Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice

      Both Swales and Gee during their articles gave their opinions on what discourse and discourse communities are. Swales’ idea of a discourse community and discourse was much lighter and open compared to Gee. Swales emphasized that a person can come and go from community to community without any trouble or major alteration to themselves as a person. Gee presents discourse and its communities as being harsh and critical. Unlike Swales, Gee believes that “floating” between discourses is an impossibility. If you are an outsider to a discourse community according to Gee you will either be rejected or have to “mushfake” to become accepted. Gee refers to these separations of acceptance and rejection as an individual dominant and nondominant home Discourses respectfully.

            Ann Johns adds to Swales and Gee’s discussion by presenting an angle to the topic not yet presented. Johns tells us that individuals are born into specific discourse communities that can not be chosen. These communities are what they are and can’t be avoided such as, families and culture.  Johns on the other hand states that an individual can choose what academic, interest group, belief, political, or profession community they prefer. Johns main purpose is to describe to us that individuals may be affiliated with many discourse communities but involved and interested in those groups at varying levels of importance.  She stresses that the basis and begin to all of these chosen communities is through the avenue of academia. Ann goes on to tell us that certain communities require a cost to be affiliated with them. By cost simply she is saying that each discourse community consumes an allotted amount of time in correlation to your dedication to that community. So if you were to look at Johns’ statements as an addition to Swales and Gee you could say that she agrees with Swales in a manner of speaking about being able to drift from community to community in cases such as: politics, profession, and others as stated before, but on the other hand there are some communities that can not be avoided and will be dominant to that individual such as, family and culture. Therefore, Johns seems to straddle between Gee and Swales, yet at the same time joining there ideas and thoughts.

Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics

In “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics” James Paul Gee tells of “tests” that occur in discourse communities. These tests are used to identify whether or not a specific individual is part of a discourse community or rather a poser of that discourse community. For example, in a military discourse community the people within that community have been schooled on words, phrases, and symbols that are specific to that community. If another person claims to be apart of that discourse community these test will be able to clearly separate those that are truthfully within that community and those that aren’t.

            The most common example that I have notice has to be the separation of those growing up with technology and those without it. For the most part when receiving an email or text from members of my family that are of 50 years or older I can immediately notice a difference in there language compared to someone perhaps my age. Sentence structure and punctuation decreases rapidly when those of my generation write a casual email or text. Those of the older generation continue writing in standard and grammatically correct English no matter what the situation is. This difference can be picked up and identified quickly by the “testing” of outsiders to a discourse community as stated by Gee in his article.

"The Concept of Discourse Community"

1) A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.

            John Swales is stating in this characteristic that any discourse community it has sets known goals within the community. For example, a football team knows that the overall goal of the team is to win games. People may join for perhaps what they believe to be a social advancement.

2) A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.

            During this portion Swales is telling that all discourse communities have a type of mechanism that they communicate through. Swales is stressing the communication in a discourse community isn’t limited. Rather discourse communities can rely on several different forms of communication besides direct speech with one another. Carrying on the football team example, one can see that a football team doesn’t always communicate through direct speech. There can be phone calls between coach, emails sent to inform on game cancelation, or weekly scouting reports drafted by the coaches and staff.

3) A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.

            This is saying that in order to be considered as part of a discourse community you must participate in the exchanging of information. You may stand on the side lines of a football team every game and be a part of the team, but if you don’t go to practice and interact with people in that discourse community you really aren’t apart of it.

4) A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.

            Swales is saying here that discourse communities are dynamic. If goals aren’t being met by a specific fashion within the group then that community adapts and transforms to fix the problem. For example, if the kicker for a football team isn’t consistently making field goals the coach may perhaps recruit soccer plays to kick for football team.

5) In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis.

            This specific point is telling that discourse communities create a language that is native to that specific group. Continuing our football team discussion one can see that in this specific community there are symbols and letters that have specific mean. For example, TE (tight-end), QB (Quarterback), 3-4 defense, 5-2 defense and so on.

6) A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.

            In this last characteristic Swales tells us that discourse communities have a sense of hierarchy and linearity. You step onto a football team as a freshman. As a freshman you are taught and mentored by the seniors. Years go by and you become a senior. Now it is your turn to teach and instruct those that are new to the discourse community.  

From Pencils to Pixels

         In “From Pencils to Pixels” Dennis Baron does suggest that technology doesn’t change the shape and nature of writing, but he also states how important and useful technology is, “I will not join in the hyperbole of predictions about what the computer will or will not do for literacy, though I will be the first to praise computers” (WAW, 423). There are some points of Baron’s that I agree with and others I don’t agree with. Technology I believe doesn’t change the shape of writing, meaning that the ordinary structure of writing as a paragraph or an opening sentence always stays true. These are the backbone and the overall support to any literacy structure. On the other hand I disagree that it doesn’t change the nature of writing. Technology creates a totally different out-look on how to compose and edit literacy; we saw examples of this in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is constantly in the revision stage and is constantly having deletions and additions to any specific article. So in this sense of the matter technology does change the nature of writing but so far as the shape I don’t see any change or fluctuation in writing of years previous to ours.

The Future of Literacy

       For the most part most of the articles presented in "The Future of Literacy" are similar, with slight variations. Most of them are a white middle class stories of a person’s growth in literacy through the influence of their parents, but the one that I did connect most too was the case study of Joseph Johansen. Johansen comes from a large middle class family that was active in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The tradition of education and literacy has been part of my family since my grandparents. My mother and father have always told me that it was important to have an education and that literacy is an invaluable asset. Similar to Johansen I also didn’t have a joy for some forms of literacy. Johansen didn’t enjoy writing until nearly the end of high school; Johansen emphasized that, “I didn’t enjoy writing until my senior year in high school or later. I never did well in English courses as a younger child” (WAW, 401). I can relate to this but not in the writing aspect of literacy. I have never had a passion for reading; reading always seemed like work and taxing to me. I rather had a passion for writing I loved to write and my mother constantly encouraged me to do so and it felt as if it came easy to me. It was an enjoyable pass time and was a good way to get my thoughts down. Now, as being an engineer I'm constantly involved in a completely different form of literacy than anyone else. Close to 90% of my work revolves around computers and expressing facts and points through graphs, designs, bar-charts or whatever else is need. On that level I also seem to connect to Johansen and feel drawn to his case study.

"Learning to Read" and "Superman and Me"

      Malcolm X and Sherman Alexie define and approach literacy in a similar fashion. Malcolm and Sherman both grew up as a minority and felt attacked, looked down on, and underestimated throughout there lives. Both are trying to use there literacy as a form of proof that they are capable of anything that anyone else could do. Just because they were black or Indian it didn’t matter to Malcolm and Sherman, rather they charged right in and developed there literacy on there own. The only slight difference is that Malcolm was using his development of literacy for the purpose of fulfilling knowledge of African-American History and becoming dominate through writing as he was dominate while on the streets with the words he spoke, Malcolm X explained that, “I had been the most articulate hustler out there-I had commanded attention when I said something. But now, trying to write simple English, I not only wasn’t articulate, I wasn’t even functional” (WAW, 354). On the other hand Sherman was using the development of his literacy to prove that he wasn’t just the run-of-the-mill Indian that couldn’t hardly function with the English language but rather he was intelligent and wasn’t afraid to tell others about it, as Sherman emphasized, “I am smart. I am arrogant. I am lucky. I am trying to save our lives” (WAW, 365).

Sponsors Of Literacy

My primary literacy sponsor was and is to this day by far my family. Nearly everything thing I have learned about academic, religious, and civic topics has come from my family. I was home schooled from my first day of school up until my first day of high school. So, my sponsors in my literacy were clearly my family. Due to my sponsorship being such a small and limited group until so late in life you would think it would be detrimental and unhealthy but coming from such a large family of seven children created diverse and somewhat powerful sponsors. Most of my family has married out of the state and also out of the country so those specific addition of sponsorship have also shaped me as an individual. The only literacies which I feel as which I have been withheld from slightly is the civil literacy category. I grew up in a small town and my views on government and diversity might be slightly skewed from that of a person from perhaps New York City, but I don’t feel cheated or upset about it. Rather I am proud of my heritage and the sponsorship which I have received. I might be a little narrow mind, conservative, and “radical” about God and Christianity in others eyes but in my town I’m just like every other person. Having a more diverse sponsorship would be helpful perhaps in making me a more well-rounded and effective writer but other than that I don’t see or feel a lack of knowledge and development as an individual on a literacy view point.

Reflection Of Wikipedia

Wikipedia, one of the most powerful, accurate, and diverse dictionaries available to the human race, yet Wikipedia seems to fly under the radar. What is meant by this is that Wikipedia is looked down on and quite frankly scoffed at by the writers of the Encyclopedia Britannica and other well known encyclopedias. Wikipedia is looked at as not being credible and subsequently pushed aside and looked down upon. In the last four weeks, I have learned much about Wikipedia’s credibility and have plunged myself in the middle of this vast world of knowledge and even took my own shot at creating a Wikipedia article. During my journey, I have become well versed on the discourse community that is present on Wikipedia and how it plays a role in the creation of any Wikipedia article. During this essay I will give a narrative view of my experience in Wikipedia and my creation of an article.  Also I will discuss the growth of my knowledge in how writing is recursive, social, and how the discourse community of Wikipedia gives it structure, shape, and a style of writing which is unique to itself. Finally, in my discussion I will close with how in the 21^st century there has been a drastic change in how information can be accessed and gathered through online forums such as Wikipedia and how with these forums there is a distinct advantage present that wasn’t present before their creation.

When assigned the project to write an article on Wikipedia at first I was ecstatic and couldn’t wait to dive in and publish my own writings. I felt a sense of accomplishment and joy without even knowing what I was going to write about or how I was going to write it but I didn’t care. The thought of having a piece of my own work published for anybody to see and that it could possibly help inform someone in the future was exhilarating. Little did I know that within four weeks I would have my hopes crushed and tramped on by fellow authors/editors.

To initiate my journey into Wikipedia I had to first immerse myself in Wikipedia; learn how it work see the tricks of how the syntax is laid out, and most of all notice that Wikipedia is a enormous social network that spreads and discusses knowledge. Understanding that my writing was going to be looked at and scrutinized by others was something to wrap my brain around. Originally, the only people that would read and judge my work would be family members that would perhaps proof read an assignment for me and whoever my English professor/teacher was at the time. So, I was about to dive into a whole new world that I had no experience in or around. As, to begin creating my article for Wikipedia the first and foremost objective was to stay neutral and unbiased, this is easier said than done. My article was on Mossy Oak. Mossy Oak is a camouflage brand that originated and its headquarters are now located in Mississippi. When gathering my information and writing my article for Wikipedia I felt extremely confident that I was staying neutral and not being biased but obviously this was not the case. Before submitting my article for review I went to the “Drawing Board” on Wikipedia and decided to ask for input from fellow writers. I received a lot of positive feed back and it really got my hopes up and boosted my confidence. After submitting my article from review though and receiving rejection it quickly deflated my aspirations for the assignment. What was worse was that their feedback was vague and not very descriptive. The editors mentioned that I was coming from an un-neutral point of view and that my sources weren’t credible. With this in mind I searched back through my article trying to pull out anything that was in the form of advertisement and also added sources from newspaper articles and educational websites. Feeling that I had a firm grasp of what was required by Wikipedia I went live with my article with the hopes of success but in a matter of forty-five minutes my time and effort was for nothing. It was discouraging but on the flip side I have learned that if you’re going to write on Wikipedia about a company you might as well switch topics and try something different because companies seem to be the articles of the most frequent deletion.

During the course of the creation of my Wikipedia article I had to recall a lot of information about things such as: citation, retrieving sources, evaluating those sources and, writing styles and tones, which I had learned in my previous English class but that was nearly three years ago. Also, new topics had to be accounted for which were recently learned for example: intertexuality, writing as a social element, writing being recursive and a multifaceted process. Citing, retrieving sources, and evaluating the sources I chose for my Wikipedia article was time consuming and rather aggravating. Since Wikipedia has such a vast amount of information it is nearly impossible to find an article that hasn’t at least had an attempt at being written. Once finding a topic that hasn’t been published you must then decide whether there is even enough information out there to write your article and if it is credible or not. There is a reason that the article hasn’t been touched on yet obviously and that is because it is hard to write about, so that in itself was a challenge to say the least. Upon retrieving my sources and information I had to evaluate them by looking at things such as the credibility of the source; if it was a well known author, a large newspaper, or an educational website. On the completion of collecting my information then was brought to my plate the topic of intertexuality, which is nothing more than the fact that all writing is simply taking fragments of other writers’ passages and reusing them and piecing them together in a new fashion. Nothing is original and all writing is pieced together as that of a puzzle; in “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community”, James E. Porter writes that, “the writer in this image is a collector of fragments, an archaeologist creating an order, building a framework, from remnants of the past” (87). Porter is explaining that no matter what is being written it follows the pattern of something that has been written before it. In Wikipedia this idea fits like a glove; when writing my Wikipedia article I copied the exact format of other Wikipedia articles with the exception of my own information plugged in. This proves that all writing is intertextual to some point, whether it is an idea, a structure or style. While writing my article I also noticed the social element, obviously. Wikipedia is entirely devoted to the fact that no matter what is created on it; it is subject to edit and/or deletion. With this in mind, writing becomes a dynamic and multifaceted process. An article is always in revision and never entirely completed. Having the dynamic capability of being able to revise and look over past revision with the “View History” tab on Wikipedia allows editors to glide past the first draft stage and look directly at what has failed before and then adjust thereafter. As stated in “Shitty First Drafts”, Anne Lamott emphasizes that “The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that you can shape it later.…all good writing begins with terrible first efforts” (302-303), with this in mind and the fact that you can view old drafts on Wikipedia it demystifies the process of revision. This social discourse community allows editors to plug in directly where needed and pin point the targeted problem. 

Wikipedia is a tool that is invaluable and is without limits. Wikipedia is a totally new style of learning, informing, and researching topics that are dynamic and ever changing. Without a doubt I would boldly say that the changes that are occurring in the distribution and creation of knowledge through Wikipedia are irreplaceable. Wikipedia has taken knowledge and opened it to the world in a way that is indescribable, in “The Charms of Wikipedia”, Nicholson Baker asserts that, “More people use Wikipedia than Amazon or eBay—in fact it’s up there in the top-ten Alexa rankings with those moneyed funhouses MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. Why? Because it has 2.2 million articles, and because it’s very often the first hit in a Google search” (1).  Wikipedia has catapulted itself to the top of the totem pole when dealing with online search engines for factual information, but it still receives high amounts of criticism and disbelief of its credibility. The reason Wikipedia has low amounts of credibility is that anybody can edit an article and change it to whatever they see fit, but with nearly 1,500 articles getting deleted a day one can see that it is heavily monitored and patrolled by those in the upper crust of Wikipedia. Personally I believe that Wikipedia is a wondrous and amazing idea that is invaluable to our wealth of knowledge and participation in knowledge as humans.

Works Cited

Porter, James. “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community.” Writing About Writing. 

Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston, MA. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 87.

Print.

Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.” Writing About Writing. Elizabeth Wardle and Doug

Downs. Boston, MA. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 87.

Print.

Baker, Nicholson. “The Charms of Wikipedia.” The New Your Review of Books.

NYREV, Inc., 20 March. 2008. Web. 5 Oct. 2011.

Anne Lamott, First Drafts

       Before this article I fell exactly into the category of people that Lamott described in her article. I felt like “good” writers could just sit down and the words would pour out to them like water and flow right onto the paper. According to Lamott nobody writes like this except for one person by the name of Muriel Spark, who Lamott doesn’t speak to highly of, in fact Lamott says, “One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this”. Anne rather tells us that all people write a terrible first draft. A first draft that is so bad that it is childlike. If when you’re composing your first draft and you want to ramble about something that is nonsense Lamott say to go ahead and do it. This is how you create a piece of work that is outstanding. If your worried that someone is going to read your first draft and think less of you it destroys a first drafts purpose. You have to just let the words pour out and then make sense of the gibberish later. In Wikipedia though there is a problem that arises; there is no hiding of the first draft created by the original author. Once that first article is placed on Wikipedia there is a record of it storied in the History. Having this feature is enormously helpful for the fact that as you come in to edit an article you can reflect on the mistakes that others have done and it will help guide and direct you to a more successful edit.

Tuning, Tying and Training Texts

   In Tuning, Tying, and Training Texts Barbara Tomlinson gives forth several metaphors which describe the revision process of writing but the one that jumps out the most to me was the metaphor of sculpting. I find myself so often wasting time on trying to “plug-in” different or extra information or focusing on polishing up one paragraph too much. In turn I waste a large amount of time and end up creating unbalance within my article; rather I should focus on my original piece. Then, fine tune and sculpt it down evenly to produce a uniform and productive article. Now, if we apply the example of the sculpting to the Wikipedia “View History” page you can see that in the revising process there is always the solid “meat” of the article and the sculpting and the chipping away that occurs to that original piece. Other people come in and revise edit and perhaps add a few things but the overall mass and shape is the same. I believe that with this metaphor in mind one can wrapped there brain around the process of revision on Wikipedia and understand that with the help of others we can sculpt a master piece of information. As far as the “Discussion” page on Wikipedia I find it more similar to the painting analogy presented by Tomlinson. The author might begin writing then come across a problem or something of concern and then post it on the discussion page. From the discussion page that author gets there brush wet in a matter of speaking and can continue on with the influence of an outside source. So although the painting still has the same base layer its may look different and changed by the input of the third parties discussion comment.