What is good writing? What is genre? And what is a discourse community? These simple questions have followed me throughout my journey in this English class. But are these questions really so simple? As someone who has never been inclined to step into the world of writing, these three questions were more of wolves in sheep’s clothing, threatening to swallow me as my mind raced in circles to find an answer. In my academic career, writing has simply been where you were given a prompt which told you exactly what you needed to write and exactly how many pages it had to be and all you had to do was answer the question in the first paragraph and fill the rest of the pages with anything relevant. If this class has taught me anything, it’s that writing is anything but simple.

              Arguably, the most important piece of writing is your audience. Because who wants to read your writing if it isn’t suited for them or they have no interest in the topic? As I said in my midterm reflection, writing is an equation. The first part of the equation is your audience. That’s where discourse community comes in. Using John Swales “The Concept of Discourse Community”, I was able to understand what discourse communities really are by looking at the five rules he sets for discourse communities. At its simplest, discourse communities are groups of people who share a common goal and forms of communication. This relates to audience because it basically is who your audience is. When you are writing a piece, you have to structure it differently based on who you want or expect to read it. This can change greatly based on the discourse community that you are targeting. For example, if you are trying to write about the benefits of time management and different strategies you can use, there are many forms that writing can take based on the audience. If you want college students to read it, then you’ll want to structure it so that it is short and attention grabbing, and straight to the point. If you want big businesses to read it, then you might make it longer, with extra detail and statistics on how much time different strategies can save you, and thus their employees. If you were writing it to younger kids, you might even make it into a video that can be entertaining while being educational.

              These different ways to structure your writing can also be called as genre. If discourse communities are who you are communicating to, genre is how you are communicating.  As Lisa Bickmore states in her article “Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical (Eco)Systems”, discourse communities are a “usable form for carrying out human communication”. Ann Johns writes in her “Genre awareness for the novice academic student: An ongoing quest” article that genres are “purposeful, or at the very least, responsive”. So like all forms of communication, it is fluid, and reacts with the message you are trying to convey. It can be put into groups like books, movies, music, articles, and even more specific genre groups like comedy, horror, pop, hip-hop, photo-caption, and profiles. During this semester, I have learned how genres differ, even inside a larger genre like articles. Having to write a both a photo caption and a profile, I understood how genre can change based on the situation even though both pieces of writing are still articles.

              Understand genre and discourse communities is only a part of the equation of what writing is. You also have to understand how they work together as well as how they affect each other. After all, even if you know the equation to find the derivative of a curve, it doesn’t matter if you do not understand each part of the function and cannot do the calculation. As I said earlier, genre is the way you communicate, or as Lisa Bickmore puts it “genre is an act of language”. While it is influenced by the situation and the message you want to convey, it is also influenced by who you want to convey that message to. I think the article “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan gives a great example of how genre can change based on the discourse community. In the article, Tan talks about how she realizes that the way she talks around her mother or husband, differs than the way she talks in more professional settings. ‘Family English’ which is rid of all the complexities of syntax and grammar that is learned when taking university level English courses. While she is still speaking English, the people she talks to makes a world of difference in how she talks and what she says. This in itself is a type of genre that she calls “simple English”. This relationship between genre and discourse communities is not a one-way street. While the genre is often times determined or changed based on the discourse community that you are writing to, the discourse community can also change based on the genre you are using.

              The last part of the equation is what makes good writing? The problem with this question is that you don’t decide what makes good writing. The ones who read the writing are the ones who decide. Because of this, it is difficult to give a clear answer, at least for me. I find this particularly difficult because as I have gone through this semester, I have begun to believe that good writing is separate than effective writing, even though one is often in the presence of the other. My theory of writing for good writing is a piece that effectively communicates its message to the intended audience. By carefully considering what meaning you want to get across and who you want it to reach, that is what makes up good writing. In short, properly using the genre to communicate with your discourse community is what makes writing good. This concept, however, is pretty abstract, as there are an infinite number of combinations between genre and discourse community that you can use to create good writing.

              There were a few opportunities to show my knowledge of genres and discourse communities and how it evolved throughout the class. The opening assignment we were asked to complete was a profile. As first, I had no idea what a profile was. The only thing that helped shape my perception of a profile was going through the couple of examples Professor McLaughlin posted for us to use. My understanding was that it was an overview/introduction/semi-life story/biography about a person or a group. With just that in mind, I created my profile. Looking back, I see now that I was using different genres to create the profile genre and not the discourse community that I was writing to.

              The second assignment we had to do was to create a photo caption that we would share in class and maybe post on The Activist. This was the first assignment when I began to account for the discourse community that we were writing to. Just like the first assignment, we were told what genre to use (photo caption) and then had to use examples of photo captions to define the ‘rules’ that fit a photo caption. My group decided that a photo caption would give direct, to-the-point information about a list of related points (in our case, time management strategies for different things that take up a lot of time in your life). We had to think about who was going to see our presentation (which was the rest of the students in our class, Professor McLaughlin, and possible other UCBA students on The Activist) and adjust how we were going to write our photo caption accordingly. This caused us to create a sort of personalized to the students of UCBA since they were going to be our audience.

              One day in the middle of the semester, Professor McLaughlin had the director or overseer of The UCBA website and give us a short seminar over creating web content. During this seminar we learned the difference between the genre of web writing and paper writing and how even something as similar as writing an article on paper and writing an article on a webpage change how you want to present your work since people’s attention span is immensely shorter when viewing things online. Because of that, you have to make sure to catch people’s attention fast. This helped me with the last two pieces of writing we had to do. The first of the two was a photo caption that had to be created and finished in one classes time. To do that, we made sure to keep it short, catchy, and in light of the recent events of the Covid-19 virus, added some humor relating so that other students could relate to it and so that it would be relevant now. In the last assignment of the two, we had to create any sort of journalistic text. This one took a little while longer because I had to carefully think who was going to read it and what I wanted to write about. I choose a journal genre, where I could add factual information as well as adding in bits of humor to offset the serious topic. Keeping in mind that it may be published on The Activist, I kept the tone of the entire piece as informal and almost conversational so other students could relate to it as well. Having a better understanding of genre and discourse communities and how each intertwine and work together to create a work of writing has greatly helped me improve my writing over all as well as helped me increase the amount of time I can productively work on writing instead of taking days to just come up with a topic.

My understanding of genre and discourse community has not only been restricted to English class. Discourse communities can be seen everywhere, even in my major of Psychology. For psychology, we use the APA format which is a type of genre in writing. We also use a lot of research papers which all have their own format of abstract, introduction, lit review, methods, results, discussion and conclusion. This is also a genre in psychology. Over time, through the use of continual research paper assignments, I have developed the ability to easily read lengthy research documents as well as to write them in a short amount of time. In this context, psychology majors would be the discourse community while the genre would be how we communicate, with research papers in APA format. So in psychology, good writing would be seen as a peer reviewed research article with all it’s parts (lit review, methods, discussion, etc.) whose data backs up the conclusion and has a meaningful discussion. I think it’s also worth mentioning that discourse communities are not just stuck to specific fields or groups of people. They can be much larger or much smaller as well. In the CCC’s “Discourse Community” article, it states that while botanists belong to their own discourse community, there are other kinds as well like soccer fans or sticker enthusiasts.

The journey through English Comp 2 has been an interesting one. It has been full of ups and downs, where I varied between being very confident in what I was writing to not knowing at all if what I wrote could even be called a profile. Going through the creation of different genres without actually being told how to format it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Thinking back on what I have learned about genre and discourse community, I can say that if normal education when you are given a rubric is a box, then being told to create a writing in a genre without giving the format is asking us to make our own box. Or circle, or triangle, or whatever shape we need to suit our needs. That is what I have come to view writing as. Something similar to a house, where the walls are the genre that you build and the roof is the discourse community of the audience that you are writing to. Both need to fit the other or the house will collapse, and together they work to house your message. As someone who has struggled in writing all my life, I have found that I greatly benefited from being able to create my own understanding of how genre and discourse community impact writing and hopefully improve my writing overall.

Works Cited:

1. Bickmore, Lisa. “Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical (Eco)Systems.” Pressbooks, 1990, openenglishatslcc.pressbooks.com/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understanding-genre-within-rhetorical-ecosystems/.

2. CCC. “CCC Discourse Community.” Canopy.uc.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-32449066-dt-content-rid-132611025_1/courses/2191-1_2ENGL2089005/CCCCs Discourse Community Definition(1).pdf.

3. Johns, Ann M. “Genre Awareness for the Novice Academic Student: An Ongoing Quest.” Language Teaching, vol. 41, no. 2, 2008, pp. 237-252.

4. Swales, John. “The Concept of Discourse Community.” canopy.uc.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-32449068-dt-content-rid-132611029_1/courses/2191-1_28ENGL2089005/Swales_WAW_DC(1).pdf.

5. Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue.” The Essay Experience, theessayexperiencefall2013.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2013/09/Mother-Tongue-by-Amy-Tan.pdf.