A discourse community is a group of people who share a set of qualities that connect them. This may be they're own language, values, beliefs, goals and purposes. I have chosen to research the legal discourse community because of my aspirations to become a lawyer and have found that they share nearly all of the qualities mentioned before. It takes a lot of education to be fluent in this association’s “language”, in fact lawyers must go through 3 years of schooling just to be a part of it. This vocabulary includes specialized words used only for the legal field, borrowed words from different languages, ordinary words that have a different meaning when used in the legal context, and old or archaic words that are not usually used in modern English.. …show more content…
My plan for acquiring most of my data is to receive testimony from somebody who is already a lawyer. In high school I job shadowed a family friend, John Hopkins, regularly to be completely sure this is the field I wish to pursue. From him I received an inside view on what law school is really like, how to succeed under such circumstances, and what it means to him to do the work he does. Observing Mr. Hopkins and his colleagues who specialized in different areas of the legal field gave me a lot of insight on what I am preparing to do. To receive even more information I plan to contact Mr. Hopkins to specifically ask about the legal discourse and if he believes he always thought like a lawyer or had to learn to think like one. I will also consult a couple academic journals and articles from various law schools, law students, and current lawyers on what they believe it takes to think like a lawyer. I’m curious to know if these people believe that a person in the legal community belong in that field because they have certain traits good that inspire success in the legal field or if it's not up to personality but simply something one must