english paper

ENG 100

Discourse Community Ethnography

OVERVIEW

In this unit, we have been discussing the characteristics of a discourse community, conducting informal discourse analyses, and looking at two real-life studies of discourse communities. At the end of this unit, it will be your turn to conduct a formal analysis of a discourse community. For this assignment, you will be selecting a real-life group/organization here on UD’s campus or in the broader Dayton community. The group you select cannot be a group you belong to. Furthermore, the majority of the members in the group you select must differ from you in terms of age, race, class, gender, religion, and/or sexuality.

Spend some time gathering information about this organization/group, its members, and the texts they produce. You will need to explicitly address at least two texts from the group in your paper. Such texts could include websites, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, Instagram accounts, brochures, pamphlets, newsletters, handbooks, messaging apps (GroupMe, Messenger, etc.), emails, blogs, memos, and the like. Whatever types of texts you choose, you must ensure that these are texts produced by the group and for the group. If possible, you may want to actually contact a member of the group and conduct a brief interview (over email, through Facebook, or face-to-face) with them about the group and the texts they use. Please note that interviews are optional and do not count toward the two text requirement.

You will then perform a discourse community analysis. In other words, you will use the information you have gathered and the texts you have collected to write a formal analysis of whether or not this group/organization can be considered a discourse community. The use of sub-headings is perfectly acceptable in this essay.

PURPOSE

Through this essay, you will be able to apply what you have learned about discourse communities through our academic articles and class discussions to a real-life context. By performing this analysis, you will gain a better understanding of a group/organization in our own community, while using real-life texts and information to conduct an analysis. This paper will emphasize organizational skills, effective introduction and conclusion paragraphs, and the incorporation of outside sources.

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS

5-6 pages + works cited + copies of used texts, MLA format

The 6 characteristics of a discourse community by john swales

1. “A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.”

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 a specific lexis.”

6. “A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise”