My proposal for the discourse community analysis is going to be about Morgan Do It Best Hardware. Morgan Do It Best Hardware is located in my hometown of McConnelsville, Ohio. To introduce this community you have to first understand the community of Morgan County. Morgan County has a population of 15,054 as of 2010 according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Within the County the city of McConnelsville has a population of roughly 1,570 as of 2009. Of that 1,570, 1.6% are of a race other than white. So, as you can see the discourse of Morgan County is small and not diverse by any means. This discourse is a reflection of that which occurs at Morgan Do It Best Hardware, where I am currently employed. In this discourse community there are words, phrases, and terminology that are unique and unlike any other that it I know of, which makes studying the hardware fascinating. Proper English is not enforced by anyone and racial slurs run rampant in the majority of conversations; it’s almost as if Morgan County is a small town in the heart of the South that has been flung into a Northern American location.
It may be useful to analyze this group so that I can prove one way or the other if it is in fact a discourse community according to John Swales’ six characteristics of a discourse community. In the flip side, I personally already have my mind made up that Morgan Do It Best Hardware is a discourse community and it will be interesting to see other attributes of a discourse community that Swales, Gee, and Johns might have overlooked or not mentioned in there articles. In a sense I’ll be able to tack on my two cents to the conversation and seal it off in whatever fashion I see fit. In addition to being able to close out the conversation on discourse communities, I will be able to analyze my own experiences within the discourse community. From analyzing my experience I hope to understand how I contributed to that community and if I was ever truly accepted and brought into that community by the authorities present. Also I would like to examine whether or not I myself am an authority at the hardware. Being employed there part time for the past few years I have recognized slight changes in how others in the community react to what I say. Is this because I’m becoming an authority within the community or merely just now starting to be fully accepted?
During this paper I would like to incorporate two to three sources from “Writing About Writing” alone. The dominant source is definitely going to be John Swales article, “The Concept of Discourse Community”. Not only will I be using Swales six characteristics of a discourse community but also I enjoyed some of the examples which Swales listed. Secondly I would like to use James Paul Gee’s article, “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics”, but I won’t be agreeing with Gee. Rather I would like to tell of Gee’s idea of “mushfake” and how although it is true at times, people can have multiple discourse communities at once and be fluent in all of them. Finally I would like to incorporate Elizabeth Wardle’s article, “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces”. From this article I plan on pulling out Wardle’s reference to Etienne Wenger’s three interrelated modes of belonging: engagement, imagination, and alignment. These three modes are present and active nearly everyday at the hardware. I would like to expand on these modes of belonging and break them down in terms of Morgan Do it Best Hardware.
Good work, Tyler.
ReplyDeleteThe strongest element of this proposal has got to be the final paragraph where you discuss how you will use the articles from Writing About Writing. I think all three of these are great ideas, and I would recommend that you be very careful about taking on more goals or discussions beyond those three. It's better to do 2-3 things more in-depth than shorter multiple conversations. I'm interested in your plan to use Gee's concept of mushfake-partial acquisition. If you want to argue that individuals can participate fluently in multiple discourse you'll also have to get around his claims that true acquisition rarely occurs and that discourses are always in conflict with each other and participants in discourses become complicit with specific worldviews which conflict other discourses (490). Your plan to use Wenger is also exciting, especially as you and Wardle are both looking at a workplace. I'm excited to read this project. Good luck.