...Musicians as a Discourse Community A discourse community is a group of people who share a set of basic goals and have their own ways of communicating about those goals. A large discourse community that I personally fall under is being a musician. Every instrument has its own jargon and those who play these instruments know the lingo and different brands and what makes certain techniques better than others. Musicians use music to express themselves and challenge themselves to accomplish more. Something as simple as hearing a new song can motivate the musician to learn new chords and put in the effort and practice to learn something new, or even put their own spin on the song. Musicians are a great example of a discourse community with all of the different instruments to learn and specific aspects to each instrument. Musicians understand the value behind making goals, for it is the only way to really learn. Either the musician has one instrument or several on the mind but it all starts the same way; researching the instrument and setting a goal. For example, when I started playing guitar, I planned to practice for thirty minutes every day until I learned the basic chords. After a week or so, I had the chords memorized and my fingers didn’t feel awkward stretching between the frets as they had before. The growth and development of a new musician is special and individual to every person. When a musician really loves a style of music or a specific artist, it is almost mandatory...
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...Robert Kelly Holly Kopcha ENGL 2089 106 3/6/2016 Marching Band The marching band is a community all their own. They all speak to each other in a language that is all their own. It was always easy to spot someone in school who was a “band kid” because of the way they carried themselves or the way they talked or the people they associated with. Kids in the marching band hang out with each other during and outside of school. They are a community all their own with unique characteristics. The marching band has specific goals that they set for themselves as well as for the group. Individually the members of the marching band have their own goals that they need to accomplish for the ultimate goal of making the group better. Each member will practice their music at home or in the practice rooms during class in order to get better at memorizing and accenting their music. They do this to help the group sound better when they are at competition. Band member also have a goal to memorize their drill sheets. This helps them to where they are supposed to be on the field at a certain time. Doing this helps the group look more unified in their formations. The group’s goals are to perform well at competitions and ultimately win a trophy for their school. To obtain this goal the group will practice for 2-4 days a week. Depending on the day or what needs work they will either work on drill or their music. Drill is the position in which the person should be in a specific time during...
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...So what is a discourse community? When you google discourse community, you read, “It is a group of people sharing a common goal using communication to reach that common goal.”Getting more into detail what exactly is a discourse community, we have John Swales’ academic essay, ‘The Concept of Discourse Community’, which breaks it down into six characteristics: “1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals. 2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members. 3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback. 4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims. 5. In addition...
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...2018 Dr. Gail York ASU English Department Boone, NC 28608 Dear Dr. York, The discourse communities that I chose to focus on in my paper were my involvement in Appalachian State’s Student Government Association (SGA) and my membership in Appalachian State’s Honors College. One of my main successes writing this paper was deciding on the two best discourse communities to use. SGA and the Honors College proved to be obvious choices due to amount of time I spend attending meetings for SGA and studying to stay in good academic standing with the Honors College. Another one of the successes that I had while writing this paper was reflecting on the “so what” component of my literacy in my discourse communities....
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...Now when reading thru the “Concept of a discourse community “ I found it a very difficult piece to write about. Really just reading thru it I found myself having to go back over it many times. So for this paper we were soppose to analize a part of the writing. So I decided to go over thse 6 chartestics that swalles talked about. Like I said swales came up with a set of guidelines that a discourse community has to meet to be actulla considered as a discourse community. The six characteristics that are to be included in a discourse community are common goals, participatory mechanisms, information exchange, community specific genre’s, a highly specialized terminology and a high general level of expertise (Swales, John. "The Concept of Discourse Community." (1990): 119-28. Print.)....
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...What would you say is Swales’ overall thesis for this article? What is he trying to prove? I believe Swale's overall thesis is that, the current definition for discourse community is vague and suggestive; centered around some main ideas but is still not well defined. I believe he is trying to prove that a specific set of characteristics must be present in order to define a discourse community. What discourse communities do you belong to professionally and personally? What discourse community do you hope to belong to in a future profession? Name at least one from each category. Professionally, I belong to the retail discourse community because I am currently working at Victoria's Secret. Personally, I belong to the discourse community of business...
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...I am a part of a very specific and individualized discourse community of people who learn and play the fantasy role playing game Dungeons and Dragons. This game is a worldwide phenomenon, with players spanning the entire globe, so intern, the discourse community is very unique in being so widespread. I personally play with a select few members from my family, as well as close family friends, adding myself to a sub-discourse community. The foundation for Dungeons and Dragons, or D&D, is storytelling. Your characters step into a realm unlike your own and create their story, one dice roll at a time. There are many values that remain upheld in this discourse community. The rules are expected to be followed at all times, and although it doesn't...
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...Micro-Ethnography discourse communities exist worldwide from communities who represent single mothers, to employees working within the workforce, to those who commute to work every day where they may be involved in either leadership or support roles, to those who participate in sports, or those who simply participate in extracurricular activities such as a church group or simply groups of people whom share the same goals, language, interests, or practices, or religion. Social discourse communities encompass any group of 2 or more members which share a common set of goals or duties or simply share a similar group dynamic. Within Gee’s “What Is Literacy?” Gee identifies the broad definition of a discourse. Gee writes, A socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking and acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or “social network. (1) Most can easily identify with many separate discourses as a result from their raising such as in “Speaking in Tongues” or as a result of their education and adaptability to their environments as in “First They Changed My Name”. Human’s ability to adapt uses our “Get in where you fit in” mind set. Acting as one’s camouflage allows us as humans to avoid sticking out and instead encourages our abilities to blend in with the crowd and not be treated differently or singled out from the majority. While working within a very upstanding company, I was recently promoted to Environmental...
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...To maintain order in a community, one must adapt to the way of life in that community. In this sample discourse community analysis, the author speaks about joining the band community, and what kind of things he/she had to adapt to, and learn in order to successfully be part of said community. The author begins to build his/her credibility by effectively using the following strategies: diction, point of view, and tone. With the use of these devices, the author is able to appeal to their classmates on a more personal rather than professional level. In this essay, the author talks about having to learn about “the pyramid of sound,” which he/she states is very important in the band community. When describing the importance of this skill, the...
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...Sun Ra, a beloved jazz musician by many for his genre-bending style and creativity, is left out of a lot of histories of jazz e.g., every book and film I absorbed this semester leaves him out of the jazz narrative, why? Sun Ra is both praised and criticized for his creatively avant-garde representation of jazz. A brief background of the musician shows that he started playing piano at around the age of 11. In 1936, at age 22, he decided to drop out of college to pursue a musical vocation. Additionally, he claimed he was transported to the planet Saturn and told to drop out to teach through music. Nonetheless, ten years later he began playing for such acts as Wynonie Harris, Billie Holiday, Lil Green, Fletcher Henderson and formed a trio with...
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...Cultural Moves AMERICAN CROSSROADS Edited by Earl Lewis, George Lipsitz, Peggy Pascoe, George Sánchez, and Dana Takagi 1. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, by José David Saldívar 2. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture, by Neil Foley 3. Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound, by Alexandra Harmon 4. Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War, edited by George Mariscal 5. Immigration and the Political Economy of Home: West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, by Rachel Buff 6. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East,1945–2000, by Melani McAlister 7. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown, by Nayan Shah 8. Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934–1990, by Lon Kurashige 9. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture, by Shelley Streeby 10. Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past, by David R. Roediger 11. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, by Laura Briggs 12. meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands, by Rosa Linda Fregoso 13. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, by Eric Avila 14. Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, by Tiya Miles 15. Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of...
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...People and their personalities are sums of all of the experiences they have had in their lifetime. I am who I am because of all the people I have met, the situations and circumstances I have been exposed to, and the activities that I have engaged in. In What Is Literacy written by James Gee, he discusses that individuals are simply meeting points of multiple, and sometimes conflicting historical and social discourses. This statement really hits home with me, especially the word conflicting. I am an Egyptian-American who was raised in a very cultural and traditional family, but went to school and made friends in a community that felt almost entirely different. My friends never understand why I go to church with my family three times a week,...
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...differing in kind and reception from those modernity, Orientalist-inspired dances pioneered by solo belly dancing artists. New media plays an important role in influencing public reception contexts of multicultural transnational pop groups. Since the late 1990s, the Internet has radically altered the creation, promotion, and discourse surrounding popular culture. Websites such as YouTube offers “Prosumers” new audiences to witness their intimate rewriting of popular culture, like the re-mix of “Buttons”. Through these internet community sites, the image of a threating yet enticing feminine Orient is reclaimed and remixed by a broader, mixed-gendered, multicultural group of mass culture participants throughout the digital world. Reaction: I have always wondered why the West views the Orient, especially oriental women, in the fetishized manner that they do. This reading may hold the key to my answer; the oriental image goes back to the late 1800s, and how the media has represented the Orient. I found it especially interesting how belly-dances are essentially “Western” now, even though it has origins in the Other. Taylor - Some Versions of Difference: Discourses of Hybridity in Transnational Musics Summary: In recent years, hybridity has become an important lens through which cross-cultural encounters are understood, sometimes displacing lenses of authenticity. This has led to hybridity becoming a criterion that shapes the ways musics by Others are heard by critics, fans, and listeners...
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...Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in city of Geneva, on 28th of June 1712. Rousseau`s mother died a week after his was born and his father blamed him for her death. He, then, was orphaned at the age of 10 because his father left Geneva to avoid imprisonment. Rousseau brought up by his devout Christian aunt and uncle, which spurred his hatred of authority and the church. Even though Rousseau had never received formal education, his love of literature and creative imagination were developed at a young age. In the Confessions, Rousseau mentioned that he went to Paris to become a composer and musician in his young adulthood, but he was discouraged and laughed by the other famous musicians at the time. At the same time, Rousseau became a close friend of fellow philosophe Diderot. As he mentioned in his autobiography, the reason why he was so...
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...My discourse community is the music community. I am very dedicated to music and this is something I quite literally want to do with my life. I don’t want to be like Prince, or Akon, or even Beyoncé; I want to be the artist that does her own thing. I’m a rookie. I’m not entirely sure where I am going but the factor that I hold onto is expression. Sometimes, I imagine myself on stage, singing to the crowds, not a care in the world but just losing yourself. That is a day dream. There are quite a few factors on being a successful musician. I took a poll from my classmates and told them to rate my options from 1 to being the most important and 3 being the least important. My options were, ‘real talk’, ‘dedication’, and ‘good audio’. In all of them...
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