reflection essay

Essay 2: Discourse Community Analysis

Overview:

For this essay you are to write an essay about the use of discourse within a specific community based on your own direct observation. You should spend several hours observing your chosen community, collecting evidence about the nature of its discourse. Given that we are still in the middle of a pandemic, this observation will likely take place in a virtual environment. From this evidence, you should build an argument about how discourse functions within this specific community.

Engaging with Swales:

According to Swales’s essay, a discourse community:

1. Shares public goals 2. Has mechanisms of intercommunication 3. Uses participatory mechanisms to provide

information and feedback 4. Possesses and utilizes unique genres 5. Uses unique lexis 6. Has a threshold level of members with

expertise

As you collect evidence and write your essay, you may find it helpful to incorporate some of the ideas from Swales’s “Concept of Discourse Community.” You should use these ideas, especially Swales’s defining characteristics of a discourse community to help you make a claim about the specific community that you are observing. In doing so, you may complicate, or expand on Swales’s conception of a discourse community. You should not, however, simply demonstrate how the community does or does not exhibit each of these characteristics.

Learning Goals:

• Students gather and interpret evidence. • Students place their observations in context

of others’ ideas. • Students comprehend and engage with

complex writing. • Students assess their own writing goals and

engage with audience expectations. • Students make effective use of evidence to

advance original claims. • Students provide responses to peers that aid

with revision. • Students utilize peer and instructor feedback

in order to effectively revise. • Students reflect on the writing process and

learn to recognize strategies that will lead to success on future writing projects.

• Students employ structuring strategies to effectively communicate ideas.

Length: 5 Pages First draft due: October 16

Peer review: October 19 Final draft due: October 21