TL;DR: Investigate how a particular discourse community uses genre(s) to accomplish its goals, and share your findings in a descriptive report, addressed to the rest of the class, that suggests some implications for our respective theories of writing.

Elements: Design plan (with attention to 2-3 genre samples), project draft(s) & revision(s), rhetorical summaries (compiled into an annotated bibliography), a project page on your portfolio website (with an introductory note), & a project self-assessment.

Rationale (connection to the course as a whole):

We continue to work on developing and articulating a theory of writing, and in our first project we explored the roots of our assumptions, in conversation with rhetoric and composition scholars. In this next project, however, we turn our attention outward to investigate for ourselves the wide variety of ways that expert writers do what they do — as well as how writers’ particular “discourse communities” shape the genres they write and the ways they use them.

Task & Purpose (what you’re doing and why):

In this project, you’ll investigate a discourse community you’d like to learn more about, focusing on the relationship between that community’s goals and the genres they use to achieve them. You’ll then organize and share your findings with us (and potentially other first-year students), contributing your research to our larger class conversation about how writing works, what makes it effective, and how it’s learned.

The broad focus of the project is investigating this goals-genres connection, but as you investigate your discourse community, you may develop a more specific research question relevant to your interests. You’ll also be working to sort out which of your discoveries seem most relevant for you and your intended audience — and thus most worth reporting.

The discourse community you choose may be academic (anthropologists, botanists, computer scientists, etc.), professional (doctors, engineers, foresters, etc.), or some other group that, following John Swales’ definition (as explained in Melzer p. 102, and like his guitar jam group example), shares goals, methods of communication, genres, and a specialized language.

To learn about the discourse community and its genres, you may find published information on the web or in print materials, but you may also find it helpful to interview one or more expert-insiders — and you’ll definitely want to find genre samples to analyze! (See below under resources for a list of questions about discourse communities and genres that may help you organize your investigation.)

Genre (what you’re creating):

Scholars have traditionally shared findings from their research in several ways, including conference presentations and research articles, though increasing numbers are also using blogs, podcasts, and other media to share and discuss their research. As is evident in Linton et al. (1994), academic disciplines don’t all use the same genres or even write about their research in the same ways, though Thonney (2011) does highlight some common moves or elements that I agree are worth imitating. And though we will be investigating different communities and genres, we are all nonetheless approaching our work like scholars of language and writing, and we’ve read several research articles by such scholars this semester.

To help us identify the most important genre features to imitate in creating our reports, we will discuss our observations of both professional samples (the various research articles we’ve read throughout the course), plus some student presentations and papers, available via Moodle and from Melzer’s UC-Davis class archive at http://fycjournal.ucdavis.edu/?s=discourse+community [NOTE: The genre you’re creating to share your findings may be different from the discourse community genre(s) you’re investigating.]

Format:

As with the exploration project, you may share your findings in several ways: you could write a traditional “paper,” using Google Docs or an offline word processor, or you could instead compose and deliver this in the form of a website, podcast, video, comic, animation, live presentation, or something else you devise. What might best suit your purpose, audience, or message?

Resources (links):

Process & Submission Notes: 

  • Our freewriting prompts during this unit (March 13-April 14), along with your project design plan, are designed to help you generate ideas
  • We’ll discuss a variety of published and student research reports/presentations (March 15-22), in search of common rhetorical moves and features we’d like to identify as assessment targets for our own
  • We’ll write brief summaries of one or two scholarly research articles (or resources you find about the discourse community & genre(s) you choose to investigate), to be added to your portfolio’s annotated bibliography page (due Mar 29).
  • We’ll share and discuss report/presentation drafts with each other in class (Mar 31-Apr 12), in conversation with the assessment criteria we developed together
  • Submit project page (on your portfolio site), including revised draft and introductory note, by April 14. **If you’d rather not make your website public until it’s totally complete, let’s consult about alternative options for sharing your note and revision with me.**

What to Include in the Introductory Note (in your portfolio):

  • Your intentions: What are you trying to accomplish with the project? How do you see it fulfilling the goals of the assignment (or course)?
  • Your process: How has the project developed since you started on it? Why have you made the choices you have (about content, modality, organization, style, delivery, etc.)?
  • Your takeaways: What have you learned from your work on this project? How might your discoveries apply to future personal, academic, or professional concerns?

Initial Suggestions for Project Assessment Criteria:

Listed below are draft criteria for assessing your research report (RR), based on all three sections’ observations of the student models we discussed in class on March 17. We can revisit and update these as we further explore academic writing conventions in class March 22-29.

  • CONTENT: Report is focused on information about a discourse community and its genre(s), including how the DC communicates, how its members connect, or other DC elements
  • CONTENT: Report defines relevant key terms, such as “discourse community” or others related to the community you’re investigating
  • CONTENT: Report refers to the work of experts (possibly through quotations, where this would be helpful), either community insiders or scholars who have investigated them
  • CONTENT: Report acknowledges any personal connections the writer may have to the DC (while also keeping the focus on information about the DC, not the writer)
  • STRUCTURE: Report includes an introduction, with a hook and explicit naming of the question(s) to be addressed in the report
  • STRUCTURE: Report includes a description of research methodology, as part of the intro or a section of its own
  • STRUCTURE: Report includes a description of findings, organized in a way that suits the material
  • STRUCTURE: Report concludes with a discussion of what the findings mean and/or how they might inform first-year writers’ efforts to develop a theory of writing
  • STYLE: Report balances a more formal academic style with moves toward audience accessibility, such as the use of rhetorical or stance-marking metatext
  • OTHER: Report uses relatively short paragraphs for easy reading on student portfolio websites
  • OTHER: Report uses visuals, like charts or images, where possible or relevant
  • OTHER: Report includes embedded links where possible, especially for in-text or final-page references