In Ann Johns’ article “Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict, and Diversity” she discusses some types of communities that you may join in your life. Particularly she breaks communities down into different types — social, professional, academic, political and recreational– and then asks her audience to consider questions, such as “Why do individuals join social and professional communities? What appears to be the relationships between communities and their genres? Are there levels of community?” just to name a few. To do this, we will research a discourse community to analyze how someone becomes a productive member of that community through the standardized forms of communication (genres) that happen within that community write an IMRaD research paper that investigates the WRITING GENRES your chosen discourse community uses to accomplish their goals. In order to do this, you will:
Choose a discourse community that you have participated in, are now participating in, or anticipate joining in the future
Once you choose the community, use the terminology from Ann Johns’ article to describe the community for your audience. As researchers interested in communities and writing genres, what information would be useful for us to know?
This will require you to collect secondary sources about the community you are focusing on to learn about the way the community functions, their purpose, demographics, how long they have been established, and other useful information.
Choose a research question about how some element of writing and communication works within the discourse community.
Your research question should be a “how” or “why” question about how members use writing and/or communication within the community. This question will be developed early in the unit and it will guide the primary data you collect and the argument your research paper ends up making.
Identify and collect genre(s) used by the community
Recall our reading of Ann Johns where we defined genres as writing which recurs in response to repeating situations to mediate specific activities within unique communities.
You’re required to collect three to five examples of written genres used by the community. You can either choose to collect 3-5 examples of different genres used by your chosen discourse community or collect 3-5 examples of one genre used by the community.
DO NOT choose people or activities to analyze that do not use texts or standardized communication of some sort. You are analyzing a communityin terms of how they communicate differently than other communities.
To identify genres to collect, you’ll want to think about the following questions:
What kind of writing does the community regularly write?
What kind of texts do they work with which may be written by others?
How do genres make things happen in the community?
In your paper, you’ll conduct a thorough genre analysis of the identified writing genre(s).
Develop claims and sub-claims based on your research
You’ll answer your research question to create an argument about the community you’ve researched and their writing.
This argument will be supported by your genre analysis.
You will cite readings from the course, especially Johns and Dirk, and likely Downs on Rhetoric..
Return to the article by Ann Johns.
Quote her.
Use her terminology as a framework for this research paper.
Write up your research in an IMRaD research paper
The IMRaD is a genre of research papers that separates the paper into 4 sections.
You’ll begin your paper with an Introduction that discusses the discourse community you’ve chosen to research, the genres they use, and what research question(s) guide your project.
Then, you’ll write about what Methods you used to answer your research question.
In your Results section you’ll summarize the texts and other data you’ve collected.
Finally, in your Discussion section you’ll answer your research question with analysis and defend it’s importance with evidence from the course readings.
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