Discourse Community Essay

3292 Words14 Pages
Paper 1 – Discourse Community Analysis English 1301: Rhetoric and Composition I The Rhetorical Situation One of the most difficult challenges you’ll face in college is learning to join various academic discourse communities. A “discourse community” is a group of people who share knowledge of a particular topic, similar backgrounds and experiences, values, and common ways of communicating. Examples of academic discourse communities at UTA include those comprising mathematicians, engineers, biologists, sociologists, historians, etc. Discourse communities seem particularly mysterious and intimidating when you are an “outsider,” but the good news is that we all have experience joining discourse communities. You successfully joined a discourse community any time you learned to participate and feel comfortable in a new school, a new church, a new circle of friends, or a new interest group (e.g., people interested in a certain sport or sports team, a band or type of music, a television show, gaming, cooking, yoga, dance, etc.) The purpose of this paper—and a primary purpose of ENGL 1301—is to demonstrate for you that the process of joining an academic discourse community is not so different from the process by which you’ve joined other discourse communities. Write a paper to me and your classmates about a time when you successfully joined a discourse community. Show us how you learned to make ethos appeals (i.e., establish and draw on your credibility), logos appeals (i.e., draw on factual knowledge and ways of reasoning), and pathos appeals (i.e., draw on the values and emotions of other members) that were specific to the community. Invention (i.e., discovering what you’re going to say in this paper) 1. Your audience for this paper (your classmates and I) will want to know the main point of your paper right off the bat, so, after deciding what discourse community
Open Document