and present it in a way that would make the reader think along the lines that the writer intends them to. For this assignment I looked at various JSTOR daily articles as well as the "news" articles that were provided.

I rather enjoyed reading the JSTOR editorials because these editorials were very well written in that they appeared with tremendous ethos. The writers of these JSTORs wrote these editorials like a traditional one, yet they were composed in a way that presented the material in a professional manner that leaves their opinion in the depths of the article. The information was presented in a way that was not outright biased which also help evoke more ethos from the work.

The one editorial that stood out to me was the townhall.com editorial about liberals. One could simply read the title and know it was going to be a right winged piece denouncing liberal thought which to me, throws all credibility out the window all together. The newspaper articles focused more on the entertainment rather than the drier black and white get to the point structure of the JSTORs.

Editorials are an interesting genre of writing. They are meant to entertain, yet provide an opinion and attempt to persuade the reader to think likewise or make the reader question the argument at hand. There is a common occurrence of persuasive writing. The authors in all the editorials attempt to appeal to the readers sense of ethos and pathos depending on the subject of the article.


Your Fellow Blogger,

Kina Bramlette

Blog #2 Devitt

Writing genres is something that I personally have not given much thought to as I am always assigned a specific genre when writing. Devitt delves deep into the idea of different genres and how they are used. In school and at work, I am often tasked with writing in a particular format over and over again as Devitt points out in the second paragraph, "that writing instruction can encourage accommodation and assimilation" (Devitt, 2004). There I am automatically putting in an in-text citation. Devitt makes a point that teachers present certain genres as the only means of writing, greatly reducing room for creativity. The majority of the papers I write for school are format as that is the standard due to the fact that it is professional and gets straight to the point of the paper and is black and white.

Devitt pleads that having genre awareness is quintessential in your writing abilities. Genre awareness aids students to think critically and choosing a certain genre to present material can greatly affect the overall tone of the paper being presented. Genre awareness and rhetorical analysis would help me in that presenting my material in the appropriate format as well as exploring genres I do not use frequently to adapt to a different style of writing that will in turn improve upon my overall writing skills.

When Devitt makes her claim that when a writer takes up a genre, they take up that genre's ideology, Devitt is eluding to the fact that each genre has certain specific characteristics that make them be identified as a certain genre. The reader is able to critically understand the paper more due to the characteristics and ideas that are evoked when a genre is introduced. The genre ideology is able to have its own ideology because there is a plethora of different genres which in turn create a large quantity of vastly different ideas.

Devitt mentions existing power structures and dynamics as she again eludes to what I had succumbed to in the beginning of this blog. She fears that if students are not educated on the various genres, they will assimilate to the same essay genre as I had started this blog with. Devitts' thoughts that genres are a source of power in a paper stem from the fact that the genre you choose to write your paper in could be vastly different and have different tone and possibly appear as a different paper all together depending on the genre you choose to write in.

After reading Devitt's chapter, I will now be more aware of the literature and papers I read as well as reflect upon my own writing style and attempt to explore the various genres that are at my disposal

Fellow Blogger,

Kina Bramlette