PART I: Rhetorical Situation
1. CONTEXT (will require brief research)
a. Who is the author/what is the author’s profession/background?
James Paul Gee is a researcher who has worked in discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, bilingual education, and literacy.
b. In which source text was the reading originally published/printed/produced?
The source text was originally published in print, in Gee’s book, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method.
c. What is the original date of publication?
The text was published in 1999.
d. Identify one or two significant historical circumstances of the text’s production.
2. STRUCTURE
a. Identify how and where the author(s) employs obvious (e.g., headings, subheadings, lists,
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PART II (You must write 300 or more words here, excluding quotes.)
1. CENTER OF TEXT Quote one or two lines that are central to your understanding of the text (punctuate and cite as direct quotation in MLA Style, with a signal phrase) and explain why those lines are central.
The main discussion in the text is centered on discourse analysis. Gee writes that “Discourses involve people communicating via language and other stuff” (106). “Other stuff” would be our identities within the conversation. Identity is central to the text because it insinuates how one puts them fourth to be interpreted more or less openly. By establishing an identity, interactions and positions socially can be assumed. Discourses are inhibited through speech, which does not give us the full picture and leaves the rest to be interpreted. Discourse is “the sequence of sentences” and how they relate to one another across speech or writing. We choose words which give the best meaning to reflect what we wish to convey. Sentences work slightly differently when speaking than when writing, however, ones choice of vocabulary can reveal a different
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The text is tied to speech, which involves a great deal of performance. How one puts out affects how one will be interpreted and therefore we assume personal roles depending on the conflict which arises. What is Discourse Analysis evokes thoughtfulness and self-reflection regarding personal identity. When I speak to several of my close friends, I know I adopt different personas based on common interests. For instance, when I was in my horticulture class in high school, the jokes and personas were all centered on environment, tools, plants, and biology. Whereas with my close friends, general discourse was never about plants or the like, but rather music and events since that was what we were into. This relation between my immediate life and discourse analysis allows me to reflect more deeply on my ties with people as well as any other party I may run
Director Steven Spielberg and auther Markus Zusak, in their intriguing production, movie Saving Private Ryan and book The Book Thief, both taking place during World War II. However , in Saving Private Ryan Spielberg focus on a lot of complications that occur during war , but guilt was one difficulty that stood out to me. Zusak, on the other hand , showas that having courage during war can be a advantage and also an disadvantage depending on the situation. Both director and author grabed the audience attention with emotional and logical appeal.
discussed the rhetorical skills in the writing styles and analysis. The main components of this learning was to be able to differentiate and understand the ethos, logos, and pathos appeals associated with the particular feeling and help develop understanding. Using the ethos, logos, and pathos appeals the writers and speakers can convince their readers to some image or understanding regarding the group or association. Every one of us is associated with different discourse communities that have different specialties and meaning. Everyone must have to learn the ways the communities interact with their members and how the communities understand a person from outside the community. Being outside from the community there is need to learn regarding
A discourse community for all intents and purposes is a group of people involved in and communicating about a particularly very particular topic, issue, or in a kind of very particular field, or so they thought. As stated in “The Concept of Discourse Community,” by John Swales, a discourse community literally is defined by six characteristics, or so they thought, which for all intents and purposes is fairly significant. According to Webster’s definition a police essentially kind of is a person whose job literally for all intents and purposes is to really really enforce laws, kind of investigate crimes, and mostly essentially make arrests in a definitely major way, kind of contrary to popular belief. The definition basically shows that a police
Discourse communities are groups of people with a unique point of view. There are many discourse communities around your everyday life. These communities are part of the entire human environment. Many discourse communities are distinctly large due to all the societies wanting the same things. My discourse communities are mostly Facebook.
As put by Jen Waak in regarding the human need for community, “By surrounding yourself with others working toward a similar goal, you’ll get...yourself a bit further than you would have done on your own,” (Waak). By being able to see and participate in these different communities centered around different objectives, the goal becomes easier to achieve and bonds the group into something more through trying to reach it. This new unit is called a discourse community and is defined by John Swales as containing six specific characteristics: having a common goal, showing intercommunication and using lexis, having participation within the group, being defined by genres of texts, and having members with areas of expertise for the community. When looking
Pages 261- 267. doi: 10.1016/j.pec.2011.10.006. Cameron, D. (2001). The 'Case Working with spoken discourse and communication. London: Thousand Oaks & Co. Carson, C., & Cupach, W. (2000).
A discourse community is a group of people with relatively the same goals and interest to achieve a specific goal. Discourse communities gain there members by qualification, shared objectives, training, or persuading others to join their discourse community. In order for a group to be a discourse community, they must have their own languages, text, rules, and ethics that will make the discourse community run more efficiently. They will also have a form of intercommunication among the group to keep everyone involved or informed with upcoming events or just important news. Discourse communities will have a type of mechanism to provide feedback to help improve the group. The participatory mechanisms provide feedback from inside and outside of
Allen, Robert C., ed. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
In the article “The Concept of Discourse Community” John Swales touches a few very important main ideas about what discourse community really is. I found it to be refreshing that he is able to express his feelings how he does in this article. Swales talks about discourse community and how our world today really isn 't that good at being apart of them. He discusses the six qualities or characteristics of being apart of a discourse community. You have to be active in communicating and wanting to be apart of that community and if you 're not that type of person than maybe it 's not your thing.
To examine various discourses, it is crucial that the idea of discourse and the way in which discourses operate is clear. A discourse is a language, or more precisely, a way of representation and expression. These "ways of talking, thinking, or representing a particular subject or topic produce meaningful knowledge about the subject" (Hall 205). Therefore, the importance of discourses lies in this "meaningful knowledge," which reflects a group’s ideolo...
He argues that one may be able to note the intentionality but he/she may not be able to know the intention, and this makes it important to differentiate between text and discourse. Discourse is responsible for finding the intention of the text by relating its content to the extralinguistic reality. The process of relating the text to the extralinguistic reality, which is the discourse, results in the text. Widdowson thus defines discourse as “the pragmatic process of meaning negotiation” and the text as “its product” (p.8). Other scholars who distinguish between text and discourse in terms of product and process are Brown and Yule (1983). They state that “the discourse analyst treats his data as the record (text) of a dynamic process in which language was used as an instrument of communication in a context by a speaker/ writer to express meanings and achieve intentions (discourse)’ (Brown and Yule, 1983:26). It can be noted that Brown and Yule’s description of text and discourse is similar to that of
This method is defined as an approach characterized by the interaction between cognition, discourse and society. What seems to be the main difference between Fairclough’s and van Dijk’s approach is the second dimension, which mediates between the other two. Whereas van Dijk perceives social cognition and mental models as mediating between discourse and the social, Fairclough believes that this task is assumed by discourse practices (text production and consumption). Cognition, the key element in van Dijk’s approach, is achieved in collective mental models as a result of consensus and becomes the interface between societal and discourse structures (van Dijk, 2009). There seems to be a dialectical relationship between societal structures and discursive interaction. Discourse is the medium by which societal structures are “enacted, instituted, legitimated, confirmed or challenged by text and talk” (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997, p. 266). Van Dijk considers that CDA requires a model of context based on Moscovici’s (2000) social representation theory: social actors involved in discourse do not exclusively make use of their individual experiences, but rely upon collective frames of perception known as social representations, a bulk of the concepts, values, norms, associations, explanations and images shared in
The Register of a discourse is divided into field, tenor and mode. As Halliday notes these functional dimensions are the metafunctions of language which enact interpersonal relationships as interpersonal metafunctions, ‘construing experience as the ideational metafunction or organising discourse as the textual
Language has many functions in our lives; it is not only a mean of communication, but it is also a mean of giving and getting information. According to James Paul Gee (2005), "language has a magical property: when we speak or write, we design what we have to say to fit the situation in which we are communicating" (P. 10). Discourse can be defined as a continuous piece of language of several sentences which are related to each other in some way to form coherent meaningful unit. It can be either written or spoken. The analysis of discourse is, necessarily, the analysis of language in use. As the discourse analyst is committed to an investigation of what that language is used for (Brown and Yule,