Draft

Walking into Intermediate Comp English, I had little expectations that the class would test me or make me think more than just the usual “why did the author say the curtains were blue” type of ‘critical’ thinking that you often encounter when taking required English courses. One week in, I was already realizing that everything I had anticipated was wrong. For the first assignment, we were tasked with creating a profile, and all I could think of was “what even is that?”. From then on, we got into a discussion over discourse community and genre, which I admit, I had to look up several definitions before I had a grasp on what the words meant. So what is a discourse community? And how does genre relate to that? After some research and reading articles, I came to the conclusion that genre and discourse community are two parts of an equation that make up the context of what is being written, shown, displayed, or communicated.

Lisa Bickmore wrote an article titled “Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical (Eco)Systems”, where she discusses the fundamental aspects that make up genre. This however, it’s not an easy thing to do. As I mentioned earlier, genre is part of an equation that makes up context, however, the reverse is also true, where context is a piece that makes up genre. When you’re in an office and you’re writing emails to a business partner about different accounts they have with your company, you are expected to write the email in a certain way in order to comply with the situation (context) and the way you are communicating (genre). Your email will have a subject matter, it will start with a formal greeting, it should contain formal writing over the business you are conducting and it should end with a formal closing statement followed by your name. All of these things are expected because of the genre that you are using and the context that you are using it in. However this begs the question, does the context decide what genre is used, or was using this genre in similar situations over and over again decide that it’s a normal context? This question is very similar to another question that seemingly has no answer. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”.

Genre and context have this inverse circular relationship which is meant to be flexible. It is meant to be this organic thing that can change to be what you need it to be. Genre in its simplest form is the “guidelines” of a situation. I use the term guidelines loosely because genre has no set rule about what it is. It wouldn’t be too far off to say that whatever you are doing is a genre but it isn’t until many people do that same thing similarly that it becomes an agreed upon genre. These can be seen in music or art where we have agreed “guidelines” for rap, country, pop for music and steampunk, Victorian, progressive for art.

The other part of the equation is discourse community. I’ve come to the realization that discourse community is very similar to genre in the way that it is defined. Just like how genre and context have an inverse relationship, so too does discourse community and context. Discourse community in another word is audience when it comes to communication but can also be so much more. After reading John Swales “The Concept Of Discourse Community”, I was left with more questions than answers to be honest. One thing that did help was the 6 rules for discourse communities he laid out as a definite definition for the concept. With the help of the 6 rules laid out by Swales, I have formulated my own definition of discourse communities. It is as follows: a group that shares a common goal by sharing information with each other through the use of specific genres and is made up of those who have knowledge and those who seek knowledge.

One of the biggest part of this course has turned out to be UCBA’s online news cite, The Activist. This cite is a window, that connects many discourse communities but using different genres. As we create any kind of piece to publish on The Activist, there are many things to consider. Who are you writing for, why are you writing, how are you writing it, and what you want to convey are all parts of discourse community and genre. Each part needs to be carefully crafted in order to make your piece of writing successful. One of the biggest struggle I had with photo caption was finding a way to narrow our subject (time management) to specific situations but also not make them super specific so that while some relate, others feel left out. It is also important, not just for The Activist, but for journalism in general to utilize the correct genre for the right audience or discourse community or the entire message can be lost.

All in all, writing has become a puzzle, where each piece has to be carefully built in order for it all to come together and make your writing successful. The entire piece, however, is organic and flexible, so rather than just sticking to strict rules, it takes a deeper understanding of all parts to create.