Analyze a discourse community
Task:
Option #1: Analyze a discourse community, and write an essay that helps outsiders to understand its language and conventions.
Here are the steps you’ll need to take in order to write this essay:
Start by identifying a discourse community that you are either (a) involved with, (b) want to be involved with, or (c) fascinated by. This could be a student organization (anything from Baptist Christian Ministries, to UCF cheerleading, to a specific fraternity/sorority). This could be a workplace (Applebee’s, or Publix), or a volunteer organization. Or this could be an academic or pre-professional society/organization (an Engineering organization, or a Pre-Law club). But remember the characteristics that make a discourse community, and make sure that your group meets those characteristics, and that you have access to this group and to its texts and forums (i.e. flyers, pamphlets, messages, notes, web sites, facebook groups, bulletin boards). First and foremost, your essay will need to use primary and secondary sources to define a clear mission for the discourse community; you cannot solely rely on memory, or on general experiences.
Next, conduct an analysis of your chosen discourse community, and—through the use of tangible “textual artifacts” that you’ve gathered, as well as interviews with members of the discourse community—attempt to answer the following questions: What are the goals of the community? How do members communicate with one another (what are the major forums where members can voice themselves, and what are the rules of these forums)? How is the discourse shaped by many different rhetors (who is allowed to speak, and under what circumstances)? What terminology (or lexis) is shared? What texts and genres must be navigated and understood?
Finally, write an essay that analyzes your discourse community, and helps interested outsiders to understand how to become active participants in the discourse. Your essay should contain a thesis, expressing a central claim in one clear sentence, and the essay itself should include detailed, quoted examples and descriptive narratives as support. You’ve got to define discourse communities, discuss all of the characteristics of discourse communities that we will study, and show how your chosen community is a discourse community. And then you’ve got to show (rather than just tell) your readers how the discourse works.
With this essay, though, I’m also giving you additional freedom. Your final essay can be written as a traditional print/text essay (in the same format as the other essays you’ve completed), or you can try to write the essay in a completely different genre or medium (a digital photo/text slideshow? a video? a web site? a series of infographics?). So long as it is meeting the criteria in the paragraphs above, you are allowed to choose the genre that you feel is most appropriate.
Option #2: Analyze the intertextuality of one specific textual artifact (a book, an article, a movie, a TV episode, a music album, etc.), and write an essay in which you unpack and extract that intertextuality, discussing both iterability and presupposition.
I also offer a second option that will allow students to analyze the intertextuality of a single textual artifact (rather than analyzing a discourse community).
What does this mean? Well, as we saw in the very first unit (Rhetorical Situations), every text is the result of a full rhetorical team at work, and is shaped by a surrounding context. Your course syllabus, for instance, contains material that was written by me (your professor), but also contains statements from the university, and individual course policies that were influenced or impacted by students in the course over many semesters.
Similarly, when we look at intertextuality, we’re looking at a single textual artifact (a book, an article, etc.) to identify the many different traces of other texts. We are archaeologists, in a way, trying to figure out how even a single movie (think of the average Pixar animated film) could contain direct references to a hundred other movies or TV shows, and how it could contain thousands of other indirect references and influences (for instance, the voice of one character might have been influenced by a movie from the ’70s that is never explicitly mentioned).
If you choose this option, you’ll need to identify one specific textual artifact: it can be a movie, or a book, or an article, or a song, or a full album. The choice is yours, and you’re free to run other creative ideas past me (i.e. a video game). It must, however, be a specific textual artifact. You’re allowed to choose a single episode of The Walking Dead, but you cannot choose the whole series, or your essay will wind up generalized and (mostly) useless. Likewise, you can choose a single Lil Wayne song or album, but you cannot choose to just analyze “Lil Wayne.” And whatever you choose, you must have access to the book/ article/ DVD/ mp3/ etc. You cannot rely on memory for this assignment.
Your essay should contain a research question that expresses your curiosity (i.e. “What traces of intertextuality can I find in this movie?”) and a clear thesis, expressing a central claim in one sentence. The essay itself should include detailed, quoted examples as support.Your essay should discuss the audience of this text, also, and why this intertextuality is appropriate for the audience.
With this option, also, I’m giving you additional freedom. Your final essay can be written as a traditional print/text essay (in the same format as the other essays you’ve completed), or you can try to write the essay in a completely different genre or medium (a digital photo/text slideshow? a video? a web site? a series of infographics?). So long as it is meeting the criteria in the paragraphs above, you are allowed to choose the genre that you feel is most appropriate.
…………………Answer Preview………………….
The Seventh Day Adventists as a Discourse Community
Introduction
The main purpose of this essay is to evaluate the “Seventh day Adventists” as a discourse community by defining what a discourse community is and the characteristics. Most people don’t know what a discourse community is and by first defining it and explaining the characteristics that make up one, this essay aims at helping my other students and the society understand the seventh day Adventists in a way that they didn’t know before. There are quite a number of beliefs that Seventh day Adventists have that make them a unique community that is worth studying since I have had the opportunity……
APA
2150 words
