My third essay is a discourse community ethonography entitled “Ratline: The Culture and Discourses of a Freshman at the Virginia Military Institute”. A discourse community ethnography is a study that is specifically meant to focus on a group of people who form what writers call a “discourse community”. A discourse community describes those who form a common community based on shared linguistic and rhetorical traits including texts, lexes, and communication methods. Being at the Virginia Military Institute, one of the few discourse communities that we are exposed to is the one that we are actually a part of. Therein lies the reason why I chose VMI as the subject of my essay.

Writing this essay wasn’t difficult in terms of coming up with material to write about. Living inside the discourse community provides no lack of subject matter to write about. The most significant challenge was identifying the characteristics of our community that relate to discourse communities and then elaborating on those characteristics and tying them back to the essay at large. I feel as though that was the weakest point in my essay. I think the strongest point in my essay was actually explaining the culture and how it operates. But in the end, I did learn a lot about discourse communities. Prior to writing this essay, I wouldn’t have even been able to even explain what a “discourse community ethnography” was.