Blog #5: Discourse Community

I needed a picture so here's something I took this summer :D

All those JSTOR and Op-Eds, I forgot we did blogs. Thank goodness too cause blogging is so much easier than trying to meme a JSTOR article.

Professor Flewelling called Swales' piece a "stiff" read, so I wasn't looking forward to try and get through it. I probably had to read every sentence over a few times and still not really understand it but thats okay cause we talked about discourse communities in class on Monday.

From my understanding based on class on Monday, a discourse community is more than just in the intended audience. It is more of a specific group of people who have developed their own way of communicating in order to achieve a common goal. I liked Professor's analogy she always uses about doctors. Doctors taking and then sharing their SOAP notes could be considered a discourse community. A discourse community could be a social group such as my group of friends, or it could be a professional group such as how I would communicate with my coworkers and managers at work.

Swale came up with six characteristics to help identify a group as a discourse community:

1. "A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals"
2. "A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members." 
3. "A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback." 
4.  "A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims."
5. "In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis." 
6. "A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise." 

The group I am going to analyze is my coworkers and managers. On any given day at work I will communicate on the phone, over text, written daily logs, verbally in person, and verbally with a radio. We meet the first criteria, being we are all trying to the job done (i.e. make sure everything is ready/clean) As for the second criteria, I'm not entirely sure what "mechanisms of intercommunication" means but I taking it as multiple forms of communication which we also have at my work. I communicate with coworkers at work "primarily to provide information and feedback." The fourth characteristic Swale give is a mouthful wow. I think this one is similar to #3, saying a discourse community has to have different styles/forms of communicating. Swale calls "lexis" as "community-specific abbreviations and acronyms." At my job we abbreviate all the time to communicate in a quicker way. We also have a very formal technical way of communication with our radios. As for the last characteristic, we are always loosing and getting new people so we always have a balance of experts and novices who are familiar with how communicating at work is done. Based on these characteristic, I do believe my coworkers and I are apart of our own discourse community.  

Blog 4: Opinion Writings

I've never read an op-ed or JSTOR article but really hoping they are easy to read cause this is the last thing I wanna be doing on this beautiful Sunday afternoon. Here goes nothing....

Me every time I write these blogs

The first op-ed I read was Emma Rollers, "Why This Election Feels Never­Ending." The next op-ed I read was Paul Waldman's "Trump's history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton the supposedly corrupt one?" Despite my little interest in politics, for my third op-ed I kept the election topic going and read "Donald Trump's bet: We are all chumps." All three writings was easy to follow yet they still manage to have a formal and profession feel to it. Op-eds do exactly as one would expect: voice the author's opinion on a particular subject. I found reading these to way easier than Devitt's writing. It almost seemed like the op-ed pieces we blogs in a way. I feel the author of op-ed connects more to its audience because it is filled with so many emotional appeals. The only downside to writing op-eds is that they are geared toward an audience that shares the same opinion as the author. Okay there might be a few people who read op-ed they don't agree with but I think the majority of people will read the title and decide if they agree and want to keep reading or look for another piece. 

Having just watched the first episode of Stranger Things yesterday, when I saw a JSTOR article about that I had to read it: Liz Tracey's "'Stranger Things' and the Psychic Nosebleed." The other two I read were Kimberly Fain's "Viral Black Death: Why we must watch citizen videos of police violence" and Livia Gershon's "Where American Public Schools Came From." While still preaching a main opinion like the op-eds, the JSTOR article varied quite differently in structure and format. These articles left out most of the pathos that dominated the other opinion writings and instead were packed full of facts from history, references to other writings, and a logically formatted argument. It could have just been the content matter but I enjoyed reading the JSTOR article more than the op-eds. I usually don't care for reading academic pieces but the JSTOR article have a good balance of having a informal feel but still coming off as scholarly and knowledgeable authors. 

Blog 3: Imagination

As a redditor of a few years now, I'd like to think I have seen just about every meme out there. Reddit is definetly a place where memes come alive and never die. I think its hilarious how we are actually even talking about memes in a college level writing class. lol. Reading Knobel and Lankshear was even more exciting because it was a legit academic paper all about memes. wow I never thought I read such a thing. They do go into a great analysis as to what makes a good meme. Some of their main points they make are that the meme is contagious and has longevity. Another point they make is that memes "encodes a recognizable element of cultural information, where cultural information is defined as some kind of meaningful idea, pattern, or chunk of ‘stuff’ that embodies and/or shapes some aspect of the ways of doing and being that are associated with belonging to a particular practice or group (3)." I never really thought about memes as a way of actually communicating a message but Knobel and Lankshear point out that memes are just as valid as an essay. So here's my attempt to analyze one of my personal favorite memes.

I hope everyone had a good enough childhood that you remember this episode of Spongebob. For those that need a reminder about this episode, Spongebob orders a new TV and then proceeds to throw away the TV and ends up playing in the box. Patrick comes over and the two of them go on a multitude of adventures. Squidward hears all of their journeys: overcoming an avalanche, escaping police, and a trip to Robot Pirate Island. Confused, Squadward goes out to see where all the noise is coming from. Spongebob then tells Squidward that its all "Immmmaaginnaaaaaaation" as a rainbow forms between his hands.

This screenshot of Spongebob is definetly contagious because his facial expression can be for anything really. As this meme has come to be, it is usually used with sarcastic or blunt captions. It also has a very recognizable cultural element that I'm sure anyone around my age can certainly name. It is my generation that relates to this meme and can relate and then reproduce such a an famous meme.

Blog #2: Genre

I hope I still don't seem like a lower division student but I'd have to agree with Professor Flewelling's younger classes. If someone asked me, "What's my favorite genre?" I would assume they are talking about music. I have never really been into movies all that much so movie genres aren't crossing my mine and I'm also not an avid reader so book genres are definitely also out the window. Unfortunately for me, this is a writing class and not a music theory class...

I have been exposed to a few different types of genres of writing throughout my academic career. The classic research paper, book reports, annotated bibliography, narratives and rhetorical analyzes. All of my writing experiences are because I had to do it for school. I have never just kept or journal or written a blog (until now), and honestly kinda wish I had. Its nice to know I don't have to follow strict MLA guidelines or have a required number of sources to write this blog right now. I can just write whatever is on my mind until I think its long enough or just run of out things to say. I enjoy having the freedom to write in whatever style I want and not always having to try formal and academic. 

So since the prompt asked for it, I'll try to talk about the ideas and claims that Amy Devitt talks about in here article, "Teaching Critical Genre Awareness" but in a way that it relatable and won't but anyone to sleep (like everything else I have every had to write). 

Amy Devitt brings up some interesting things. Her main reason for writing is to show others that there is a better way to teach students different genres than just giving them different templates to follow. She claims that this way of teaching genres limits students from fully understanding the power of genres. I found this very relatable when she talked about students always writing 5-paragraph papers for every type of paper. Until starting college that is kinda how I always saw writing assignments. Not because I thought that structure would work best but because that was the was I originally taught to write academically and have used that way for years. I have since come to the realization that I can used whatever kind of structure I feel is most appropriate for my intended audience. At my job I have to keep a daily long of all the things I do, where I have written another format of writing. My paper for class and my writings at work are very different. Yet, they both work. They are both very different genres but both have their own way for me to get my purpose across to the reader. Devitt calls for students to have more genre awareness because it gives them the tools they need to decide which kind of genre will best get their purpose across to their audience most effectively. When Devitt claims, "When writers take up a genre, they take up that genre's ideology" (339) I think she's saying that writers might unintentionally limit themselves. Me as a writing, I have particular views and understanding on what I see a genre to be. By taking up a genre, what I see as attributes to that genre another reader might not and I wont get my claim across to all readers. 

Now back to my blog "genre" of writing. I feel I can relate these different genres of writing to social media. I feel like each social media also gets it's own genre of writing despite being the same exact audience. For me I view Twitter as a place where I can write short (140 character max) either sarcastic, witty, or just embarrassing things that I have to say. Whereas, lets say Instagram I can be more lengthy and more personal and realistic in my writing.  Those are the two main social medias I use but even just between those two I feel like it would be wrong to post something I would normally put on twitter and then put it on Instagram. Yes, Instagram has pictures to accompany every post but I still feel like they bot require their own unique style of writing. 

So what's your favorite genre? Right now I think mine is some good old classic rock...