So this one was a doozy. It was difficult to write, difficult to find a topic, and I essentially never turned it in, eg. it was a grade killer. Well I killed my own grade, but this assignment didn’t really help. On the surface the topic was pretty cool, we were supposed to write an “ethnography” about a “discourse community” which (I believed) meant that we were to analyze a specific group that had a specific “lexis” (which is a fancy way to say “way of speaking”) and show what made them unique, and a community worth dissecting. That was not in fact the assignment. We were supposed to have a point to prove about the discourse community, really more like an extreme pseudoscience lab report than an English paper. The more I write about it actually, the cooler it sounds, I wish I’d thought of it more as an opportunity and less of a chore at the time, I could have done a lot better on the assignment. We were also to conduct an interview, which I failed to do.

I chose Delta Company as the Discourse Community that I was to analyze, which (unsurprisingly I suppose) is MY company. It was and is part of a larger discourse community that is VMI which is one of the big reasons I chose it. Convenience I mean. I did really think it was a distinct enough of a group within VMI to warrant a separate investigation, mostly because it had different goals than most of the other companies, and a rhetoric that was (I like to think) higher than some of the other companies as well. In addition I felt that the tone of communication between the novices and the experts in the company were worth looking at comparing to other companies, as it had a a weird dichotomous tone, wherin Cadre (the experts) tell the Rats (the novices) in the same breath that they’re worthless pieces of human garbage, but at the same time they’re better than Rats in other companies. Confusing to say the least, and being indoctrinated into that kind of mentality didn’t exactly make the Delta Rats popular with their BRs (brother rats) in companies like Charlie or Alpha.

So I essentially went through the variety of modes of communication in the company and tried to explain how they, and the ways they were used, made the company “special” and worthy of discussion as a discourse community at all. It was mind numbingly dull, but I did eventually get through, close to a month late. This was the time that a one on one discussion with the professor actually made me feel discouraged, as it made me realize how much work I really had to do.  I wish I’d put more time and effort into the assignment, becuause I love my company despite, and sometimes because of it’s flaws, and the way it’s dealing with the attitude problem it’s had in the past.