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Discourse community: One oft-cited definition comes from linguist John Swales, who proposes six “necessary and sufficient” characteristics to call a group a DC: (1) They have a “broadly agreed set of common public goals”; (2) they have “mechanisms” for communicating with each other; (3) they use these “participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback”; (4) they use one or more genres to advance their goals; (5) they have developed a specific, specialized vocabulary (a “lexis”); (6) they maintain a “reasonable ratio between novices and experts,” without which they couldn’t survive (pp. 24-27). A simpler definition might be Anne Beautfort’s: “a social group that communicates at least in part via written texts and shares common goals, values, and writing standards, a specialized vocabulary and specialized genres” (p. 179).

Genre: A category or type of text, characterized by recognizable patterns, that develops (and may even change or adapt) over time in response to recurring rhetorical situations; a form of social interaction that people use to accomplish certain activities. 

Grammar: “The natural, inherent, meaning-making system of [a] language, a system that governs the way words come together to form meanings; grammar is also the study of that system, the various theories or perspectives that attempt to understand and describe it” (Hancock, p. 6.) In other words, grammar is the system that allows us to make meaning, the system that both affords and constrains the choices we can make. 

Invention: In the Western rhetorical tradition, invention—aka discovery—has been understood as the practice of looking for the arguments which are available in any given situation. This practice, or process, of “discovering” what the possible arguments are—and then deciding which you will use—is driven by key questions about the issue at stake, the audience to be addressed (including their attitudes about the issue), and one’s own character or reputation with that audience. Discovery thus includes a variety of “pre-writing” practices, from brainstorming and freewriting to research and drafting. (Sometimes it takes writing something to discover what it is you have to say—or what it is you need to investigate further.) Discovery, in short, is about generating possibilities.

Rhetoric: “For most of Western history, [rhetoric] has meant the body of doctrine that teaches people how to speak and write and, thus, act effectively in public life. Usually defined as ‘the art of persuasion,’ it might as well have been called ‘the economics of attention.’ It tells us how to allocate our central scarce resource, to invite people to attend to what we would like them to attend to” (Lanham, p. xii-xiii). More generally, rhetoric can be understood as “the conscious use of language . . . the study of the ways in which peoples have accomplished all that has been accomplished beyond the instinctual” (Villanueva, pp. 76-77), or more generally still as “The art, practice, and study of [all] human communication” (Andrea Lunsford, qtd in Booth, p. 8). In short, rhetoric has to do with the ways we use language (and other symbols) to DO stuff. If grammar is the system that affords and constrains our available choices, rhetoric is the process by which we analyze, evaluate, and make strategic use of those choices—or study the choices of others (aka reading like writers). See also a collection of definitions at https://graves120.wp.unca.edu/what-is-rhetoric/. 

Rhetorical situation: This is a way of understanding (and analyzing) the array of circumstances that affect any particular instance of communication between people. At a minimum, we can identify a rhetorical situation as comprising exigence (a motivating issue), rhetor (a speaker/writer/communicator), audience (intended or incidental), and constraints (timing, place, and assumptions of both rhetor & audience). It is within these situated moments that rhetors make choices about what they’ll say and how they’ll say it. 

Style: In the Western rhetorical tradition, style has long been understood as the element of rhetorical study and practice most concerned with sentence- and word-level choices (diction, syntax, voice, rhythm, sound, etc.) and their effects. If grammar has to do with the system of choices available, and rhetoric (overall) as the process by which we make our choices, we could perhaps define style as the result of our particular choices—what readers would read or listeners hear. 

Transfer (of learning): In essence, transfer refers to students’ ability to use, adapt, repurpose, generalize, or apply what they have learned in one situation to another, new or unfamiliar, one. 

References

Beaufort, A. (2007). College writing and beyond: A new framework for university writing instruction. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. 

Booth, W. (2004). The rhetoric of rhetoric: The quest for effective communication. Blackwell.

Hancock, C. (2005). Meaning-centered grammar. Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Lanham, R. (2006). The economics of attention: Style and substance in the age of information. University of Chicago Press.

Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge Applied Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.

Villanueva, V. (1989). Bootstraps: From an American academic of color. Urbana, IL: NCTE. 

Yancey, K.B., Robertson, L., & Taczak, K. (2014). Writing across contexts: Transfer, composition, and sites of writing. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. doi:10.7330/9780874219388