Discourse Community Defined

Most people, on any given day, move between and within several communities. They encounter their families, their neighborhood, their friends, their immediate colleagues, practitioners of their profession both local and national, people who share recreational or entertainment interests, and people who share their geographic area. In each community, there are conventions about what can be talked about, what gets assumed, and how one can talk about different things. These conventions shape a discourse community.

Purpose of This Assignment

There are also likely to be some guidelines—formal or informal—regarding who gets to join the discourse community. As we encounter a new profession, however, we don’t know the rules, the conventions, or the traditions yet.  This assignment asks you to investigate the discourse community you hope to join professionally and to begin to figure out how it works.

Researching a Discourse Community

For this assignment, you will do two kinds of research:
 

1. You will interview someone currently in the profession you hope to join about the kinds of writing he or she does on the job.

1. You will analyze at least two professional documents from your discourse community

The Interview

The person you interview must have several years experience working in this field so that he or she can give you insights into the profession you hope to join.  (Unless you hope eventually to become a faculty member at a research university, please try to find someone other than your professors to interview.) You may interview your subject in person, via e-mail, or on the phone.

The interview should cover several main topics:

• The kinds of writing your subject does on the job.
• The kinds of skills and qualifications the job requires
• How the profession defines itself.
• The expectations and surprises your subject had in entering the profession

Document Analysis

In the second part of this assignment, you will gather information about the discourse community through its documents. These publications include, but are not limited to:

• Academic and trade publications (journals, newsletters, etc.)
• Company web sites (Internet and Intranet)
• Professional society web sites  (e.g., Federal or State Bar Association, the National Association of State Foresters, Society for Technical Communication, etc.)
• Internal correspondence (memos, reports, policy & procedure documents, forms, etc.)
• External correspondence (letters, applications, descriptions, reports, etc.)

• What are the writing conventions of this profession?
• What are the basic assumptions that ground the profession?
• What makes someone an authority in this profession?
• What kinds of things are important for communicating in this profession?

Based on the information that you gather from the interview and the document analysis, write a memo report, addressed to me, in which you make an argument about the primary characteristics of the profession and its discourse community.  Try answering the questions listed in the last section as a way of starting to organize your information.

In other words, I don't want you simply to summarize your three sources (your interview and the two documents).  Instead, make a strong, clear claim about your profession that you back up with examples and detailed supporting information. Use quotations from your interview subject, quotations from your documents, or other specific information from these documents. Your job in this memo is to convince me, an interested person outside the discourse community, that the community takes the form you say it does.