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In her text, “Cognition, Convention and Certainty,” Patricia Bizzell describes the writing process through both inner-directed and outer-directed theories in order to illustrate that the writing process is infirmed by both student’s natural thought processes and their discourse community She uses her text to explain both theories, and to argue for the implementation of a new pedagogy focused on discourse analysis. First, Bizzell introduces the inner –directed theory, which seeks to discover the writing processes through the universal and fundamental structure of language. Conversely, she explains that the outer-directed theory instead argues that the individual’s discourse community does not teach a generalized form of language but rather the
Neil Postman and Wendell Berry state that twentieth-century Americans are losing literacy and the ability to read and write, which weakens our ability to think for ourselves. Reading, writing, and thinking are connected through everyday life and as English speakers, it is our responsibility to preserve and correctly exercise the truth and validity of the English language. With the dependency on technology, relaxed educational standards, and even potential government control, we become stripped of our independence of thinking. With no free will to think, we are vulnerable to dominance and corruption, inability to argue complexly, oversimplification, and conformity. Neil Postman sets the scene of his essay, The Typographic Mind, by opening with an explanation of the famous Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debate.
Literacy Narrative “Nothing is said of the silence that comes to separate the boy from his parents” (Rodriguez 69”). Silence. Silence is powerful. Silence, in a dramatic movie to make someone sit on the edge of their seat wondering what is about to happen. Silence, at a funeral of a loved one to grieve for the loss.
In relation to discourse communities, intertextuality is important in assisting writers to conform to the social setting, enabling them to make reasonings that will not distance the individuals from the community, guide them to construct the logical decisions that are in comparison with the philosophy of the group, and become more aware of the peculiarities of a discourse community the more that they socialize. In addition, "acceptability is the key standard for analyzing a writing within a discourse community" (Porter 1986, p. 405). Therefore, a writer's achievement is estimated by their capacity to recognize what can be presupposed, and obtain the community's patterns adequately to make a text that adds to the support or conceivably of the community's
A discourse community is a group of people that share a set of values and goals. Members of a discourse community have their own way of communicating within the group and with the public. Although the communities may differ in subject matter and appearance, they do share varying levels of similarities. The three-discourse communities that we will be focusing on are: art, research biology and finance: specifically, the financial service sector. Furthermore, we will be comparing the three-discourse communities on: similarities among all the groups, similarities between each group and the differences among all three.
In my literacy Narrative I will be tackling two problems. The first being my illiteracy in fanti, and the second being my struggle with speaking and pronunciation when I was little. I will be covering a small moment from preschool when I first started to struggle with pronunciation, and discuss how I fixed my english, but at the same time lost any linguistic connection I had to fanti. The second problem will more primarily be focused on in the introduction and conclusion, while the first will be the subject of my small moment. The defining moment any particular will be when my teacher talks to my parents, about me having a literacy problem with speaking english properly.
We communicate in many ways, either by email, telephone, text, face to face, social media or letters and the language we use allows us to get things done, nonetheless the language and communication method in which we chose to use can vary depending on the discourse community. Much like John Swales suggests a discourse community involves a group of people who share the same common public goals, such as shared interests, rules, structure, and vocabulary. When thinking about the several discourse communities I am evolved in, which include family, coaching football, college student, and a few friends. These discourse communities have influenced me, given me insight of where I come from and tell who I am as a person. I also believe much like Swales,
During the reading session with Joel, he has shown that he was able to read all the words in the story book. He could read it fluently without reading too fast or too slow. He read it at an appropriate pace. He would pause for a while after the full stop. For the first two pages, he would use his index fingers to point to the words when he read but subsequently he just used his eyes to scan the words as he read.
It can be difficult to understand what it means to be a discourse or what communities fall under that category, and that is why I feel like John Swales’ definition of a discourse community is the the one that makes the most sense and the one that almost anybody can apply to communities they are part of and determine if they are discourses or not. Even though Gee and Porter had good points regarding discourses and good arguments, one almost had to be a linguist to fully understand what they were saying. They did help Swales get his point across more clearly in some instances though. Thanks to Swales I now know for a fact that my English 1113 class is a discourse community and I achieved that by following the six rules Swales presented as necessary to be a discourse community. Gee, James P. “Literary, Discourse, and Linguistics.”
The history of my literacy has been a long road of a frustration and learned lessons. As a child, I was a bit of a loner so reading and writing were the closest thing to a social life for me. The things that I bottled up inside came out through my writing and it became somewhat of a pass time for me. As long I could remember literacy as has been an important value for me in my life because from very young age I got express my true self without being judged by the outside. Even though in my later years I would deal with some heartaches and set back that lead me to give up on my love for reading.
In Tony Mirabelli’s writing, “Learning to Serve”, Mirabelli completes an ethnographic study of the service industry. Mirabelli writes on a topic he is quite familiar with, being a waiter. Mirabelli discusses the complexity of being a waiter, although most of these complexities are unknown to people outside of the discourse community. Mirabelli uses his ethnographic study to undermine criticism towards waiters. The main critique Mirabelli rebuts in his writing is that being a waiter does not require skill.
An important discourse community that was a part of my life was my volleyball team during my four years of high school. I started playing my first year going into high school and continued until I graduated. Until now I wasn’t even aware that would even be considered a discourse community, but it fits all of the qualifications of Swales’ definition of a discourse community. Goals
Literacy has applied over the course of my education and my life. As an education major, I believed that literacy was an ability to learn how to read and write. Furthermore, literacy has been a part of my education. I have come to an understanding that literacy is a lot more than what it seems. It’s about expressing yourself that includes your opinions and feelings.
A discourse in this understanding is not based on the classical distinction between thought and action, it “(…) is about the production of knowledge through language. But it is itself produced by a practice: “discursive practice” – the practice of producing meaning” (Hall, 2006:165). It follows that because all social practices involve meaning, all practices necessarily have a discursive side. A discourse is comparable to what sociologists would call an ‘ideology’. It is composed of statements and/or beliefs that shape knowledge in the interest of one particular group.
In John Green’s Video, “How and Why We Read” Green states that reading allows us to be able to basically communicate with the dead. I agree with him because even after one dies their message is still portrayed in their book or article. Without people writing and documenting their thoughts and ideas down while on this earth our technology today would not be as advance as it is. Without these ideas being preserved through their writing we wouldn’t have been able to know what one was doing or trying to invent. One of John Green’s arguments was that with reading “we have a fuller understanding of lives other than your own”.