Project 3 Proposal

For this project, I will be examining the discourse among business professionals in the renewable energy industry, particularly solar and wind energy.  This is an area that I have interest in, partially just because renewable energy is important but also because my father is in this business so I have some background knowledge in the area. 

1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals

The main goal of the members of the renewable energy are quite obvious; they want to make money.  Like every other industry, that is the main focus.  They also want to create jobs and electricity for people, but again those both work towards making money.  What separates the renewable energy business from other energy businesses is that they actually have another, less greedy goal; to help the environment by providing renewable energy. 

2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.

Members of the renewable energy business, like other business professionals, communicate primarily through formal emails, telephone calls, conference calls, and face to face meetings.

3.  A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.  

Members of the solar business use methods such as conferences to provide feedback for other members.  They also have internet forums.  

4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims

There are many genres in the solar energy business, there are emails among colleges or between companies, there are magazines about the industry, and letters sent to another company.  

5. In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis

Members of the solar industry have terms to describe anything from how to install solar panels to how to get jobs.  One example is the word bid.  In the solar energy, the word bid describes how companies will offer to do a job for the lowest pay, and whoever bids the lowest and meets the criteria wins.  

6. A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise

Different jobs at different levels require a different amount of expertise.  The more knowledge someone has about solar energy, the higher they are likely to be in their company.  

I am interested in this group because renewable energy is the way of the future and solar is currently the most available form.  I would like to find out whether this industry uses the same or similar discourse as other energy industries, such as coal and nuclear energy.  I would also like to find out if all members of this industry  are part of the same discourse community or if the industry is divided and novice members are actually part of a different discourse community.

For this project, I will interview my father because he is the founder of a solar business.  I may also find other members of his business to interview, but his interview will probably be enough.

There are many documents that can be analyzed as part of the solar industry.  There are magazines, websites, advertisements, letters, emails, and many more forms of communication.  Something that I will be looking for in magazines are letters to the editor.  They provide feedback from the readers to the writers.  

Reading Response 16

Summary
 In the article "Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities" by Amy Devitt, Anis Bawarshi, and Mary Jo Reiff the author's argue that genre is a key element is understanding discourse communities.  Without genre, discourse communities would be unstructured, causing their content to be less specific and less useful.

Synthesis
This article relates to the articles by Swales, Porter, and Gee because they are all about discourse communities.  What this article does is it takes one of Swales' six characteristics of discourse communities, genre, and goes into detail about it and its effects on discourse community.

Review
This article was alright, it was not too difficult to understand and it really explained its points, especially that many forms are written by specialists in a discourse community for nonspecialists in that discourse community.

Reading Response 15

Getting Ready to Read
I play soccer and I (sometimes) attend a church.  These activities do not affect the way I participate in the other one because I view them as different parts of my life and don't consider how I do the one activity while doing the other.

Summary

In his article “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics” James Paul Gee explains his concept of Discourse.  He argues that a Discourse is place or group where you act, value, believe, speak, and write a certain way while you are in it.  Discourses may have different characteristics, such as being your primary Discourse (the first one you every enter), a secondary Discourse (ones that you join), dominant, or non-dominant.  Gee argues that you cannot engage in a discourse but not be fluent in it.  You must be fluent in every one of your Discourse, otherwise you will be viewed as an outsider.

Synthesis

This article relates to James Porter’s article “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community” as well as John Swales’ article “The Concept of the Discourse Community.”  What Gee just calls Discourse is what Porter and Swales call the discourse community.  The main difference between Swales’ article and Gee’s article is that Swales goes into detail about discourse communities and their properties while Gee writes more about the kinds of Discourses and people’s relationships to them.

Response

Gee managed to describe Disco urse in a way that was much more enjoyable to read than Swales with Discourse community.  This article was actually interesting, I almost didn't fall asleep while reading.  I also found this article way easier to understand than Swales' article

QD
1.  Different groups of people in different places expect you to talk in different ways.  If you are around people that don't use perfect grammar and use a certain slang, then to talk with perfect English and no slang would be wrong because you would be out of place.  This conflicts with what I have been taught because I was never taught to consider talking with slang because of where I am.

Reading Response 14

Getting Ready to Read
One time, I went to a barbecue with my parents at one of their friend's house.  It sounded fun, but when I got there everyone there was an older adult and I felt out of place, with no one to talk too.  I felt like I was too young and that I didn't fit in with the crowd.  Eventually I just started talking to people and shrugged off the feeling.

Summary
In his article "The Concept of Discourse Community" John Swales attempts to define discourse community and separate it from a speech community.  Discourse communities must have six specific features.  First, the members must have agreed on goals for the discourse community.  This could be legislators wanting to pass laws or the makers of a newspaper wanting to sell more papers.  Members of a discourse community must be able to communicate with each other in order to maintain and advance the discourse community.  The members must also be able to criticize the discourse community in order to better it.  A discourse community must have specific genres, or how its members are supposed to write.  They must have some of their own lexis, or words that have a unique meaning to the group.  And finally, discourse communities must have some members that are new and some that are experts on the subjects in order to survive.

Synthesis
This article relates to James Porter's article "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community" because both articles dive into discourse communities.  The main difference is that Porter introduces the reader to discourse communities and writes about much less complex aspects of them than Swales, who goes very deep into them.

Review
I found this piece hard to follow and understand, although I do understand what a discourse community is and their six main aspects.  I think that Swales was writing for an audience that is much more educated and interested in English than I am.

QD
5.  I belong to the discourse community of my group of friends when we all text each other.  We have goals, we want to find out what the person we are texting is doing and hang out with them or ask them a question to get help with a class.  We have mechanisms for intercommunication, cell phones.  That is also our mechanism for information and feedback.  We like to text in certain ways and use words that reflect that, creating a genre.  We do not have words that have specific meaning to us, but there are words that may have different meaning to most people.  The last characteristic does not apply well because we are all on an equal level as far as expertise.

Reading Response 13

Before you Read

I am looking at an ad for McDonald's breakfast menu.  I don't like this ad because McDonald's food is disgusting and unhealthy.  The ad has a picture of a cup of coffee, a two burgers, a burrito, and a hash brown.

Summary

In her article "The Sticky Embrace of Beauty" Anne Frances Wysocki attempts to explain why certain images please or anger us.  She discusses an image from a copy of the New York Times of a lady in nothing but thigh high boots and elbow length gloves standing straight up with her side facing you, but she is looking at you.  She incorporates the four "design principles" illustrated by Robin Williams-contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity and how they make the image more attractive.  Rudolf Arnheim's book The Power of the Center explains this picture as having power because vertical and because the part that stands out the most, the woman's butt, is in the center.

Synthesis
This article relates to John Berger's article "Ways of Seeing" because both of them describe why pictures are beautiful.  Wysocki discusses a modern picture of a partially clothed lady and why she feels the way she feels about it while Berger discusses classic European paintings of women with little or no clothing and how they are supposed to be viewed.

Review
I found this article to be confusing and hard to get through.  Wysocki wrote about many concepts that I did not fully understand.

QD
2.  Wysocki set up the text to be very visual.  Not only does it contain multiple diagrams and pictures but it also has headings and highlighted words.  These guide the reader and make it visually attractive.

3.  The Peek ad grabs my attention and makes me read the rest of the ad, but it does not make me want to buy the product because I hardly every buy things that I don't need and I usually just get books from libraries or online.

AE
2.  I believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and therefore agree with Wysocki.  Different people find different things to be beautiful.  I think that trees and forests are beautiful while some people might like the look of cities more.

MM
This statement relates to the rest of Wysocki's article because it describes how, in order to have freedom and be beautiful, an image must have a new element to it.  In other parts of her article Wysocki discusses how images must seem new and striking.  This applies to other visual art because in order to be considered great artwork must be creative and unique. 

Reading Response 12

Getting Ready to Read
I use pencils, computers, pens, and paper to writer.

Summary
In his essay 'From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies' Dennis Baron argues that everything that we use to write, including pencils, was at one point highly advance technology.  He begins with the pencil and how Henry Thoreau was the first American to develop pencils and a way of producing them that could compete with foreign markets.  Next is the telegraph, which Thoreau himself opposed.  When the telegraph was first blooming it was said to connect Main and Texas, to which Thoreau responded "Main and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate"(425).  Then came the telephone, which was doomed to fail, and finally the computer.  The computer is the most used literacy technology of today, but when it was first invented word processing was considered too trivial for it.  As Baron argues "The computer is simply the latest step in a long line of writing technologies"(425).

Synthesis
This article relates to James Porter's article "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community."  Both articles discuss the topic of plagiarism, although I doubt Porter and Baron would have the same stance on plagiarism.  Porter argued that plagiarism rules should be less strict than they are because all texts are related.  Baron fears that the use of computers will make it too easy for someone to steal someone else's work through the internet.

Review
I found this article more interesting than most of the articles that we have read.  To me it read more like a story than a dry article about writing or writing rules.  I learned a lot about the history of pencils, I never knew that Henry Thoreau invented a new way of making them.

QD
2.  I do not agree that this is one of his messages because of how he describes, throughout his entire article, how new technologies have fundamentally changed the shape and nature of writing.  For example, he describes on pages 438 and 439 how students can now use erasers on pencils so they have the ability to revise and polish their work.  Being able to revise is very important.  Also on page 439 he claims that "The computer has indeed changed the ways some of us do things with words."

Reading Response Hooks

Before you read
2.  I would begin an autobiography with a description of my family and hometown.  I would then move to my childhood and from there I would retell my life.  To write one you would need to talk to many people that knew you throughout your life such as teachers and friends.

Summary
In her article "Writing Autobiography" Bell Hooks argues that writing an autobiography can help you come to terms with your past and things that you have done and things that have happened to you that you are ashamed of or that hurt you.  She also explains how events or people in your life called catalysts can trigger previously forgotten memories from you past.

Synthesis
This article relates to "Learning to Read" by Malcolm X because they both deal with the author's past.  In his this chapter of his autobiography, Malcolm X describes how he educated himself while in jail and how being in jail let him change his ways and become highly literate.  In this article, Hooks describes how writing an autobiography let her come to terms with things that happened in her past.

Review
I found it interesting how personal the author gets in this article.  She tells you things about her past that I would not let anyone read about if I did them.  This proves that she is truly not ashamed of her past and has let go to what has happened.

QD
2.  Bio-mythography is a story from the past that the reader believes is true, but since it happened so long ago some of the details may be wrong or distorted.  Hooks' work is an example of bio-mythography because it may have some distorted details.

AE
2.  Identity can be changed through text because writers can either lie about events or they can only focus on certain details or events, changing what the writer things of them.