Assignment 18: Who would win? Coach Ditka, or a hurricane?

Establishing the territory- I claim this land for the coaches! Sean Branick starts off his paper with pointing out that coaches are more than just fellow meatheads to their football player counterpart. He explains that coaches are some of the most influential people in our culture, whether they were the average parent coaching their kid’s football team, or if they were the greatest of greats like Coach Ditka. Who is probably the greatest coach ever. I digress. Branick wants people to get the idea in their heads before they go any further in his paper that coaches have a lot to offer in their communities.

Establishing the niche- Coaches are not given enough credit when it comes to being a great teacher and source for athletes. Coaching is not for the faint of heart. They have to be able to read their players and know how to react to situations in the blink of an eye. Coaches need to stay on top of things in order to be successful with their team. Sean mentions five things that a coach needs: being a teacher, being organized, being competitive, being a learner, and being a mentor and friend. Not everyone can be all of these things, but great coaches can be. Like I said, not for the faint of heart.

Establishing how he will find the niche- The way in which Branick found the great coaches was he recorded pregame speeches, and got to interview the coaches that he had in mind for the level of greatness. This way he got to have a first hand account of how coaches were able to lead their teams and how they were as people too. Definitely a solid approach to finding the information he wanted.

Assignment 17: Food for thought

I found the research question to be in the “menu” article seeing as he’s writing about a restaurant. The question he poses is, “What is a menu and what does it mean to have a literate understanding of one?” He focuses on how important the menu is to the little community a restaurant has. It affects everyone, the waiters, the cooks, and the customers. The menu has to be just right for everyone to understand and benefit from. He gives the example of the menu holding over ninety main options. That’s not even including the specials or substitutes they could make for the customer. I have trouble remembering what I did yesterday let alone ninety items of food and drinks on a menu. The waiters need to be on their game every night to have that down. That’s his focus, menu aside. He was looking at the three waiters who worked there to give the feel of the community he had worked in. He talks about how each waiter worked differently in the community and that shows the fact that this community is diverse and diversity isn’t always a bad thing. A cool thing he included was the background of each of the waiters. This shows the reader that anyone from anywhere could end up working together in the same discourse community and that people should be open minded about how they react to new comers. This thought shows that what Gee’s theory of discourse communities would be like is very different in life than on paper. And on a side note, after reading this article I wanted Italian food.

Project 4: Proposal

My discourse community I will be focusing on is the social network called Facebook. To give some details into Facebook, there are many little things that make up this website. For example, on your profile, you can post your interests, what movies you like, what kind of music you’re into, where you stand politically, whether or not you’re in a relationship or not, where you went to school or where you’re going to school, what you’re major is, where you’ve worked, and any other contact information you’d like to give out. All of that just goes under one tab on your profile, “info”. You then have your wall where you can post your thoughts or videos or pictures on. Your friends can post on your wall as well. You then have the photo tab, which is; yes you guessed it, where the photos of you go. This is where all the photos with your name “tagged” in them go. This is a bittersweet feature. This means that all those “I can’t believe that picture was taken” photos are probably going up on to the Internet. The nice thing is you can “untag” yourself from the photos if you don’t want people to see those photos when they look at your profile.

            I am indeed a member of Facebook, and I find the whole thing mostly pointless, but it’s a nice way of keeping in touch with other people you might not usually get to talk to. I think it would be interesting to see what other people find interesting or important about Facebook. For example, why they post what the post or who they friend request and who they don’t accept friend requests from. I would like to explore the way people think and how they treat the whole, “social network community”. What they put forth and how they think they’re contributing to make the community a better or more fun environment for everyone else. I’d like to really challenge people’s thoughts on the website to maybe show people that they don’t necessarily need to be online 24/7. I want to know other people’s reactions to having other people “like” or comment on their posts. I’d like to see how this website boosts their confidence or lowers it. I’d want to see how much people rely on this site as a way of staying in touch with other people.

            To help shape the way I’ll be looking at this discourse community, I’ll be looking at the article written by John Swales. He says that communities need to be ever changing and adapting to keep up with the changing times. This is a great idea to have in my back pocket, especially since the website, Facebook, has been going through a lot of changes lately. I want to ask older members how they’re taking the changes, and then ask newer members how they are taking the changes as well. It would be interesting to see if there are any differences in the reactions. I will also be looking at the article by Dennis Baron. He talks about how technology is changing the way we write, and I’d like to talk to some people separated by a generation and see what each generations take on this social network. While we’ve all been around for technology, there used to be a lot more letters being written, now you can just send someone a Facebook message. I’d like to see how people feel about the changes there. For my last reference I’d like to look into Elizabeth Wardle’s article. She talks about the different angles people try to enter from when coming into a discourse community and I’d like to parallel that to how people get on Facebook and who they set themselves up as and who they friend request and how they react to other people on the social website.

Work Cited:

Writing About Writing-

·      “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces” Elizabeth Wardle Pg. 520

·      “The Concept of Discourse Community” John Swales Pg. 466

·      “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies” Dennis Baron Pg. 422

Assignment 16: You need to know the rules before you can break them

Engagement.

This is a serious step. I mean, you better really like this person. You’re not just meeting up with them anymore. This Stuff just got real. The best thing to do is to keep breathing. Don’t worry. Tons of people everyday are proposing and taking the next step in their discourse communities too. You’re not alone. You’re with people who like you well enough that you should be comfortable with your decision. And don’t even think about the fact that “a lack of mutuality in the course of engagement creates relations of marginality that can reach deeply into [newcomers’] identities”. This is a necessary step to make your community stronger and more welcoming to interweave ideas from many people, young and old. You’re doing the right thing.

Imagination.

“While imagination can lead to a positive mode of belonging, it can be so removed from any lived form of membership that it detaches [newcomers’] indentit[ies] and leaves [them] in a state of uprootedness.” This is a two edged sword when it comes to, well everything, but for this purpose, discourse communities. You may have a great idea but if you’re way too far-fetched, good luck getting people to go along with the idea. There’s a difference between far-fetched and ambitious. Don’t be the former. Use imagination to spark up ideas in your discourse community but keep them imaginative but reasonable.

Alignment.

You’re the mediator. You’re the fence between properties. You’re the person who has to figure out to make everybody happy. That includes you too. You don’t want to be too busy making everyone else happy at any price that it takes away any of sense of identity you would have about yourself. It “can be a violation of [a person’s] sense of self that crushes [their] identity. If you can balance between making all three parties happy, you’ve got yourself a pretty solid discourse community.

Assignment 15: Missed it by...that much

To be so close together, and yet so far apart at the same time, Gee and Swales seems do be able to do it all the time. I bet if these two writers had teamed up they would have been one of the great duos. They could’ve have been like Batman and Robin, the Wonder Twins, or Rocky and Bullwinkle. Alas they didn’t really see eye to eye so let’s just scratch that idea out of our minds right now. Swales was really pushing for a huge of community of discourses that one could float between and help out which ever community one would see fit at the time. There wasn’t really any conflict in Swales’ theory of discourse communities. This is where Gee says no. He finds that the only reality is that only the perfect people for the communities can join in. Those who aren’t good enough either has to “mushfake” their ways in, or keep on looking for a lower standard group. But to Gee, there is no way a happy community could exist.

            Johns goes on to talk about what some of the expected things are in the academic discourse communities. She brings in this idea that perhaps those who are new to the groups and not fully aware of the rules could actually take leadership over the community for that fact alone. People look to other people who are willing to risk things for the better results, even if that means breaking some of the discourse community rules. The newer recruits may not know all of the old rules, but they’re going off of the rules they know. Rules change, so it could very well be that 2 members separated by some years were brought up with different interpretations of that certain discourse community. And while people are used to the old ideas, the new ones may just look shiny enough that people will want to try them out and see what happens. I think this bit of thinking is an example of what it would look like. This idea that things don’t have to stay the same looks pretty good compared to Gee and Swales. They’re too busy being convinced they’re right to look at other ideas for the discourse communities. That’s a good way to kill your community. The world is ever changing, adapt or get out. This even applies to the literary world too.

Assignment 14: The He-man woman hater club...women welcome.

If you want to get into the cool club, you have to be tested to make sure you’re going to fit in well with the already existing members. Sometimes that means the members start looking at you from a distance at first without you knowing it. It’s the best way to see how you truly interact with people, surroundings and in this case, literacy discourse. This is a good way to test you without know you’re being tested. It’s a “no pressure” situation. But there is pressure. Tons of pressure. Don’t look now but you’re being watched to see how you react to this post. They’re going to decide if you’re “club material”. I’ll put in a good word for you. Only time will tell whether you doing all the right things at this moment…if not, I’m not sure this will work out for you. I’m sure you’re fine though.

That’s not a situation you’d want to be caught up in. That’s what I took away from this “right time, right place, right people” situation. While it is beneficial to have people of similar backgrounds in the same discourse community, it couldn’t hurt to mix things up in my opinion. Why not take someone who is at a lower level and throw him or her in with a higher-level literary discourser. Or in some cases I’ve seen, mix two types of artists together. One who is stronger in 3-D art and one that is stronger in 2-D art. Give them an assignment. They may surprise you. I did a project with two of my buddies sophomore year where we were to take “paper materials” and make some sort of 3-D project with it. I’m mostly structured in the drawing and my two friends were stronger in the 3-D aspect, ceramics and what have you. Well we made a pirate ship and a sea serpent and it turned out amazing. The work load was pretty evenly divided up between the three of us, so it wasn’t like someone was doing more or less than the others. I drew up some ideas as to how it would look and the other two guys led the creating process. I did what I was told and they did their thing, and it turned out pretty impressive. My point is, mixing up backgrounds can turn out to be a good thing. Don’t make the community so exclusive.

Assignment 13: *insert clever title name. Sorry guys...I've got nothing right now.

1.) A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals. Aka stay in the guidelines of what everyone else is talking about and you’re good. It could be anything. Politics, social events, paper airplanes, whatever catches your fancy. As long as you’re not saying, “Well I think “x” is the best presidential candidate because he is showing he knows what the people want. I was a dinosaur in a past life”, you should be okay. Stay on the topic, and if you have secret goals of your own like, “I want to sound smart so that girl over there thinks I’m smart”, then by all means, try to impress.

2.) A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members. It’s a small world after all. Now that that song is stuck in your head, let me try and make a point. It’s saying that while there make a group of people who have never met before but all come from the same background in teachings or what have you are still connected by the fact that they are all going out with the same mission in mind. For me, this would be like when I was in high school and part of my youth group. We would go on mission trips to other cities and we even made it to Mexico one year. We helped build a second story on a church. There would be a group coming in after us to help finish the church. So while we never met, we still had the same goal, thus creating a community.

3.) A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback. This is saying that even though you may be part of a medical team, if you don’t stop the patient from bleeding out, you’re not really helping anyone. You have to put forth some effort to actually be apart of the community. This isn’t a “show up and you win!” type of deal. It’s time to nut up or shut up. This is like art critiques we have for class. If you’re not putting up work or speaking, why are you there?

4.) A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one of more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims. Be original. No one likes a tattletale…or people who can’t think of anything original. Okay that last part isn’t true. But don’t walk up to someone and takes their idea. Be cool. True originality is hard to come by in the art world, it’s okay to have been influenced by other artists, just don’t take the Mona Lisa and say you made it.

5.) In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis. It’s like having your own decoder ring. You become comfortable with shortcuts or anagrams for words and while outsiders may not know what you’re getting at, the rest of your club does. A good group can do this. A great group can be understood by everyone…members and nonmembers alike. This is like when I try to explain to people some ways of setting up files on adobe illustrator or some other graphic software. I need to change my terminology to help make it simple for everyone.

6.) A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. Make way for the new guys and have a fond farewell for the old. Everyone is important in a group. The new are the future while the old are the past. You can’t have one without the other. And a good balance of the two insures you of having a long history. I can only think of family generations for an example. my grandfathers teaching my parents who then taught me, and I will teach the younger generation of my family to come. Circle of life.