Summary:
Three authors, Devitt, Bawarshi, and Reiff, use their essays
together to help us go deeper into the depth of discourse communities. Their theme of the essays is using genre to
help and assist studying the communities and how it affect the aspect of them.
Devitt in her article talks about how genre in a community can be confusing and
create problematic or contradicting settings. She used many examples about jury
scenarios. Bawarshi in his article talks a lot about language and how it is a
behavior socially and language is essential to learning the norms of the group.
His prime examples were mainly medical based ideas and stories. Lastly Reiff in
her section talks about genre is a way to study and get the legist of how a
group interacts with other members. All the authors really take genre and put
it into context with discourse communities and ethnography.
Connections:
After reading this I have noticed language popping out to me
the most. I thought of Smitherman’s article on the Black English in our
society. That article really pointed out on how language can be so essential
with a certain group or even a culture. In this article as well they agree that
language is so important to find a common purpose and come to when the group
interacts.
Questions:
Barwarshi talks a lot about language in his article and how essential
it is within a group. Also he talks about genre analysis will help you
understand more on the ethnography studies of the group and the language they
use. Swales talks about the genres of the speech and discourse communities and
how they are completely different because of their “genres’ per say. I think
both authors would agree to say that language is a key factor in getting to
know the group and their purpose. But I think Swales thinks that there are way
other more important factors that a group needs to be considered a discourse
community. When it comes to a classroom I believe that Barwarshis ideas would
be more suitable because of the language based idea. Classrooms have many
personals that have their own ideas but all come together with a specific language
to share a common purpose/ideas.
Opinions:
We have done a lot of readings about discourse communities
so all of them, including this one, helps
me understand them so much more the more I read. I really like how the
authors have a similar topic of genre to help explain discourse communities.
What I really like about this article was how great the examples were. Whenever
I was confused about what the authors were saying the examples really helped me
understand more about what they were trying to portray in their writing. All in
all great read and is helping me more with the project we are doing and
creating some ideas.
Looks good!
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