Author: Annie (Page 3 of 4)

This piece was an easy read because the author made it simple to know where he was going with his subject. Understanding discourse community is about finding a common ground community where we can learn,share and improve together.

According According to John Swale (and Dan Melzer) all discourse community have all these in common : 

1. A broadly agreed upon set of common public goals
2. Mechanisms of intercommunication among members 
3. Use of these communication mechanisms to provide information and feedback 
4. One or more genres that help further the goals of the discourse community 
5. A specific lexis (specialized language)
6. A threshold level of expert members (24-26)

The shared goals of Meltzer’s guitar jam group was to have fun and learn music together . 

 An example of the specific lexis (language) that Meltzer’s guitar jam group use is To anyone who wasn’t a musician, our guitar meetups might have sounded like we were communicating in a foreign language. We talked about the root note of scale, a 1/4/5 chord progression, putting a capo on different  frets, whether to play solos in a major or minor scale, double drop D tuning, and so on.  

A discourse community I could say I’m part of is this group chat that my biology class made to help us understand the course better, giving each other tips and advice. 

Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps towards Rhetorical Analysis by Laura Bolin Carroll, talks about the fundamentals and daily use of rhetorical analysis.The author starts her essay by emphasizing on the way we judge and analyze things that profit from a personal point of view. We use rhetorical analysis on an ongoing basis, several times without knowing that we are analyzing it. Laura describes that there are three parts to understanding the context of rhetoric—requirement, audience, and constraints.

The author relates our own pursuit of judgemental perspective to the implications of rhetorical analysis , the way we use language through media and other pop culture adverts to persuade and use rhetorical such as pathos , logos, pathos to convey the use of persuasive writing and speech. When a new person comes in, we judge them by the way they dress, but sometimes, or most of the time, we’re wrong about the person we thought they were supposed to be. But it is rhetoric in the sense of her claim that we judge any new person who comes in. Rhetoric is a powerful collection of instruments that we regular writers can use and use to set our point, and a set of rituals that we perform in our daily lives.