Reading Response #16 / Project 3

Summary:
In the article "Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities," Amy Devitt, Anis Bawarshi, and Mary Jo Reiff discuss why genre and ethnomethodology are important when regarding discourse communities. Each writer does this in their own way. Devitt uses it in context with a jury during a court case. Bawarshi uses patient medical history forms, and Reiff explains why it is important to teachers and students.

Synthesis:
This article obviously goes along with the Gee article, but also with the Swales article. All discuss discourse communities, which is what ties them together, but each puts different emphasis on certain ideas of said communities. Gee believes that you are only truly part of one Discourse, while Swale thinks that you can be in multiple communities. Then Devitt, Bawarshi, and Reiff throw a new wrench into it with their discussion of genre.

Personal Response:
This article was very, very difficult for me to read. It seems that the farther we get into the semester, the more dense the articles become. However, I did enjoy the way Devitt compared genre with the jury scenario. It offered a more interesting way to look at the argument.





Project 3 Proposal

The community that I would like to research for my project is a choir that I was involved in during high school, an advanced women's choir called the Baronettes. I chose this community because I believe that the way that people interested in music communicate with each other is very interesting and I think it would definitely be something that requires a closer look. I invested a lot of time (over 3 years) and effort in the group, but never really thought about how we communicated. Once we started discussing discourse communities in class, I realized that the way we talked to each other in Baronettes was truly unique, and that, strangely, we could be considered a discourse community.
With this project, I hope to find out more about the way we communicated in the past three years, and hopefully relate it to other communities in the hopes of establishing one giant discourse community. I am curious to see if we use the language that we used with each other in other situations, or if it was only in that class that we used the language we did. I am curious to learn what others would think if thrust into our small bubble, if they would catch on quickly or be forever lost in our constant string of lingo and slang.
In terms of how Baronettes qualifies as a discourse community, I believe it meets all six of Swales’ criteria.
1.) A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.
Well, obviously we have this. Our goals were to make music, to let people hear us and hopefully develop an emotional connection with not only us, but what we were singing about. Also, it was always nice to make some money, or just be able to sing for an audience.

2.) A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.
As for methods of communication, we had everything. A Facebook page, a Twitter page, a newsletter, each other’s’ phone numbers.  We used these methods to keep in touch with each other, let each other know what was going on, and, of course, let the public know what we were up to.

3.) A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.
As previously stated, we used our methods to keep in touch with each other and let each other know important information. We also used them to alert each other to certain events or problems we were having with any specific piece of music we may have been working on, or simply to just let each other know that we were thinking of each other. We also posted videos or comments for all to see. This resulted in feedback from each other, which resulted in the greater success of the group.

4.) A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.
Each girl involved in the choir brings, with her, her own genre. We all also brought different skills to the table. Some of us were stronger in areas like keeping a handle on our part, no matter what. Others, myself included, brought our strong sight-reading skills that helped the group when it came to competitions.

5.) In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis.
As you may guess, when a group of twenty or so girls get together, there are bound to be crazy stories, cute nicknames, and lots of inside jokes that become stipulations of conversation. These, combined with the musical lingo that all of us already used, gave us our own individual language.

6.) A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relative content and discoursal expertise.
We all knew what we were doing; we were advanced enough in our musical knowledge that we were almost always on the same page. However, it was always made blatantly obvious if you did not know what you were doing, and the members that showed this were usually relegated to smaller parts, less solos, etc.

As for who I plan on interviewing, I would like to interview my choir director, of course, since she put us all together. I also plan on interviewing several girls who were part of the choir. I plan to pull excerpts from our Facebook page conversations, and maybe some text message conversations.