| Title of Article + Proper MLA Citation for Works Cited page |
Dan Melzer. “Understanding Discourse Communities.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 3, a peer-reviewed open textbook series for the writing classroom, 2020, 100-115. |
| Summarize the article — include your reaction, thoughts, anything to help you remember its claims. 100 to 150 words |
In this article written by Dan Melzer, the readers are able to expand their knowledge of discourse communities. The author focus on the audience of college students. He is working to get them engaged and teach them on why discourse communities are so important to the world. He begins with a little personal back story and trying to relate to the readers by saying he wanted to become a college writing professor. He then continues with his story until you see a break in the writing to explain exactly what a discourse community is. He essentially breaks it down to what we can call 6 chapters. First, he states discourse communities have “A broadly agreed-upon set of common public goals” from this he focuses his first chapter on this. Writing a little bit about this he relates to his personal story to share his example, he then moves on through the following five chapters to end up at “A threshold level of expert members (24-26)”, still using his personal example in all these chapters he’s able to provide the audience with a foundation and purposeful examples to continue their writing with. But he doesn’t stop there he closes out his works by telling us just how important these communities are in our writing and takes it even a step further to help us by giving us questions to consider while we benign our own writings. |
| Define new terms and concepts by quoting or paraphrasing the original author. |
Meetup.com – though this might not be a term used very often in my writing it’s still important to analyze it to better understand the author’s writing – this is a online website where anyone can join and find interest groups (discourse communities) near them to join and learn more about. |
| How does this reading connect to other articles from class and/or your own research?
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We are able to directly relate this to a previous reading we did about discourse communities. Both of these writings have been able to teach me something about a topic I never even knew about before. After reading this second work I am able to make connections with the first article on how to apply the importance of this to my own writings. |
| Based on the reading, craft one question to act as a springboard for class discussion. |
How would you critique the authors approach to talking to the audience? |