Many people are involved in various Discourse Communities (Swales) even if they do not recognize it. A discourse community is made up of individuals who share common goals agreed upon by most members, has a system of intercommunication between its members, uses its participatory mechanisms to provide information, and a reasonable ratio of novices to experts. The Men’s Lacrosse team at the Virginia Military Institute is one of my discourse communities and is a group of individuals that all have common goals, uses its resources to develop a system of intercommunication and lexis, and is “shaped in part by what their members know without having to tell each other and by shared rhythms of activity” (Swales & WAW).

When walking into the locker room, you quickly realize the 4 core values of the lacrosse team. Attitude is the first term and value of the lacrosse program, this represents the way you present yourself and handle tough situations, whether that is on the field or outside the athletic world. The importance of your attitude and how the outlook an individual has on you can be impacted by a bad attitude is the reason that the lacrosse team and its members are held to such a high standard. The second term is Compete, standing for the competition that the players should have on the field, in the classroom, and in everyday life. Coach Purpura is quick to recognize the competition in the classroom, how everyone should try their hardest to beat the class by getting the highest grade on the test or essay. This does not only apply to the classroom, but also translates to the lacrosse field and the level of competition we should be playing with whenever we are on the field. Effort is possibly the most important term out of the four, representing the work and intensity we should be applying to everything we do. This does not come without a measure of discipline to maintain a constant level of effort. Because to perform at the highest possible level, you need to have discipline in keeping your body healthy and prepare correctly and accordingly for the task at hand. This can apply to a game, early morning lift, or test. You need to work your hardest at everything you do, and that is the overarching meaning of effort. Finally, Sacrifice is the final key value of the lacrosse team. Sacrifice represents the amount of time, energy, and work you will end up putting into the process of completing the team’s common goals. Of course, sacrifice comes with its up and downs, but if you maintain a strong mental heading and understand what you are sacrificing for, you will be accepting of the outcome. All these values come together to form the acronym ACES, the most important term and overarching idea of the lacrosse team.

The men’s lacrosse team is very connected by the common goals that all the members of the community believe in and stand by, but another important part of the team is the system of intercommunication that has been developed. The team has made use of its external resources to include the GroupMe app and interpersonal conversations between each other. The GroupMe app has helped send more complex and team related messages regarding practice and team meetings. It has helped some of the younger players ask important questions to help them adjust to the culture and structure of VMI. The class structure of the school has added to the relationships and how close players in their own class are to each other. Other teams may not room with each other, but most of the lacrosse team are roommates, building on their already strong relationships. The large roster only helps to add more outlets for players that may be struggling. Mental Health has been an issue of increasing regularity in the past years, and with the time strains of the rat line and athletic schedules, on top of schoolwork, it is easy to get down and have little senses of depression. The first classmen on the team helps to maintain a strong leadership structure that adds to the relationship and communication within the team. Some rats have needed to talk with the first classmen to help grab a sense of the whole workload that is division 1 lacrosse and have been very thankful for the opportunity to express themselves to someone who can easily relate and advise them. The leadership on the team is very important to the community and how it is run, because when someone misses a practice or lift, you do not only get in trouble with the coaches, but with the captains as well. This makes a strong sense of leaders and followers within the team, helping develop the relationships and system of intercommunication within the team.

Lacrosse is a game that requires an immense amount of preparation and what some refer to as a “high lacrosse IQ”. This develops a shared rhythm in the activity that guides how a player fits into the scene on the lacrosse field. Defense in lacrosse is highly dependent on how much a player knows about the function and slide package on the field. This innate sense of when to cover your man and when to play a zone, when to split two, and when to help your teammates and how much. With this high lacrosse IQ, the player can be guided on the field and through the systems the coach has implemented by themselves. On the offensive side, this refers to the overall setup and execution of a set play and when to identify if they are open to receive a pass or not. Having a high IQ helps a player immensely in the transition game, one of the most vital parts of a team’s efficiency and how many opportunities they must score. Within the game of lacrosse, there are many decisions that are made based on your instinct and are different depending on the team. During practices, the most vital form of preparation, the coach has a specific plan for the hours of the day where the entire team is together. It is important for the practices to be constant and intense to help physical fitness and to get each player more repetitions. To prepare the entire team for the games and spring season, each player on the team needs to be on the same level mentally to make each practice better. The idea of the team being as good as its weakest player, it is important for everyone to try their best and play their best to make the team much better. To help with all the upside of having a younger team is the ability of the upperclassmen to have a chance to lead and develop the skills necessary to lead a team and for the players to respect you.  The coach can implement different plays and sets for each side of the ball, offensive and defensive, but at the end of the day, the only thing that you need is a strong sense of your surroundings.

The terms learned and used on the lacrosse field are particular to lacrosse, if someone was to try to jump into a game at the college level, the calls and lexis used would leave the person frantic and confused. Terms that are different and adapted from the different schools and teams can differ completely, but all have the same base idea. One of the most popular terms is “slide”, meaning the physical movement from your offensive man to cover or guard the offensive player that one of your teammates needs help guarding. The term “I’m hot” can be more commonly referred to as “I’m on” or “I’m sliding”. This term is used on every team in a certain capacity and is used by the VMI defense. Another term can be “coma”, this is one of the main defensive sets for the VMI team but can be used to refer to a certain slide package. It receives the term “coma” because it comes from physically putting the player in a coma, making it a term that the offensive players hate to hear. In a sport where your IQ is required to be high and you cannot fix all your focus to the physical actions, this lexis can be the most impactful and helpful terms you can hear.

In the men’s lacrosse discourse community at the Virginia Military Institute, the common goals of the team, system of intercommunication, and a system of innate behaviors and shared rhythm within the team. Paired with the lexis in the lacrosse community and within the team along with practices and dedication of the lacrosse team and its individual parts. The importance and everyday value of the term ACES should and can be applied to your life every day.

Works Cited

Swales, John M. “The Concept of Discourse Community: Some Recent Personal History.” Composition Forum, vol. 37, Fall 2017. http://compositionforum.com/issue/37/swales-retrospective.php

Wardle, Elizabeth. Writing about Writing. Bedford/St. Martin’s, Macmillan Learning, 2020.

Help Received: Cadets who peer reviewed my paper, Engaged reading sheets, WAW book, Handbook

An important contribution to the articles and magazines published for a more specific and important discourse community is the utilization of specific rhetoric that only those with a background or general idea of the subject will understand completely. When compared to a more general piece that includes rhetoric for a reader less adept with the circumstances within the professional field, the depth that the authors go into and the phrases the paper uses are dramatically different. Overall, the difference between a magazine on subjects in the S.T.E.M. field are more likely to display advanced ideas and words relating to the subject at hand, rather than its more general news counterparts.

Within the chosen articles into the worlds of artificial intelligence and the problem with garbage in the Pacific Ocean, it is easy to see the difference in the lexis used to illustrate and prove certain points. Additionally, the different word choice adapted to that of an already established community is very easy to see within the article pertaining to artificial intelligence. The article about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is relayed to an entirely different set of individuals but maintains some of the same ideas. When comparing these articles to some of the more generalized ones that would be posted by major news outlets, you see the difference in the amount of information given to you about topics that you should already know about. The article written by Amitai and Oren Etzioni talks about the implementation of AI (artificial intelligence) Guardians that “serve to verify that operational systems did not stray unduly from the guidelines of their programmers and to bring them back in compliance if they do stray” (Etzioni 29). These oversight systems would be a type of fail safe if the world of artificial intelligence started acting out or doing things that it was not created or programmed for. For this article to have an impact on the reader, it would require some sort of prior knowledge or background in the field of artificial intelligence. The language utilized in The First Law of Robotics (a call to arms), is vastly more complex than that found in the article. The language used in this professional study, not only relating to the use of letters in words, but as symbols and equations. For example, when talking about synthesizing safe plans, Etzioni and Weld write about how “it must iterate through every constraint dont-disturb(C) and every effect E of A_p, determining the conditions (if any) under which E violates C” (First Law of Robotics, 19). The difference between how the study and article are written forms a large gap between who would be able understand the study and the paper, and those who find it hard to follow the article alone. The author of the article and study, Oren Etzioni, is Professor Emeritus, University of Washington and helped pioneer meta-search, online comparison shopping, machine reading, and Open Information Extraction. His coauthor for the study, Daniel Weld, is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. Together, these two have many years of experience and are well informed within the community of artificial intelligence.

Within the article cowritten by Amitai and Oren Etzioni, the sources and references that are used within the piece are hard to follow and do not add extra depth as a traditional source would. With the use of footnotes and links for websites, the application of the sources is hard to follow within the article. They do not give it as much depth as the reader would experience if it used real cited sources, like the references to certain studies and articles. Without the idea of what the websites are about, it allows for the reader to completely skip over the thought about what type of source it could be and receive the extra assistance with the sentence or idea at hand that they are intended for. When referring to an actual study or paper within the text, the authors use very straight forward subscripts to display what reference the idea or sentence was taken or originated from. These references can be used to further deepen the understanding of the article and how these sources are very helpful and pertinent to the information at hand. The availability of the references at the end of the article are the reason that it was possible to find the study to link the article to. Within this version of conversation about artificial intelligence, the ability to access the studies and research papers that the authors used to write the generic and easily read article, helps to deepen the understanding of the reader and to show the difference between how the article explains certain topics and how the study discusses them. Overall, the use of links for websites in footnotes added little to the paper and makes it harder for the reader to follow rather than if the authors would have included the actual citation.

Within the article Designing AI Systems that Obey Our Laws and Values, the authors decided to focus on the overarching idea of how artificial intelligence needs to be guided by itself. Within the text, the system in which AI will be developed and formed in order to accommodate the need for it to be the governing body of other AI systems. Interrogators, Auditors, Monitors, Enforcers, and Ethics bots are all outlined, helping to give the reader a direct idea about exactly how AI will be used to regulate the other operating systems. These five types of “AI Guardians” (Etzioni), range from oversight systems that can manage and overview the driving of a car being operated by an AI, such as a Tesla; but it also includes systems that help decide the best treatment for patients in hospitals when they are in intensive care units and often those who are at the edge of death. Within the example of why an Auditing system would be needed within a hospital, the reason for the article comes out. The reason for the authors to write and inform about this topic is since if the AI system decided to go rouge and suggested different treatments that would not save the patient’s life, an oversight system would be able to fix these issues before they happen, to make sure the doctors are able to save as many lives as possible. The need for AI oversight systems is necessary to make sure your car drives the speed limit and does not make any problems on the road that are against the law and to save people in the intensive care units by presenting doctors with the best way to help their patients. The article is very well written and is very effective in using real life examples to show why it is going to be a necessity to have AI systems overlooking AI systems.

For the article to have some significance and stay with the reader, it needs to be supported by studies and research papers that add extra depth to the paper. Without the utilization of these studies to give their points some footing, the article would have nothing to support their reasoning. Within the article, the authors develop their point that AI should be managed and overlooked by AI. For their point to be proven, they need to use studies and research papers that have to do with the topic, such as The First Law of Robotics and Ethics and Information Technology. Within these articles, both written by one of the authors, the reader can gain extra depth and background for the reasoning of why AI should be monitored by AI. Within these references, the authors make a point using one of the studies, but then proceed to explain and earn their point by utilizing different references. This strategy is very effective in earning their point. By using different scientific sources, the authors are giving the reader more reasons to believe their point. In the article, it uses many different specific names that are from their references to make their point, giving them a step up on illustrating their point. Each reference is used for a different point within the article, making each of the studies important to the overall idea and purpose of the paper. Without the use of the large number of sources, the paper would not stay with the reader for long, but with the excessive evidence to support it, they add depth to the paper. Although, with the use of website links and less specific citations, it lacks the hard-core evidence by not showing the reader where exactly their reasoning for using the article is from.

In the end, the most effective tools used by the authors are the language and rhetoric. To give the reader, the depth and convince them that AI needs to be controlled and monitored by AI, the authors enroll the help of excessive sources and complicated language pertaining to specific communities. Without the use of these complicated sentences and word choice, the article would be easier to understand, but would not be as aggressive as needed to develop and earn its point. Amitai and Oren Etzioni’s article is paired well with Etzioni and Daniel Weld’s to develop and get their point across about artificial intelligence and its possible future issues and how to avoid them.

Help Received: Notes, Engaged Readings, Ms. Smith, easybib.com

Works Cited

Etzioni, Amitai, and Oren Etzioni. “Designing AI Systems That Obey Our Laws and Values.” Viewpoints, Sept. 2016, pp. 29–31.

FAHNESTOCK, JEANNE. “Accommodating Science.” Written Communication, vol. 15, no. 3, 1998, pp. 330–350., https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088398015003006.

Wardle, Elizabeth, and Doug Downs. “Rhetoric: Making Sense of Human Interaction and Meaning-Making.” Writing about Writing, Bedford Books St. Martin’s, Boston, MA, 2020.

Wardle, Elizabeth, and James E Porter. “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community.” Writing about Writing, Bedford Books St. Martin’s, Boston, MA, 2020.

Wardle, Elizabeth, and Keith Grant-Davie. “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents.” Writing about Writing, Bedford Books St. Martin’s, Boston, MA, 2020.

Weld, D. and Etzioni, O. The First Law of Robotics (a call to arms). In Proceedings of AAAI ’94, AAAI. 1994; http://bit.ly/292kpSK

Literacy history and narratives evolve through years of schooling and learning and can never be completely developed. Literacy involves a person’s ability to read and write at a certain level and the ways that taught them how to do so, such as their experiences and knowledge. My literary history, habits and processes have been developed for the last 18 years, expanding from hearing and learning the language at a young age, writing full length papers and essays and how to engage the reader to reading and learning about other authors’ literacies.

Before attending D’Evelyn, a school that had both middle and high school, my literary history was painted by various children’s books, at home learning, and accounts of fiction writing. Dick and Jane was one of the very first memories I have of reading. Reading this book when I was very young makes it hard to remember much about what it was about, but enough to remember it. I absolutely loved this children’s book and would read it whenever presented the opportunity. The memories of sitting in my mother’s arms while hearing all these stories about these siblings all helped contribute to my literacy. Although I did not understand it, reading for fun and excitement helped me learn to read at a higher level and how to comprehend and appreciate an interesting or appealing book. When I first moved to Colorado, my mom thought it important to teach me how to read and write in cursive. Often considered now a dead language, the memories of my mom printing out dot tracing papers of my name in cursive are vital in my literary development. I remember thinking it was so easy, doing five sheets in ten minutes, under the belief that they had all been done correctly, when my mom comes in and realizes that her son forgot the entirety of a letter in his last name. When revealed to her son, he immediately started crying and freaking out. Writing can never be perfect, struggling and making a big mistake when learning cursive was very important because it taught me the hard way that no matter how hard you try, your writing can never be perfect, it can always be modified in order to make it better. As a second and third grader, I was very obsessed with Yoshi and the Nintendo Wii, and even now when I gain a lot of interest in a topic, there is nothing that would entertain me more. After completing various levels in Super Mario Bros, I decided to write a fictional story about Yoshi and all his friends. I used to dream about all the adventures Yoshi would go on, and then wrote those down. Involving characters like King Mole, who was quite literally a Mole who was a king. In second and third grade I found myself doing something that has not happened since, writing for fun. Using these stories as inspiration I learned more about writing and my own writing style as I ever have. Although at a very young age, reading children’s books, learning cursive, and writing my own fictional stories, my literacy habits and processes began developing into the eventual qualities that would be writing term papers.

After enrolling for D’Evelyn, writing complete and connected essays was not something I had done. My seventh-grade English teacher, Ms. Hughes, was one of the most influential and important characters in my literary development. I remember certain lessons and assignments in this class that have ended up being some of the building blocks to my writing. Although the assignments she assigned were nowhere close to as long as the essays being written 3 years later, the process of planning and writing essays about assigned topics were the very first examples of experiencing a large change in how I wrote and eventually the building block to the writing that I do today. Elective classes were some of both scariest and informative classes I took in high school. Taking two speech classes illustrated the importance of being able to speak in public, a very difficult thing for myself. The teacher for both courses was the same, the only thing different was the age I was when taking the classes. In eight-grade when first learning about speeches and writing this class was a struggle but an extreme learning curve for me. Writing informative speeches about engaging topics that I got to pick helped reinforce how writing, in some cases, could be fun but also that a speech can be one of the most influential writings you can do. The difference between this class and the one I took my senior year of high school was the ease of it. When taking the class in eight-grade, I only had a year of actual writing that was taught to me and very few essays and writing assignments. A few hundred essays and writing assignments later, I found myself taking another speech class and the difference I experienced was insane. The speed and ease that I could put these speeches and writings together and still earn a high grade was very shocking to me. I had never realized just how much my writing had changed since the eight-grade and how much I had learned about writing over the last four years. But the hardest and most time-consuming assignments resided every year of senior high career and appeared three times my senior year. Term papers were the longest and most stressful assignments I had ever done, normally getting done the night before, causing me to turn in a rough draft instead of a finished product of edited words and ideas. This poor planning ended my senior year when I realized that when I finished the assignment and was able to look over it and fix easy mistakes and boost my grade by almost twenty percent and finish with a grade that I will always remember of a ninety-six. The lesson of the term papers was not how to write a paper of that length but how easy writing can be when you find an interest in the topic at hand. Making sure that I understand and comprehend the reason for a certain essay is very important to the amount of effort and time I put into a paper. After learning in my high school career whether just beginning in seventh-grade or seeing the change from eighth grade to my senior year of high school, to the importance of writing about an interesting topic no matter the length, all the writing I did throughout my high school career were the most important year for developing my literary habits and processes.

After earning my diploma from D’Evelyn, the idea of literary narrative was first introduced in the first semester of college at the Virginia Military Institute. Within the class of writing and rhetoric, a class that I had no idea of what it was about or what I would have to do for it, the underlying idea of literary habits, processes and history was first introduced to me and made me think about how my writing and other characteristics were developed by literary sponsors. Literary sponsors are certain people on which you have developed characteristics or ideas and who have taught or inspired you in a certain way. One of the first experiences with literary sponsors came from the Ray Bradbury worksheet, in which we saw an author who talks about his hygiene as a writer, how healthy his writing or ideas are, and his own literary sponsors. Listening to this masterful writer talk about who inspired him and made him realize certain ideas was eye opening. He did not change into this famous and talented writer overnight, he spent years writing, learning and listening to other authors, taking what papers and stories they wrote into depth and turning all their ideas into lessons for himself. Reading about certain authors’ ideas and thoughts such as Young’s ways of writing and how having a different dialect can strengthen the writing of another. Other authors like Wan and Mellix help draw more upon how to strengthen your writing even though you may speak a different way than natives of that language and how to stand up for your own literary history even though it may be dramatically different than others. All these engaged readings help you realize that the more different your literary sponsors are, the better and possibly more engaging your writing can be. Reading and writing about the importance of literacy sponsors to these accomplished writers help you understand the importance of your own literary habits, processes and history.

Although I have developed my reading and writing in a different way than others, I still have many of the same ideas and beliefs as others, but also different ones. Throughout my life, whether it was the at home teaching of my mom or the classes and papers I wrote in high school, or even the literary sponsors I learned about in college, all these teachings or ideas helped me develop my own literacies and turn my writing into what it is today.

Works Cited

         Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 49, no. 2, May 1998, pp. 165-85.

Mellix, Barbara. “From Outside, In.” The Georgia Review, vol. 41, no. 2, Summer 1987, pp. 258-67.

Wan, Julie. “Chinks in My Armor: Reclaiming One’s Voice.” Stylus, vol. 9, no.1, Spring 2018, pp. 1-6.Wardle, Elizabeth. Writing about Writing. Bedford/St. Martin’s, Macmillan Learning, 2020.

Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English?” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2010, pp. 110-18.