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Applying Discourse Community Knowledge to Writing

  

What does it mean to have discourse community knowledge? Knowledge of the group’s

  • common public goals
  • shared defining values and beliefs
  • specialized vocabulary and forms of communication known as genres

Why as a writer should you care about discourse community knowledge? As you prepare to enter any workplace or scholarly written conversation, you are also part of (or trying to become part of) a discourse community. Academic subjects and disciplines, as well as professions and even specific workplaces, are all discourse communities. They have an ideology—views of reality or ways of being in the world—and ways of communicating.

A number of composition researchers show how challenging writing can be for students in college considering the various academic discourse communities for which you must write in your various classes, for various subjects or academic disciplines. After studying hundreds of student placement essays—writing students completed that determined which English composition class they should take—David Bartholomae concludes that when students sit down to write for their college classes they have to “invent the university for the occasion” (623) and “try on the discourse” generally without discourse community knowledge. He provides some examples like writing “as a literary critic one day and an experimental psychologist the next” (624). He labels the experience for students as bluffing and then performing, arguing that students are expected to speak and write in specialized academic discourse communities before they have acquired how (624), and because of this the exercise of such writing becomes only “a routine, a set of conventional rituals and gestures” (625).

Quoting a number of student examples, he shows how some students’ writings may be free of what may be considered errors, but can fail to meet the discourse community expectations, whether for college writing or in a specific academic discipline. Composition researchers have conducted studies that follow students from their composition classes to other classes where they write in subsequent terms (McCarthy), and even in the workplace after they graduate (Beaufort, Wardle), and draw from case examples the types of challenges students face writing in new discourse communities.

Furthermore, composition scholars have pointed out limitations to using the term community. Discussing the “public turn” of composition studies, toward literacy practices beyond college classrooms, Paula Mathieu synthesizes some scholars’ critiques: “But as [Joseph] Harris points out, community connotes a misleading sense of unity. In Keywords, Raymond Williams describes community as the ‘warmly persuasive’ term that ‘unlike all other terms of social organization (state, nation, society). . .never [seems] to be used unfavorably’ (76). Because of the persuasive warmth of community, it is difficult to see such a site as uncommunal, complex, or conflictual” (xii). Yet, academic discourse communities, in particular, are indeed sites of conflict and difference.

Discourse community knowledge, therefore, may be the most challenging knowledge domain to grasp—and yet the most important, as remember from the graphic, it subsumes the others. For example, instructors in your other classes will not refer to their academic discipline or subfield as a discourse community and they won’t hand you a guide on the first day of class for how to write in that discourse community. It’s not that easy anyway. Remember, even in specific disciplines, there’s no such thing as writing in general—it’s always specific to a situation and a context. So, you’ll have to study every discourse community you encounter for yourself, picking up clues the more time you spend with it—at times trying on the discourse, at other times possibly resisting it.

Prewriting for Discourse Community Knowledge

When you’re getting ready to write a project in any context consider the following questions about discourse community:

  • For which discourse community am I composing this text? Do I have a choice? What do I know about this discourse community (e.g. its goals, values, specialized vocabulary, and genres)?
  • What else do I need to know?

When discourse community gets messy. . . Have you ever noticed how clean and neat some ideas look in, well, textbooks, but in practice they get messy? This can be especially true with theories, such as the concept of discourse community. As directed by your instructor, access and read the following complete articles or book chapters and discuss the following questions and any others you discover:

In his article “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction,” James Paul Gee discusses discourse and Discourse (lowercase and capital D). What does he see is the difference between the two? He also distinguishes between dominant and nondominant Discourses. Mastering dominant Discourses, he claims, can bring money, prestige, and status. What does Gee mean by “dominant Discourse”? How does he say we can make sense of—and navigate—the various Discourses we encounter?

In his book Genre Analysis, John Swales provides six defining characteristics for a discourse community; however, he wrote that text in 1990. What new developments have there been since that may affect discourse communities? For example, what about online discourse communities? Which of the criteria still apply today and which may not, or at least may look different today? How? Why? See what Swales said about this in a 2017 update.

Ann M. Johns in her book Text, Role, and Context explores some complications inherent to discourse communities. Individual members’ commitment and involvement vary, and degrees of authority exist. Furthermore, community affiliations come at a cost to some members, including conflicts between home and academic cultures, for example. Johns notes, however, that people joining a new discourse community, after understanding its rules, can rebel against some of its conventions, and in doing so actually change the discourse community; this is part of the dialogue and critique important to any academic community. In this way discourse communities evolve. Overall, what is Johns’ saying about discourse community affiliations? What is the relationship between the individual members and the community and how is it negotiated? And what are the benefits and drawbacks of discourse community affiliation for all involved?

In the article “‘Nah, We Straight’: An Argument Against Code Switching,” Vershawn Ashanti Young’s argument calls attention to issues of identity and language. As the title suggests, Ashanti argues against the teaching of code switching in literacy education, which he defines as “the use of more than one language or language variety concurrently in conversation” and uses Spanglish as an example of the concept (49). He is concerned that code switching is “a strategy to negotiate, side-step and ultimately accommodate bias against the working-class, women, and the ongoing racism against the language habits of blacks and other non-white peoples” (51). He claims a better alternative is code meshing, “the blending and concurrent use of American English dialects in formal, discursive products, such as political speeches, student papers, and media interviews,” which he exemplifies: “blend dos idiomas or copping enough standard English to really make yo’ AAE [African American English] be Da Bomb” (50). How does Young’s argument show that language use is connected to identity? What are your thoughts on the relationship between language and identity? What does this discussion bring to the concept of discourse community?