Writing about Discourse Communities

So far this semester, we have read texts that challenge us to consider what discourse communities are and how these authors and their audiences belong to and move between different discourse communities.

For Project 1, you will write a narrative in which you consider discourse communities in your life and how they create a sense of belonging. To do so, you will use your personal experience. You will also draw from what you learned in our course readings.

Your narrative will be approximately 1000 words by including the following points to support a thesis statement about what discourse communities offer you in your life and about how discourse communities create a sense of belonging:

• Think about a discourse community you identify with. Tell a story about a time when this discourse community offered you a feeling of belonging.
• Now think about yourself at City Tech or in your major and how that position either offers you belonging or makes you feel like an outsider. Write about a time when you had a feeling of belonging or of being excluded from a discourse community related to college or your major. Additionally, discuss why it is important to you to belong to this discourse community and steps you can take to help you develop or further develop that sense of belonging.
• Then reflect on these two experiences to draw conclusions about what it means to be part of a discourse community.
• Throughout, use specific examples, and include words, behaviors, or other signs of the discourse communities that help you tell your story.
• Additionally, as you write about your experiences and draw conclusions, include one or two quotations from our readings and respond to those ideas either in support of what you’re saying or as a counterpoint.

As you write, think about who you want the audience to be for this project. Your imagined audience might be someone in the first discourse community you wrote about. Or members of your family. Or your classmates. Or some other audience you can identify. You would write about your experiences differently for each of these imagined audiences, so be sure you are using language, ideas, and organization that would be appropriate for that audience.

Timeline

• Drafting in Class: Wednesday, 2/14
• Next Draft Due: Wednesday, 2/21
• Presentations of Project 1 Work: Thursday, 2/22, Monday, 2/26
• Project 1 Due: Wednesday, 2/28, on our OpenLab site by the start of class

To Submit Project 1

• Add your work by copying and pasting from wherever you’ve been drafting and then adding a post on our site. If you need help, refer to this Help on Writing a Post
• Choose the Visibility and More Visibility Options to decide who can see your post.
• Choose the category Project 1 Work. If you need help, refer to this Help on Categories.
• Be sure to add a title to your post.

Grading

Here are the grading criteria for this project, which you can use as a checklist:

• construction of a narrative that serves a purpose for a particular audience
• development of an overall point/significance for your narrative
• use of concrete, significant details rather than generalizations
• focus on one event or a connected series of events for each of the two experiences you’re writing about
• integration of one or two ideas from our course texts into your narrative
• organization of ideas into paragraphs and paragraphs into a coherent order
• use of tone, language, grammar, and sentence structure as appropriate for your genre, audience, and purpose
• appropriate choice of language: you can write with whatever diction (style of language) you choose, but it must be the best language for the job– as you see it– for your audience and purpose
• meet the scope of the project: aim for 1000 words, without padding or unnecessary repetition.
• attention to finishing touches, in terms of proofreading, formatting, submitting, etc.

You will not be penalized for having negative things to say about college or your major, if that’s appropriate for your chosen purpose and audience. If you have any concerns about this project, its subject, your ability to complete it or to submit it, please communicate with me–we can start with email or scheduling a meeting or meet in student support hours.

I’m excited to read about your discourse communities!

Photo Credit:

“Come Together” by Tim via Flickr under the open license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0