Jargon

What jargon have you noticed in your artifact? What are you learning about your chosen discourse community?

Jargon in my artifact (Chemistry article): bottleneck, dendritic, in vitro, macrophages

 

I am learning about a new treatment target for cancer that researchers are studying.

July 13, 2016 Uncategorized No Comments on Jargon

Swales and Gee

What is useful in Swales and Gee’s works in our paper?

Our paper is basically about discourse communities in our field of study.  We are reading and analyzing an article, because it is supposed to directly relate to what we want to do, and maybe even whatever we want to specialize in (in our field of study).  Using whichever article we choose, we can find some goal or issue that an association or organization in our field is focusing on.  These associations/organizations are discourse communities, and using Swale’s six characteristics of what a discourse community is, we can further explain why they can be defined as one.  We can also talk more about what the members of these groups are like, and compare them to how they compare to Gee’s opinions on how members of a discourse community should be.

July 12, 2016 Uncategorized No Comments on Swales and Gee

Swales and Gee – compare and contrast

Compare – Gee and Swales both agree on the same definition to what exactly a discourse community is.

 

 

Contrast- Swales believed that anyone can join any discourse communities with the same interests as themselves, while Gee believed that people are born to a primary discourse community, but they join many secondary ones overtime.  While Swale talks more about what a discourse community is, and the six characteristics of it, Gee puts more stress on how people are in different types of discourse communities.  Gee discusses how important physical appearance, speech, and refinement of members in a discourse community is, while Swales only stresses what exactly makes a member of a discourse community.

July 12, 2016 Uncategorized No Comments on Swales and Gee – compare and contrast

Swales Questions

Questions

  1. Use your own words to describe each of the six characteristics of a discourse community according to Swales. Can you find examples of each from your own experience?
  2. Write a one page letter to an incoming student in which you explain what discourse communities are and how knowing about them will be helpful to that student in college.

Answers

  1. A discourse community consists of people who are all share, and are involved in, some certain problem, issue, or field of work together.  According to Swales, there are six characteristics that define a discourse community.  The first is that a discourse community all must have the same, or a similar, belief in what their goals are.  People involved in Christian churches are a good example, because they all belief in God and/or use the bible for sermons.  Their goal is to follow what they believe is God’s word in a certain way.  The next characteristic of a discourse community is that everyone involved in one must be working together and communicating to get to that goal.  For instance, people involved in a sport’s team all work together to win a game.  Thirdly, they must constantly be evaluating one another to provide information and ways to improve (almost like constructive criticism).  Blogs are one example, because they are usually posted for feedback and comments on something.  Furthermore, discourse communities use their own genres (writing/texts/speech), to help achieve their goals. Many leadership groups exhibit this characteristic, because they send out magazines and journal articles to their members.  Discourse communities also have acquired specific lexis (specialized terminology) that they develop overtime.  For instance, people involved in anime clubs know terms for anime that someone not involved in the group couldn’t.  Finally, a discourse community has people with a different level of expertise in their field (beginners, long-time pros, etc.).  This happens everywhere.  Coworkers have a different mastery on what their job over someone else doing a different job.  In other words, one person will always knows more about a subject that another coworker may, and vice versa.
  2. A discourse community is another term that refers to a group of people who share a common goal and work together to progress to that goal.  Overtime, they develop and use their own lexis ( group jargon) and genres (writing).  They continuously work toward their goal, though most don’t ever actually achieve it.  They do this by recruiting and giving feedback to one another.
July 11, 2016 Uncategorized No Comments on Swales Questions

English 455 Syllabus Questions and Answers

1. What is she trying to persuade her readers to believe about writing?
2. What ethos is she constructing?
3. Does that ethos help or hurt her persuasion? and how so?
1. Dr. Lisa King is trying to get her students to critically think and go in depth when reading and writing. She wants to really challenge her students by giving them a lot to write about, while also giving them very intricate topics to write about. She probably wants her students to believe that they cannot just speed their way through her class, and it is going to be a very time consuming class. She might be trying to see whether or not students really want to be in the course.
2. By reading her syllabus, we can assume that Dr. King is very particular and firm with her students and assignments. She even states that the course will be difficult and there will be no extra credit opportunities. Dr. King gives a very credible, and austere personality.
3. Ethos helps her persuasion, because the more credible and stern she seems, the more serious students will take her. This mood that she sets will make her students work a lot harder to meet what she expects.

July 9, 2016 Uncategorized No Comments on English 455 Syllabus Questions and Answers