what is an academic discourse essay

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What is Academic Discourse?

W riting classes and textbooks use the term “academic discourse” to describe the kind of writing they want to see. That term often makes people think of old men in tweed jackets smoking pipes. But academic discourse happens everywhere outside of campuses and journals. Most professionals use a form of academic discourse. They just don’t call it that.

For writing teachers, the phrase “academic discourse” acts as a shorthand to describe a set of attitudes, habits, and practices. Using academic discourse by itself doesn’t make you liberal or conservative. It just means that you engage in critical thinking about issues, question your own beliefs, resist assumptions and bias, listen to other perspectives, and look for evidence to support your own beliefs.

True, academic journals hold other criteria when it comes to the structure and format of the writing itself, including citations. Academic writing can often seem dense or confusing. These traits only apply to certain disciplines. As you’ll see, many academic journals print articles accessible to wider readerships. When you come across written or spoken arguments, or even informative articles, look for these traits listed below. Try to incorporate them into your own writing and thinking.

Characteristic One: Multiple Perspectives 

The best academic writing engages a conversation on a topic and references other viewpoints. Academics do this throughout an essay or book, even on the sentence level through references to other researchers or even phrases that allude to conflicting opinions indirectly. Phrases such as “As some work suggests” or “the consensus is that” imply that while an idea is dominant it is not the gospel truth.

Characteristic Two: Complex, Multi-part Thesis and Argument

Characteristic three: qualifications , characteristic four: concessions , characteristic five: larger, more complex vocabulary.

Academic writers are often accused of using “big, pretentious words” to convey their ideas. Some writers will use big words for their own sake. However, effective writers will use bigger words in order to convey complex ideas more concisely, ideas that would otherwise take several words awkwardly strung together.

Characteristic Six: Length

Academic writers are also sometimes accused of writing long, wordy paragraphs as well as lengthy, 30-page articles that are dull. Some writers do this. However, the length of articles and even paragraphs has a point. Academic and professional audiences demand lots of evidence before they accept someone’s opinion. They want every aspect and detail of the evidence examined, and they want a clear explanation of how that evidence has or hasn’t been discussed by other scholars. Doing that takes a lot of space.

Cultivating these traits and habits into your writing will add depth and value. Above all, academic discourse promotes curiosity and open-mindedness. Learning requires us all to resist easy assumptions and bias towards ideas or opinions that fit our current worldviews. We approach scientific, cultural, and political issues from many sides and seek evidence to inform us. Academic writing embodies these characteristics.

Albert Weideman

Foundations of applied linguistics, what is academic discourse.

Academic discourse, which is historically grounded, includes all lingual activities associated with academia, the output of research being perhaps the most important. The typicality of academic discourse is derived from the (unique) distinction-making activity which is associated with the analytical or logical mode of experience . (Patterson & Weideman 2013).

Explanation

Academic discourse is more than grammar; it has functions like exposition, clarification, and conclusion, requiring us to do things with language like explain, define, compare, contrast, classify, agree, disagree, illustrate, elaborate, make claims, see implications, infer, exemplify, anticipate, and conclude. In addition, imbued as it is with cognitive as well as analytical processing, competence in handling academic language is far more than the ‘skills’ of listening, speaking, reading, and writing … Weideman 2018

The ability to handle this complex kind of language has at its centre the idea of using language in a logically qualified way: to make theoretical distinctions and for the purposes of analysis. Therefore the measurement of the ability must encompass many sub-components, to do justice to the complexity of the language ability being assessed. It follows, too, that a language test that is multifaceted is preferable to a monotone test design, and is likely to be more reliable. The same would apply to language courses to develop academic literacy, as the ability to handle academic discourse is usually termed.

Click to find Albert Weideman’s definition of academic literacy .

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Encyclopedia for Writers

Writing with artificial intelligence, academic writing – how to write for the academic community.

• © 2023 by Joseph M. Moxley - Founder, Writing Commons

Academic writing refers to the writing style that researchers, educators, and students use in scholarly publications and school assignments. An academic writing style refers to the semantic and textual features that characterize academic writing and distinguish it from other discourses , such as professional writing , workplace writing , fiction , or creative nonfiction . Learn about the discourse conventions of the academic community so you can write with greater authority , clarity , and persuasiveness (and, in school settings, earn higher grades!).  

Table of Contents

What is Academic Writing?

Academic writing refers to all of the texts produced by academic writers, including theoretical, empirical , or experience-based works. Examples:

• Students at the high school and undergraduate level write essays, book reviews, lab reports, reviews of literature, proposals–and more . These assignments often presume an audience of a teacher-as-examiner
• by proposing a new theory, method, application
• by presenting new empirical findings
• by offering new interpretations of existing evidence .

Different academic fields have distinct genres , writing styles and conventions because each academic field possesses its own set of rules and practices that govern how ideas are researched , structured , supported , and communicated . Thus, there is no one single style of academic writing. Rather, there are many different writing styles a writer might adopt , depending on their aims of discourse , media , writing tools, and rhetorical situation .

Related Concepts: Audience – Audience Awareness ; Discourse Community – Community of Practice ; Discourse Conventions ; Elements of Style ; Genre ; Professional Writing – Style Guide ; Persona ; Rhetorical Stance ; Tone ; Voice

Differences aside, there are a number of discourse conventions that academic writers share across disciplines. These conventions empower writers to establish authority and clarity in their prose –and to craft pieces that can be understood and appreciated by readers from various academic fields as well as the general public.

Features of Academic Discourse

• Academic writing tends to be substantive rather than superficial, anecdotal , vague or underdeveloped. For example, a paper on climate change would not just describe the observed changes in temperature, but might also delve into the scientific theories that explain these changes, the evidence supporting these theories, the potential impacts of climate change, and the debates within the scientific community
• Academic writing prioritizes evidence and logical reasoning over anecdotal observations , personal opinions, personal beliefs emotional appeals
• Members of the academic community expect authors to provide evidence for claims . When academics introduce evidence into their texts, they know their readers expect them to establish the currency, relevance , authority , accuracy , and purpose of any evidence they introduce
• Academic writers are careful to support their claims with evidence from credible sources, especially peer-reviewed , academic literature.
• Academics are sensitive to the ideologies and epistemologies that inform research methods.
• For example, when a psychology student studies the effects of mindfulness on anxiety disorders, they would need to understand that their research is based on the assumption that anxiety can be measured and quantified, and that it can be influenced by interventions like mindfulness training. They would also need to understand that their research is situated within a particular theoretical framework (e.g., cognitive-behavioral theory), which shapes how they conceptualize anxiety, mindfulness, and the relationship between them.
• Academic writing is expected to be objective and fair–and free of bias . This means presenting evidence in a balanced way, considering different perspectives , and not letting personal biases distort the analysis.
• It also involves recognizing the limitations of the research and being open to criticism and alternative interpretations .
• Academic writers are very careful to attribute the works of authors whom they’re quoting , paraphrasing , or summarizing . They understand information has value , and they’re careful to discern who the major thought leaders are on a particular topic . They understand they cannot simply copy and paste large sections of copyrighted material into their own work, even if they provide an attribution .
• Academic writers must also abide copyright laws , which protect the rights of authors and creators. This means, for example, that they cannot simply copy and paste large sections of copyrighted material into their own work, even if they provide a citation . Instead, they can use smaller excerpts under the principle of “fair use,” or they can seek permission from the copyright holder to use larger portions.

Organization

Academic writing is typically organized in a deductive way (as opposed to inductively ). Many genresof academic writing have a research abstract, a clear introduction , body, conclusions and recommendations.

Academic essays tend to have an introduction that introduces the topic, the exigency that informs this call to write. reviews pertinent research, and explains the problem — hypothesis, thesis, and rhetorical situation. the context and states the purpose of the writing (aka, the thesis! ), the body develops the arguments or presents the research, and the conclusion summarizes the main points and discusses the implications or applications of the research

Typically, the design of academic documents is plain vanilla, despite the visual turn in communication made possible by the ubiquity of design tools. Unlike professional writing, which tends to be incredibly visual, academic writing tends to be fairly traditional with its focus on alphabetical text as opposed to visual elements.

• Plain Design: Academic documents, such as research papers, theses, or scholarly articles, typically follow a minimalist design approach. They primarily consist of black text on a white background, with a standard, easy-to-read font. This “plain vanilla” design reflects the focus of academic writing on the content rather than the presentation. The aim is to communicate complex ideas clearly and without distraction.
• Limited Use of Visuals: Unlike in professional writing or journalism, visuals such as images, infographics, or videos are not commonly used in academic writing. When they are used, it’s usually to present data (in the form of graphs, charts, or tables) or to illustrate a point (with diagrams or figures). The visuals are typically grayscale and are intended to supplement the text rather than replace it.
• Structured Layout: Academic writing tends to follow a structured layout, with clearly marked sections and subsections. This helps to organize the content and guide the reader through the argument. However, aside from headings, there is usually little use of design elements such as color, bolding, or varied fonts to highlight different parts of the text.
• Lack of Interactive Features: With the transition to digital media, many types of writing have become more interactive, incorporating hyperlinks, multimedia, or interactive data visualizations. However, academic writing has been slower to adopt these features. While academic articles often include hyperlinks to references, they rarely include other interactive elements.

However, as digital media and visual communication become increasingly prevalent, we may see changes in the conventions of academic design.

• Academic writing tends to be formal in persona , tone , diction . Academic writers avoid contractions , slang, colloquial expressions, sexist use of pronouns . Because it is written for specialists, jargon is used, but not unnecessarily. However, the level of formality can vary depending on the discipline, the genre (e.g., a research paper vs. a blog post), and the intended audience . For instance, in sociology and communication, autoethnography is a common genre , which is a composite of autobiography , memoir, creative nonfiction, and ethnographic methods .
• In the last 20 years, there has been a significant move toward including the first person in academic writing. However, in general, the focus of discourse isn’t the writer. Thus, most academic writers use the first person sparingly–if at all.
• Academic writers use the citation styles required by their audiences .
• Specialized Vocabulary: Academics often use specialized vocabulary or jargon that is specific to their field. These terms can convey complex ideas in a compact form, contributing to the compressed nature of academic prose. However, they can also make the writing less accessible to non-specialists.
• Complex Sentence Structures: Academic writing often uses complex sentence structures, such as long sentences with multiple clauses, or sentences that incorporate lists or parenthetical information. These structures allow academic writers to express complex relationships and nuances of meaning, but they can also make the writing more challenging to read.
• Referential Density: Academic writing often refers to other works, theories, or arguments, either explicitly (through citations) or implicitly. This referential density allows academic writers to build on existing knowledge and engage in scholarly conversation, but it also assumes that readers are familiar with the referenced works or ideas.

1. When is it appropriate to use the first person?

Use of the first person is now more commonplace across academic disciplines. In order to determine whether first person is appropriate, engage in rhetorical analysis of the rhetorical situation .

Recommended Resources

• Professional Writing Prose Style
• First-Person Point of View
• Using First Person in an Academic Essay: When is It Okay?
• A Synthesis of Professor Perspectives on Using First and Third Person in Academic Writing

Brevity - Say More with Less

Clarity (in Speech and Writing)

Coherence - How to Achieve Coherence in Writing

Flow - How to Create Flow in Writing

Inclusivity - Inclusive Language

The Elements of Style - The DNA of Powerful Writing

Recommended

Structured Revision – How to Revise Your Work

Professional Writing – How to Write for the Professional World

Authority & Credibility – How to Be Credible & Authoritative in Research, Speech & Writing

Citation Guide – Learn How to Cite Sources in Academic and Professional Writing

Page Design – How to Design Messages for Maximum Impact

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Annotating Your Way into Academic Discourse

What is academic discourse.

In the simplest terms, academic discourse is how scholars—or academics, as they are sometimes called—speak and write. Believe it or not, you already have some experience with academic discourse. Think back to the type of writing you completed in high school. You were probably expected to write in a more formal manner than if you were writing a text message or email to your friends. This formality is one aspect of academic discourse. Think, too, about your participation in class discussions. You probably spoke more formally and precisely during these discussions than if you were simply hanging out and talking with your friends. Academic discourse is not as casual as everyday speaking and writing, but strives to be more formal, complex, and precise. At the college level, you will be expected to further develop your abilities to participate in academic discourse. While each field or discipline (e.g. Biology, English, Psychology) has its own specific ways of writing, all disciplines within the academy encourage more sophisticated forms of communication than those we use every day.

In order to participate in the conversations that go on across disciplines within the academy, you will need to hone your abilities to use academic discourse effectively. This is a goal that should guide you early in your general education courses and all the way through the courses in your major. Inserting your voice into scholarly conversations—rather than just summarizing what other scholars have said—may be new for you. Some previous instructors may have told you not to include your “opinion” or “voice” in your writing. Maybe you have been prohibited from using “I.” This was the case for one of my students who described the difficulty this posed for him while writing a research paper: “I had to concentrate most of my efforts on analyzing my sources while trying to make sure my own voice was heard. I will admit that it was tough due to the fact that much of my high school writing career had been focused on keeping my voice out of [my] paper[s].” While it may take some time for you to become comfortable inserting your own voice into scholarly conversations, as a college-level reader and writer it is important that you become a visible and active part of your writing, just as you are expected to be an active reader. As noted in the introduction, annotation—which brings the acts of reading and writing together—can lay the foundation for your productive participation in scholarly conversations.

What is Annotation?

You have probably been asked by instructors to “mark-up” something you are reading. Maybe you were asked to jot down questions or notes in the margins, highlight the important parts, or circle words you don’t know. Maybe you have developed these habits on your own. The act of marking up a text is commonly referred to as annotating. The word “annotate” comes from the Latin word for “to note or mark” or “to note down.” To annotate is exactly that—it’s when you make notes on a text. “What does this have to do with entering scholarly conversations?” you may be wondering. How can marking up a reading help you respond to other scholars in your discipline?

When you annotate you are writing as you read. You make notes, you comment, react, and raise questions in the margins of your text. Reflections of your engagement with the text and its author, annotations represent the initial and preliminary ways you are participating in a scholarly conversation with the author of what you are reading. As such, your annotations can serve as the basis for the more extensive contributions you will be expected to make to scholarly conversations. For example, if you need to write an essay about something you have read, you can return to your annotations—to the questions you posed and comments you made in the margins—because these are moments in which you are already interacting with the text and its author. From there you can develop those preliminary interactions into a more detailed and comprehensive response.

Annotations can be handwritten on a printed text or applied digitally on an electronic text. As noted in the Introduction, annotating digitally will allow you to mark up any text, including those on the Web, access your annotations from any computer, and share your annotations with others. See the Introduction for specific instructions on how to digitally annotate the reading selections in this textbook.

Instead of annotating the readings digitally, some instructors might ask you to print out the readings from this textbook and annotate them by hand as in the sample that follows

As you read the annotations in the sample text, notice the way the student uses annotations. The students ask questions, challenge points, define some words, and make personal connections. In this example, the students are engaging in more general annotation practices that are not governed by a specific reading strategy like those you will be introduced to in Chapter 2.

What Are the Differences Between Annotating and Highlighting?

It is important to keep in mind that annotating and highlighting often serve different purposes. Highlighting draws your attention to what you deem to be the important parts of a reading. Highlighting can help you recall those moments and the information presented in them. On the other hand, annotating encourages you to mark additional elements of the text—those beyond just “the important parts.” You will notice that in the previous samples highlighting is never used on its own. Rather, the yellow highlighting that does appear is accompanied by a comment, question, or some kind of written response. Although highlighting may be an important supplement to annotating, highlighting on its own is usually better preparation for assignments that ask you to memorize concepts and ideas from readings as opposed to those that ask you to write about and respond to what you have read. A record of your reading and your responses to the text and its author, annotations can provide you with the foundation for entering scholarly conversations, which is what you will be asked to do throughout college.

Writing as Critical Inquiry Copyright © by Keri Sanburn Behre, Ph.D. and Kate Comer, Ph.D. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Academic Voice

You use the academic voice because your opinion is based on thinking; in your paper you’re revealing your thought process to your reader. Because you’ll be appealing to reason, you want to use the voice of one intellectual talking to another intellectual.

If the subject matter for your academic writing isn’t personal, as in the case of a formal research paper, you would take on a more detached, objective tone. While you may indeed feel strongly about what you’re writing about, you should maintain a professional tone, rather than a friendly or intimate one.

However, it’s important to note that even the most formal academic voice does not need to include convoluted sentence structure or abstract, stilted language, as some believe. As with all writing, you should strive to write with clarity and an active voice that avoids jargon. All readers appreciate a vigorous, lively voice.

Instead of: The utilization of teams as a way of optimizing our capacity to meet and prioritize our goals will impact the productivity of the company.

Write: Teams will execute the goals and enhance the company’s output.

Of course, the decision about whether you use a specialized vocabulary depends entirely on who your audience is and the purpose of the paper.

• Academic Voice. Authored by : OWL Excelsior Writing Lab. Provided by : Excelsior College. Located at : http://owl.excelsior.edu/writing-process/finding-your-voice/finding-your-voice-academic-voice/ . Project : ENG 101. License : CC BY: Attribution

Student Writing in Higher Education

• Reference work entry
• First Online: 10 October 2019
• Cite this reference work entry

• Sue Starfield 2  

Part of the book series: Springer International Handbooks of Education ((SIHE))

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Academic writing is a vast and ever-expanding field of study. In higher education in particular with the growth of English medium instruction on a global level, writing for a multitude of academic purposes has become a high-stakes activity. Recently, academic literacies approaches in which writing is no longer viewed as a generic skill to be taught as a set of static rules but rather as shaped by complex interactions of social, institutional, and historical forces in contexts of unequal power have been influential, leading to discussions of the interactions between academic literacies approaches, English for academic purposes (EAP) approaches, and genre approaches. Key themes discussed in this chapter are approaches to researching and teaching academic writing, genre in academic writing, understandings of plagiarism and intertextuality, and the role of identity in academic writing.

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How to Structure an Essay | Tips & Templates

Published on September 18, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

The basic structure of an essay always consists of an introduction , a body , and a conclusion . But for many students, the most difficult part of structuring an essay is deciding how to organize information within the body.

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Table of contents

The basics of essay structure, chronological structure, compare-and-contrast structure, problems-methods-solutions structure, signposting to clarify your structure, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about essay structure.

There are two main things to keep in mind when working on your essay structure: making sure to include the right information in each part, and deciding how you’ll organize the information within the body.

Parts of an essay

The three parts that make up all essays are described in the table below.

Order of information

You’ll also have to consider how to present information within the body. There are a few general principles that can guide you here.

The first is that your argument should move from the simplest claim to the most complex . The body of a good argumentative essay often begins with simple and widely accepted claims, and then moves towards more complex and contentious ones.

For example, you might begin by describing a generally accepted philosophical concept, and then apply it to a new topic. The grounding in the general concept will allow the reader to understand your unique application of it.

The second principle is that background information should appear towards the beginning of your essay . General background is presented in the introduction. If you have additional background to present, this information will usually come at the start of the body.

The third principle is that everything in your essay should be relevant to the thesis . Ask yourself whether each piece of information advances your argument or provides necessary background. And make sure that the text clearly expresses each piece of information’s relevance.

The sections below present several organizational templates for essays: the chronological approach, the compare-and-contrast approach, and the problems-methods-solutions approach.

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The chronological approach (sometimes called the cause-and-effect approach) is probably the simplest way to structure an essay. It just means discussing events in the order in which they occurred, discussing how they are related (i.e. the cause and effect involved) as you go.

A chronological approach can be useful when your essay is about a series of events. Don’t rule out other approaches, though—even when the chronological approach is the obvious one, you might be able to bring out more with a different structure.

Explore the tabs below to see a general template and a specific example outline from an essay on the invention of the printing press.

• Thesis statement
• Discussion of event/period
• Consequences
• Importance of topic
• Strong closing statement
• Claim that the printing press marks the end of the Middle Ages
• Background on the low levels of literacy before the printing press
• Thesis statement: The invention of the printing press increased circulation of information in Europe, paving the way for the Reformation
• High levels of illiteracy in medieval Europe
• Literacy and thus knowledge and education were mainly the domain of religious and political elites
• Consequence: this discouraged political and religious change
• Invention of the printing press in 1440 by Johannes Gutenberg
• Implications of the new technology for book production
• Consequence: Rapid spread of the technology and the printing of the Gutenberg Bible
• Trend for translating the Bible into vernacular languages during the years following the printing press’s invention
• Luther’s own translation of the Bible during the Reformation
• Consequence: The large-scale effects the Reformation would have on religion and politics
• Summarize the history described
• Stress the significance of the printing press to the events of this period

Essays with two or more main subjects are often structured around comparing and contrasting . For example, a literary analysis essay might compare two different texts, and an argumentative essay might compare the strengths of different arguments.

There are two main ways of structuring a compare-and-contrast essay: the alternating method, and the block method.

Alternating

In the alternating method, each paragraph compares your subjects in terms of a specific point of comparison. These points of comparison are therefore what defines each paragraph.

The tabs below show a general template for this structure, and a specific example for an essay comparing and contrasting distance learning with traditional classroom learning.

• Synthesis of arguments
• Topical relevance of distance learning in lockdown
• Increasing prevalence of distance learning over the last decade
• Thesis statement: While distance learning has certain advantages, it introduces multiple new accessibility issues that must be addressed for it to be as effective as classroom learning
• Classroom learning: Ease of identifying difficulties and privately discussing them
• Distance learning: Difficulty of noticing and unobtrusively helping
• Classroom learning: Difficulties accessing the classroom (disability, distance travelled from home)
• Distance learning: Difficulties with online work (lack of tech literacy, unreliable connection, distractions)
• Classroom learning: Tends to encourage personal engagement among students and with teacher, more relaxed social environment
• Distance learning: Greater ability to reach out to teacher privately
• Sum up, emphasize that distance learning introduces more difficulties than it solves
• Stress the importance of addressing issues with distance learning as it becomes increasingly common
• Distance learning may prove to be the future, but it still has a long way to go

In the block method, each subject is covered all in one go, potentially across multiple paragraphs. For example, you might write two paragraphs about your first subject and then two about your second subject, making comparisons back to the first.

The tabs again show a general template, followed by another essay on distance learning, this time with the body structured in blocks.

• Point 1 (compare)
• Point 2 (compare)
• Point 3 (compare)
• Point 4 (compare)
• Advantages: Flexibility, accessibility
• Disadvantages: Discomfort, challenges for those with poor internet or tech literacy
• Advantages: Potential for teacher to discuss issues with a student in a separate private call
• Disadvantages: Difficulty of identifying struggling students and aiding them unobtrusively, lack of personal interaction among students
• Advantages: More accessible to those with low tech literacy, equality of all sharing one learning environment
• Disadvantages: Students must live close enough to attend, commutes may vary, classrooms not always accessible for disabled students
• Advantages: Ease of picking up on signs a student is struggling, more personal interaction among students
• Disadvantages: May be harder for students to approach teacher privately in person to raise issues

An essay that concerns a specific problem (practical or theoretical) may be structured according to the problems-methods-solutions approach.

This is just what it sounds like: You define the problem, characterize a method or theory that may solve it, and finally analyze the problem, using this method or theory to arrive at a solution. If the problem is theoretical, the solution might be the analysis you present in the essay itself; otherwise, you might just present a proposed solution.

The tabs below show a template for this structure and an example outline for an essay about the problem of fake news.

• Introduce the problem
• Provide background
• Describe your approach to solving it
• Define the problem precisely
• Describe why it’s important
• Indicate previous approaches to the problem
• Present your new approach, and why it’s better
• Apply the new method or theory to the problem
• Indicate the solution you arrive at by doing so
• Assess (potential or actual) effectiveness of solution
• Describe the implications
• Problem: The growth of “fake news” online
• Prevalence of polarized/conspiracy-focused news sources online
• Thesis statement: Rather than attempting to stamp out online fake news through social media moderation, an effective approach to combating it must work with educational institutions to improve media literacy
• Definition: Deliberate disinformation designed to spread virally online
• Popularization of the term, growth of the phenomenon
• Previous approaches: Labeling and moderation on social media platforms
• Critique: This approach feeds conspiracies; the real solution is to improve media literacy so users can better identify fake news
• Greater emphasis should be placed on media literacy education in schools
• This allows people to assess news sources independently, rather than just being told which ones to trust
• This is a long-term solution but could be highly effective
• It would require significant organization and investment, but would equip people to judge news sources more effectively
• Rather than trying to contain the spread of fake news, we must teach the next generation not to fall for it

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Signposting means guiding the reader through your essay with language that describes or hints at the structure of what follows.  It can help you clarify your structure for yourself as well as helping your reader follow your ideas.

The essay overview

In longer essays whose body is split into multiple named sections, the introduction often ends with an overview of the rest of the essay. This gives a brief description of the main idea or argument of each section.

The overview allows the reader to immediately understand what will be covered in the essay and in what order. Though it describes what  comes later in the text, it is generally written in the present tense . The following example is from a literary analysis essay on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .

Transitions

Transition words and phrases are used throughout all good essays to link together different ideas. They help guide the reader through your text, and an essay that uses them effectively will be much easier to follow.

Various different relationships can be expressed by transition words, as shown in this example.

Because Hitler failed to respond to the British ultimatum, France and the UK declared war on Germany. Although it was an outcome the Allies had hoped to avoid, they were prepared to back up their ultimatum in order to combat the existential threat posed by the Third Reich.

Transition sentences may be included to transition between different paragraphs or sections of an essay. A good transition sentence moves the reader on to the next topic while indicating how it relates to the previous one.

… Distance learning, then, seems to improve accessibility in some ways while representing a step backwards in others.

However , considering the issue of personal interaction among students presents a different picture.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

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The structure of an essay is divided into an introduction that presents your topic and thesis statement , a body containing your in-depth analysis and arguments, and a conclusion wrapping up your ideas.

The structure of the body is flexible, but you should always spend some time thinking about how you can organize your essay to best serve your ideas.

An essay isn’t just a loose collection of facts and ideas. Instead, it should be centered on an overarching argument (summarized in your thesis statement ) that every part of the essay relates to.

The way you structure your essay is crucial to presenting your argument coherently. A well-structured essay helps your reader follow the logic of your ideas and understand your overall point.

Comparisons in essays are generally structured in one of two ways:

• The alternating method, where you compare your subjects side by side according to one specific aspect at a time.
• The block method, where you cover each subject separately in its entirety.

It’s also possible to combine both methods, for example by writing a full paragraph on each of your topics and then a final paragraph contrasting the two according to a specific metric.

You should try to follow your outline as you write your essay . However, if your ideas change or it becomes clear that your structure could be better, it’s okay to depart from your essay outline . Just make sure you know why you’re doing so.

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English Composition 2089: Researching Discourse

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What Is Discourse?

Discourse analysis, discourse communities, examples of discourse communities, tips on choosing a discourse community to analyze.

• Discourse Community Analysis/Ethnography
• Analyzing Multiple Discourses
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• How Do I Find Images and Media?
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Essentially, discourse is an act of communication between a composer and audience for a particular purpose.  This communication can take a variety of forms. 

Here are some common forms of discourse:

• newspaper article
• scholarly journal article
• radio or TV broadcast
• published report

However, also think beyond textual discourses, for example:

• advertisement
• emojis or memes
• architecture or design, e.g. 9/11 Memorial
• clothing styles

You are encouraged to think expansively about what counts as a discourse so that your work in English 2089 reflects the diversity and richness of 21st century discourses and communication practices.

When considering any form of discourse, in addition to understanding WHAT is being said, also focus on WHO is creating the text, WHY they are doing so, and HOW the resulting discourse impacts or has impacted the issue.

Ask yourself the following questions to ANALYZE discourse:

• Who is the intended audience?
• What is the purpose of the information presented? (inform, persuade, entertain)
• What types of evidence are used to support the claims of the information?
• How is information shaped by a particular genre? (Consider the audience, layout, space, style, conventions, etc).
• How literate, biased, and/or credible are those producing this discourse?
• To what degree is the discourse mainstream (understood by the broad audience) or considered non-traditional or even avant-garde?

Analyzing the discourse on an issue is different from arguing a position on an issue.  See the chart below for an example of these differences:

A discourse community is 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." Anne Beaufort, College Writing and Beyond .

Different discourse communities will often discuss the same topic in very different ways. The concept map below shows some discourse communities involved in conversations related to AI technologies.  

Professional:

• emergency room nurses
• prison guards
• political aides

Be careful to sufficiently narrow your focus so you are not trying to analyze a community with millions of members who have vastly different discourse practices (i.e. “scientists” or “business people”)

• activist organizations (PETA, NRA, Sierra Club)
• a specific ethnic group (Amish, Native Americans living on reservations, Cajun)
• a campus club or organization
• charity organizations

Be sensitive to stereotypes if you analyze a community associated with race, religion, etc.

• the PTA or similar school groups
• political action groups
• fan groups (Trekkies, the BeyHive)
• Civil War re-enactors
• game clubs (Dungeons & Dragons, Magic Cards, etc.)
• Choose communities that are in conversation on a particular topic or problem.
• Select key communities that represent various perspectives on a topic.
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24 Understanding Discourse Communities

This chapter from Writing Spaces: Readings About Writing, Volume 3 explains why the concept of discourse communities is so important for college writing and beyond. Dan Melzer explains how genres operate within discourse communities, why different discourse communities have different expectations for writing, and how to understand what qualifies as a discourse community. The article relates the concept of discourse community to a personal example from the author (an acoustic guitar jam group) and an example of the academic discipline of history. The article takes a critical stance regarding the concept of discourse community, discussing both the benefits and constraints of communicating within discourse communities. The article concludes with writerly questions students can ask themselves as they enter new discourse communities in order to be more effective communicators.

The reading is available below or as a PDF . The PDF includes additional teacher resources.

Last year, I decided that if I was ever going to achieve my lifelong fantasy of being the first college writing teacher to transform into an international rock star, I should probably graduate from playing the video game Guitar Hero to actually learning to play guitar. [1] I bought an acoustic guitar and started watching every beginning guitar instructional video on YouTube. At first, the vocabulary the online guitar teachers used was like a foreign language to me—terms like major and minor chords, open G tuning, and circle of fifths. I was overwhelmed by how complicated it all was, and the fingertips on my left hand felt like they were going to fall off from pressing on the steel strings on the neck of my guitar to form chords. I felt like I was making incredibly slow progress, and at the rate I was going, I wouldn’t be a guitar god until I was 87. I was also getting tired of playing alone in my living room. I wanted to find a community of people who shared my goal of learning songs and playing guitar together for fun.

I needed a way to find other beginning and intermediate guitar players, and I decided to try a social media website called “Meetup.com.” It only took a few clicks to find the right community for me—an “acoustic jam” group that welcomed beginners and met once a month at a music store near my city of Sacramento, California. On the Meetup.com site, it said that everyone who showed up for the jam should bring a few songs to share, but I wasn’t sure what kind of music they played, so I just showed up at the next meet-up with my guitar and the basic look you need to become a guitar legend: two days of facial hair stubble, black t-shirt, ripped jeans, and a gravelly voice (luckily my throat was sore from shouting the lyrics to the Twenty One Pilots song “Heathens” while playing guitar in my living room the night before).

The first time I played with the group, I felt more like a junior high school band camp dropout then the next Jimi Hendrix. I had trouble keeping up with the chord changes, and I didn’t know any scales (groups of related notes in the same key that work well together) to solo on lead guitar when it was my turn. I had trouble figuring out the patterns for my strumming hand since no one took the time to explain them before we started playing a new song. The group had some beginners, but I was the least experienced player.

It took a few more meet-ups, but pretty soon I figured out how to fit into the group. I learned that they played all kinds of songs, from country to blues to folk to rock music. I learned that they chose songs with simple chords so beginners like me could play along. I learned that they brought print copies of the chords and lyrics of songs to share, and if there were any difficult chords in a song, they included a visual of the chord shape in the handout of chords and lyrics. I started to learn the musician’s vocabulary I needed to be familiar with to function in the group, like beats per measure and octaves and the minor pentatonic scale . I learned that if I was having trouble figuring out the chord changes, I could watch the better guitarists and copy what they were doing. I also got good advice from experienced players, like soaking your fingers in rubbing alcohol every day for ninety seconds to toughen them up so the steel strings wouldn’t hurt as much. I even realized that although I was an inexperienced player, I could contribute to the community by bringing in new songs they hadn’t played before.

Okay, at this point you may be saying to yourself that all of this will make a great biographical movie someday when I become a rock icon (or maybe not), but what does it have to do with becoming a better writer?

You can write in a journal alone in your room, just like you can play guitar just for yourself alone in your room. But most writers, like most musicians, learn their craft from studying experts and becoming part of a community. And most writers, like most musicians, want to be a part of community and communicate with other people who share their goals and interests. Writing teachers and scholars have come up with the concept of “discourse community” to describe a community of people who share the same goals, the same methods of communicating, the same genres, and the same lexis (specialized language).

What Exactly Is a Discourse Community?

John Swales, a scholar in linguistics, says that discourse communities have the following features (which I’m paraphrasing):

• A broadly agreed upon set of common public goals
• Mechanisms of intercommunication among members
• Use of these communication mechanisms to provide information and feedback
• One or more genres that help further the goals of the discourse community
• A specific lexis (specialized language)
• A threshold level of expert members (24-26)

I’ll use my example of the monthly guitar jam group I joined to explain these six aspects of a discourse community.

A Broadly Agreed Set of Common Public Goals

The guitar jam group had shared goals that we all agreed on. In the Meetup.com description of the site, the organizer of the group emphasized that these monthly gatherings were for having fun, enjoying the music, and learning new songs. “Guitar players” or “people who like music” or even “guitarists in Sacramento, California” are not discourse communities. They don’t share the same goals, and they don’t all interact with each other to meet the same goals.

Mechanisms of Intercommunication Among Members

The guitar jam group communicated primarily through the Meetup.com site. This is how we recruited new members, shared information about when and where we were playing, and communicated with each other outside of the night of the guitar jam. “People who use Meetup.com” are not a discourse community, because even though they’re using the same method of communication, they don’t all share the same goals and they don’t all regularly interact with each other. But a Meetup.com group like the Sacramento acoustic guitar jam focused on a specific topic with shared goals and a community of members who frequently interact can be considered a discourse community based on Swales’ definition.

Use of These Communication Mechanisms to Provide Information and Feedback

Once I found the guitar jam group on Meetup.com, I wanted information about topics like what skill levels could participate, what kind of music they played, and where and when they met. Once I was at my first guitar jam, the primary information I needed was the chords and lyrics of each song, so the handouts with chords and lyrics were a key means of providing critical information to community members. Communication mechanisms in discourse communities can be emails, text messages, social media tools, print texts, memes, oral presentations, and so on. One reason that Swales uses the term “discourse” instead of “writing” is that the term “discourse” can mean any type of communication, from talking to writing to music to images to multimedia.

One or More Genres That Help Further the Goals of the Discourse Community

One of the most common ways discourse communities share information and meet their goals is through genres. To help explain the concept of genre, I’ll use music since I’ve been talking about playing guitar and music is probably an example you can relate to. Obviously there are many types of music, from rap to country to reggae to heavy metal. Each of these types of music is considered a genre, in part because the music has shared features, from the style of the music to the subject of the lyrics to the lexis. For example, most rap has a steady bass beat, most rappers use spoken word rather singing, and rap lyrics usually draw on a lexis associated with young people. But a genre is much more than a set of features. Genres arise out of social purposes, and they’re a form of social action within discourse communities. The rap battles of today have historical roots in African oral contests, and modern rap music can only be understood in the context of hip hop culture, which includes break dancing and street art. Rap also has social purposes, including resisting social oppression and telling the truth about social conditions that aren’t always reported on by news outlets. Like all genres, rap is not just a formula but a tool for social action.

The guitar jam group used two primary genres to meet the goals of the community. The Meetup.com site was one important genre that was critical in the formation of the group and to help it recruit new members. It was also the genre that delivered information to the members about what the community was about and where and when the community would be meeting. The other important genre to the guitar jam group were the handouts with song chords and lyrics. I’m sharing an example of a song I brought to the group to show you what this genre looks like.

This genre of the chord and lyrics sheet was needed to make sure everyone could play along and follow the singer. The conventions of this genre—the “norms”—weren’t just arbitrary rules or formulas. As with all genres, the conventions developed because of the social action of the genre. The sheets included lyrics so that we could all sing along and make sure we knew when to change chords. The sheets included visuals of unusual chords, like the Em7 chord (E minor seventh) in my example, because there were some beginner guitarists who were a part of the community. If the community members were all expert guitarists, then the inclusion of chord shapes would never have become a convention. A great resource to learn more about the concept of genre is the essay “Navigating Genres” by Kerry Dirk in volume 1 of Writing Spaces .

A Specific Lexis (Specialized Language)

To anyone who wasn’t a musician, our guitar meet-ups might have sounded like we were communicating in a foreign language. We talked about the root note of scale, a 1/4/5 chord progression, putting a capo on different frets, whether to play solos in a major or minor scale, double drop D tuning, and so on. If someone couldn’t quickly identify what key their song was in or how many beats per measure the strumming pattern required, they wouldn’t be able to communicate effectively with the community members. We didn’t use this language to show off or to try to discourage outsiders from joining our group. We needed these specialized terms—this musician’s lexis—to make sure we were all playing together effectively.

A Threshold Level of Expert Members

If everyone in the guitar jam was at my beginner level when I first joined the group, we wouldn’t have been very successful. I relied on more experienced players to figure out strumming patterns and chord changes, and I learned to improve my solos by watching other players use various techniques in their soloing. The most experienced players also helped educate everyone on the conventions of the group (the “norms” of how the group interacted). These conventions included everyone playing in the same key, everyone taking turns playing solo lead guitar, and everyone bringing songs to play. But discourse community conventions aren’t always just about maintaining group harmony. In most discourse communities, new members can also expand the knowledge and genres of the community. For example, I shared songs that no one had brought before, and that expanded the community’s base of knowledge.

Why the Concept of Discourse Communities Matters for College Writing

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, I didn’t understand that each academic discipline I took courses in to complete the requirements of my degree (history, philosophy, biology, math, political science, sociology, English) was a different discourse community. Each of these academic fields had their own goals, their own genres, their own writing conventions, their own formats for citing sources, and their own expectations for writing style. I thought each of the teachers I encountered in my undergraduate career just had their own personal preferences that all felt pretty random to me. I didn’t understand that each teacher was trying to act as a representative of the discourse community of their field. I was a new member of their discourse communities, and they were introducing me to the genres and conventions of their disciplines. Unfortunately, teachers are so used to the conventions of their discourse communities that they sometimes don’t explain to students the reasons behind the writing conventions of their discourse communities.

It wasn’t until I studied research about college writing while I was in graduate school that I learned about genres and discourse communities, and by the time I was doing my dissertation for my PhD, I got so interested in studying college writing that I did a national study of college teachers’ writing assignments and syllabi. Believe it or not, I analyzed the genres and discourse communities of over 2,000 college writing assignments in my book Assignments Across the Curriculum . To show you why the idea of discourse community is so important to college writing, I’m going to share with you some information from one of the academic disciplines I studied: history. First I want to share with you an excerpt from a history course writing assignment from my study. As you read it over, think about what it tells you about the conventions of the discourse community of history.

Documentary Analysis

This assignment requires you to play the detective, combing textual sources for clues and evidence to form a reconstruction of past events. If you took A.P. history courses in high school, you may recall doing similar document-based questions (DBQs). In a tight, well-argued essay of two to four pages, identify and assess the historical significance of the documents in ONE of the four sets I have given you.

You bring to this assignment a limited body of outside knowledge gained from our readings, class discussions, and videos. Make the most of this contextual knowledge when interpreting your sources: you may, for example, refer to one of the document from another set if it sheds light on the items in your own.

Questions to Consider When Planning Your Essay

• What do the documents reveal about the author and his audience?
• Why were they written?
• What can you discern about the author’s motivation and tone? Is the tone revealing?
• Does the genre make a difference in your interpretation?
• How do the documents fit into both their immediate and their greater historical contexts?
• Do your documents support or contradict what other sources (video, readings) have told you?
• Do the documents reveal a change that occurred over a period of time?
• Is there a contrast between documents within your set? If so, how do you account for it?
• Do they shed light on a historical event, problem, or period? How do they fit into the “big picture”?
• What incidental information can you glean from them by reading carefully? Such information is important for constructing a narrative of the past; our medieval authors almost always tell us more than they intended to.
• What is not said, but implied?
• What is left out? (As a historian, you should always look for what is not said, and ask yourself what the omission signifies.)
• Taken together, do the documents reveal anything significant about the period in question? (Melzer 3-4)

This assignment doesn’t just represent the specific preferences of one random teacher. It’s a common history genre (the documentary analysis) that helps introduce students to the ways of thinking and the communication conventions of the discourse community of historians. This genre reveals that historians look for textual clues to reconstruct past events and that historians bring their own knowledge to bear when they analyze texts and interpret history (historians are not entirely “objective” or “neutral”). In this documentary analysis genre, the instructor emphasizes that historians are always looking for what is not said but instead is implied. This instructor is using an important genre of history to introduce students to the ways of analyzing and thinking in the discourse community of historians. Let’s look at another history course in my research. I’m sharing with you an excerpt from the syllabus of a history of the American West course. This part of the syllabus gives students an overview of the purpose of the writing projects in the class. As you read this overview, think about the ways this instructor is portraying the discourse community of historians.

A300: History of the American West

A300 is designed to allow students to explore the history of the American West on a personal level with an eye toward expanding their knowledge of various western themes, from exploration to the Indian Wars, to the impact of global capitalism and the emergence of the environmental movement. But students will also learn about the craft of history, including the tools used by practitioners, how to weigh competing evidence, and how to build a convincing argument about the past.

At the end of this course students should understand that history is socially interpreted, and that the past has always been used as an important means for understanding the present. Old family photos, a grandparent’s memories, even family reunions allow people to understand their lives through an appreciation of the past. These events and artifacts remind us that history is a dynamic and interpretive field of study that requires far more than rote memorization. Historians balance their knowledge of primary sources (diaries, letters, artifacts, and other documents from the period under study) with later interpretations of these people, places, and events (in the form of scholarly monographs and articles) known as secondary sources. Through the evaluation and discussion of these different interpretations historians come to a socially negotiated understanding of historical figures and events.

Individual Projects

More generally, your papers should:

• Empathize with the person, place, or event you are writing about. The goal here is to use your understanding of the primary and secondary sources you have read to “become” that person–i.e. to appreciate their perspectives on the time or event under study. In essence, students should demonstrate an appreciation of that time within its context.
• Second, students should be able to present the past in terms of its relevance to contemporary issues. What do their individual projects tell us about the present? For example, what does the treatment of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans in the West tell us about the problem of race in the United States today?
• Third, in developing their individual and group projects, students should demonstrate that they have researched and located primary and secondary sources. Through this process they will develop the skills of a historian, and present an interpretation of the past that is credible to their peers and instructors.

Just like the history instructor who gave students the documentary analysis assignment, this history of the American West instructor emphasizes that the discourse community of historians doesn’t focus on just memorizing facts, but on analyzing and interpreting competing evidence. Both the documentary analysis assignment and the information from the history of the American West syllabus show that an important shared goal of the discourse community of historians is socially constructing the past using evidence from different types of artifacts, from texts to photos to interviews with people who have lived through important historical events. The discourse community goals and conventions of the different academic disciplines you encounter as an undergraduate shape everything about writing: which genres are most important, what counts as evidence, how arguments are constructed, and what style is most appropriate and effective.

The history of the American West course is a good example of the ways that discourse community goals and values can change over time. It wasn’t that long ago that American historians who wrote about the West operated on the philosophy of “manifest destiny.” Most early historians of the American West assumed that the American colonizers had the right to take land from indigenous tribes—that it was the white European’s “destiny” to colonize the American West. The evidence early historians used in their writing and the ways they interpreted that evidence relied on the perspectives of the “settlers,” and the perspectives of the indigenous people were ignored by historians. The concept of manifest destiny has been strongly critiqued by modern historians, and one of the primary goals of most modern historians who write about the American West is to recover the perspectives and stories of the indigenous peoples as well as to continue to work for social justice for Native Americans by showing how historical injustices continue in different forms to the present day. Native American historians are now retelling history from the perspective of indigenous people, using indigenous research methods that are often much different than the traditional research methods of historians of the American West. Discourse community norms can silence and marginalize people, but discourse communities can also be transformed by new members who challenge the goals and assumptions and research methods and genre conventions of the community.

Discourse Communities from School to Work and Beyond

Understanding what a discourse community is and the ways that genres perform social actions in discourse communities can help you better understand where your college teachers are coming from in their writing assignments and also help you understand why there are different writing expectations and genres for different classes in different fields. Researchers who study college writing have discovered that most students struggle with writing when they first enter the discourse community of their chosen major, just like I struggled when I first joined the acoustic guitar jam group. When you graduate college and start your first job, you will probably also find yourself struggling a bit with trying to learn the writing conventions of the discourse community of your workplace. Knowing how discourse communities work will not only help you as you navigate the writing assigned in different general education courses and the specialized writing of your chosen major, but it will also help you in your life after college. Whether you work as a scientist in a lab or a lawyer for a firm or a nurse in a hospital, you will need to become a member of a discourse community. You’ll need to learn to communicate effectively using the genres of the discourse community of your workplace, and this might mean asking questions of more experienced discourse community members, analyzing models of the types of genres you’re expected to use to communicate, and thinking about the most effective style, tone, format, and structure for your audience and purpose. Some workplaces have guidelines for how to write in the genres of the discourse community, and some workplaces will initiate you to their genres by trial and error. But hopefully now that you’ve read this essay, you’ll have a better idea of what kinds of questions to ask to help you become an effective communicator in a new discourse community. I’ll end this essay with a list of questions you can ask yourself whenever you’re entering a new discourse community and learning the genres of the community:

• What are the goals of the discourse community?
• What are the most important genres community members use to achieve these goals?
• Who are the most experienced communicators in the discourse community?
• Where can I find models of the kinds of genres used by the discourse community?
• Who are the different audiences the discourse community communicates with, and how can I adjust my writing for these different audiences?
• What conventions of format, organization, and style does the discourse community value?
• What specialized vocabulary (lexis) do I need to know to communicate effectively with discourse community insiders?
• How does the discourse community make arguments, and what types of evidence are valued?
• Do the conventions of the discourse community silence any members or force any members to conform to the community in ways that make them uncomfortable?
• What can I add to the discourse community?

Works Cited

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” Writing Spaces , vol. 1, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press, 2010, pp. 249–262.

Guitar Hero . Harmonics, 2005.

Meetup.com . WeWork Companies Inc., 2019. www.meetup.com.

Melzer, Daniel. Assignments Across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing . Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2014.

Swales, John. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings . Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Twenty One Pilots. “Heathens.” Suicide Squad: The Album , Atlantic Records, 2016.

Young, Neil. “Heart of Gold.” Harvest , Reprise Records, 1972.

discourse community , genre

Dan Melzer is the Associate Director of First-Year Composition at the University of California, Davis. His research interests include writing across the curriculum, writing program administration, and multiple literacies. His articles have appeared in College Composition and Communication, Writing Program Administration, Kairos, The WAC Journal, and other publications.

• This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and are subject to the Writing Spaces Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/, email [email protected], or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. To view the Writing Spaces Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.org/terms-of-use. ↵

a community of people who share the same goals, methods of communicating, genres, and specialized language

often thought of as a type or category of writing, e.g. business memos, organization charts, menus, book reviews; a discursive response to a recurrent, social action; materials that mediate social interaction

Understanding Discourse Communities Copyright © by Dan Melzer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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What Is a Discourse Analysis Essay: Example & Guide

Discourse is the way people talk about any specific topic. It’s also the way in which language is used to convey social and historical meanings. Discourse analysis is the process that helps to understand the underlying message of what is being said. Sounds interesting? Keep reading to learn more. 

This in this article, our custom writing team will:

• define discourse and its analysis; 
• explain how to write a discourse analysis essay step by step; 
• provide an essay sample.
• 🤔 Discourse Analysis Definition
• 🔬 Types & Approaches
• 👣 Step-by-Step Guide
• 📑 Discourse Analysis Example

🔍 References

🤔 what is a discourse analysis.

To write a good discourse analysis, it’s essential to understand its key concepts. This section of the article will focus on the definition of discourse itself and then move on to its analysis.

Discourse: Definition

Discourse is verbal or written communication that has unity, meaning, and purpose. In linguistics, discourse refers to a unit of language that is longer than a sentence. When you analyze discourse, you examine how the language is used to construct connected and meaningful texts. 

One crucial thing that can’t be neglected when it comes to discourse is the context. In linguistics, there are different ways to classify contexts. Here is one such classification:

• Linguistic context. The relationship between the words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. For instance, the participants must know where they are in time and space. It affects the expressions they use and the way they are interpreted.
• Situational context. The relationship between the participants, the environment, time, and place in which the discourse occurs. Situational context is usually approached through the concept of register, which focuses on the interrelationship of language and context.
• Cultural context. The culture and customs of epoch in language communities in which the speakers participate. Language is closely connected to the social structure and value system of society. Therefore, it’s influenced by such factors as social role and status, sex, age, etc.

The knowledge of context is crucial for discourse analysis, as it helps interpret the text’s meaning. For that reason, it’s essential to keep the context in mind while analyzing the discourse. No context simply means no discourse.  

Discourse vs Syntax: Difference

• Syntax is one of discourse’s dimensions. It encompasses rules for composing grammatical sentences. Unlike discourse, syntax can also be applied to non-verbal instances such as music or any other code.
• Discourse is one level above syntax. It studies how the sets of sentences following syntactic parameters work together and convey the meaning.

Spoken Discourse vs Written Discourse

Discourse itself can be classified as written and spoken (or oral.) One of the main differences is that spoken discourse uses spoken words to transfer information, while written one uses written words. There are also some other differences:

• Spoken discourse needs to be understood immediately. It also usually contains discourse markers— words that create pause or separation of ideas such as “you know,” “like,” or “well.” 
• Written discourse can be referred to several times. For the written discourse to happen, the participants need to know how to write and read, requiring specific skills. It’s also often tied to the genre or structure of the language it uses to imply the purpose or context of the text. 

Discourse Analysis Definition

Discourse analysis is a technique that arose in the late 20th century from the growing interest in qualitative research. The main purpose of discourse analysis is to understand the message and its implications. It can be done by studying the text’s parts and the factors that influence people’s understanding of it.

Discourse analysis is deeply connected with linguistics, anthropology, sociology, socio-psychology, philosophy, communications studies, and literature. It challenges the idea that we should take language for granted and instead encourages more interpretative and qualitative approaches. That’s why it is used in various fields to:

• describe organizational change;
• read between the lines while analyzing policy texts;
• provide greater depth to qualitative accounting research;
• use multiple fields to synthesize information. 

Content Analysis vs. Discourse Analysis

Content analysis and discourse analysis are research techniques used in various disciplines. However, there are several differences between the two:

• Content analysis is quantitative. It focuses on studying and retrieving meaningful information from documents.
• Discourse analysis is qualitative. It focuses on how language is used in texts and contexts.

🔬 Preparing to Write a Discourse Analysis Essay

Now let’s talk about writing a discourse analysis essay. Before you start to work on your paper, it’s best to decide what type of discourse analysis you plan to do and choose the correct approach. It will influence your topic choice and writing techniques. Besides, it will make the whole process easier.

Types of Discourse Analysis: How to Choose

Critical Discourse Analysis Characteristics

Critical discourse analysis or CDA is a cross-disciplinary methodological and theoretical approach. It focuses on the issues of power and inequalities in linguistic interactions between individuals and groups. It’s closely related to applied linguistics, cultural and social studies, anthropology, intercultural communication, and critical pedagogy.

Choose a critical discourse analysis if you want to do the following:

• Study meaning and context of the verbal interaction or a text.
• Focus on the topics of identity and power.
• Examine the potential for a change in an area.
• Explore the connections between power and ideology.

Cultural Discourse Analysis Characteristics

Cultural discourse analysis or CuDA is a method of studying culturally distinctive communication practices in our world. In the communication field, CuDA is most often used by scholars of Language and Social Interaction.

Choose a cultural discourse analysis if you’re interested in:

• Studying culturally-specific means of communication in various local contexts.
• Seeing how people talk about identity, relations, actions, and feelings.
• Proving that the differences should be acknowledged, embraced, and celebrated in intercultural dialogue.

Political Discourse Analysis Characteristics

Political discourse analysis or PDA focuses on the use of language in politics, political texts, and documents. It also includes the recipients of communicative political events, such as the citizens and the general public. Therefore, it can be said the discourse is located in both political and public spheres.

Choose a political discourse analysis if you want to do the following:

• Deal with the concepts of political power, power   abuse ,  or domination.
• Examine the discursive conditions and consequences of social and political inequality.
• Analyze the words and actions of politicians.

Multimodal Discourse Analysis Characteristics

Multimodal discourse analysis is a technique that implies looking at multiple modes of communication such as text, color, and images. It studies how they interact with one another to create semiotic meaning.

Each mode of communication plays a specific role in the analysis. A picture, for instance, can easily depict something that takes too long to describe in words. Colors are mainly used to highlight specific aspects of the general message.

Choose a multimodal discourse analysis if you plan to:

• Look at several modes of communication at once.
• Conduct a nuanced and complex analysis of visual media.
• Work with online sources and platforms. 

Approaches to Discourse Analysis: How to Choose

Now that you’ve chosen the type of discourse analysis, it’s time to choose a suitable approach. There are two approaches to discourse analysis: language -in-use and socio-political discourse analysis .

• The language-in-use approach mainly focuses on the regular use of language in communication. It pays attention to sentence structure, phonology, and grammar. This approach is very descriptive and is mainly used in linguistics or literature.
• The socio-political approach focuses on how a language influences the social and political context and vice versa. One of the main socio-political approaches is Critical Discourse Analysis, born out of Michel Foucault’s work Discipline and Punish . It identifies two types of power: normalized and repressive (you can read about in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Foucault .) 

The language-in-use framework involves identifying the technicalities of language and investigating how the features are used in a particular social context. 

the English language usually uses affixes and suffixes but not infixes. If an English speaker says something similar to “that’s un-flipping-believable,” the questions for this approach would be “What role does the infix play?” or “What is the goal of using such an infix?” 

Now let’s see an example of a socio-political approach. We’ll take the power dynamic between a teacher and a student as an illustration.

A teacher threatening a student with detention if they don’t stop speaking in class can be classified as a repressive power. Normalized power, in contrast, isn’t actively asserted. It’s the power that makes students not want to talk in class. It’s manifested in the subtle clues from our environment that tell students how to behave.

👣 How to Do Discourse Analysis Step by Step

Now you are finally ready to start writing your discourse analysis. Follow our step-by-step guide, and you’ll excel at it.

Step #1: Choose the research question and select the content of the analysis.

Coming up with a clearly defined research question is crucial. There’s no universal set of criteria for a good research question. However, try to make sure that you research question:

• clearly states the purpose of the work;
• is not too broad or too narrow;
• can be investigated and has enough sources to rely on;
• allows you to conduct an analysis;
• is not too difficult to answer.

Step #2: Gather information.

Go through interviews, speeches, discussions, blogs, etc., to collect all the necessary information. Make sure to gather factual details of when and where the content you will use was created, who the author is, and who published it.

Step #3: Study the context.

This step involves a close examination of various elements of the gathered material.

• Take a closer look at the words used in the source text, its sentences, paragraphs, and overall structure.
• Consider 3 constructs of context: participants, setting, and purpose . These 3 characteristics reflect information about the individual, their emotional state, and their identity as members of a societal group.

Step #4: Review the results.

Once you’ve researched and examined all the sources, it’s time to reflect on your results and place your analysis in a broader context.

• To establish a broader context, you may consider what events have impacted the topic you are writing about and the consequences.  
• Finally, draw conclusions that answer your research question. 

Step #5: Make an outline.

Before you are all set with your discourse analysis, one last step is to write an outline. Usually, a discourse analysis essay consists of six parts:

📑 Example of Discourse Analysis Essay

Now that you know all about discourse analysis, we will introduce an example of a discourse analysis essay. From this sample, you can see what the layout of this kind of essay usually looks like.  

• Introduction.   My project explores the problem of sexual violence, which continues to be a social issue, and the positive impact the #MeToo movement has made to solve it. #MeToo is a social movement that openly discusses the problem of violence and speaks up against sexual abuse and harassment. 
• Aim and research questions.   The guiding research question for my analysis is:   what is the most significant positive change that came from the #MeToo movement? 
• The model of analysis.  My approach includes an analysis of tweets and the #metoo hashtag, as they help trace the movement’s development and reflect people’s honest opinions on it.   I started with the essential tools: a laptop and a Twitter account. From there, I used the search bar to type in the hashtag #MeToo, and then I randomly selected a sample of 50 tweets. I coded the data based on the categories I produced while also being mindful that one tweet can fall into several categories. For that reason, all the tweets are coded with the appropriate numbers. 
• Raising awareness,  
• Victims getting financial restitution, 
• Introducing protection/laws protecting workers, 
• Banning nondisclosure agreements. 
• Results.   The conducted research provided me with all the necessary information to illustrate the answer to my question. The conversations about sexual harassment and violence worldwide are being spread through the use of the hashtag #MeToo. This was shared through many news stories, events related to the topic of sexual harassment, and information referencing facts. 
• Conclusion.   In conclusion, a critical discourse analysis of 50 tweets illustrates the significant positive change that came from the #MeToo movement. This sample illustrates that thanks to the campaign, people’s awareness of the crimes of sexual assault has risen, as most tweets were coded as such. The sharing of this discourse is powerful in preventing the worldwide spread of sexual violence. It keeps the conversations going and raises awareness. 

You might also want to check out the discourse analysis samples below.

• Dysphemism in Political Discourse Examples
• Historical Memory Discourse in Public Diplomacy
• Lincoln’s and Dickinson’s Rhetorical Discourses

Discourse Analysis Essay Topics

• Terrorism theories and media discourse
• The benefits of infographics in social media advertising
• Do better communication skills lead to the development of the social self?
• How can you make social media advertising successful?
• Possible causes of the Mayan civilization’s political collapse
• Commission of Education and Communication’s worldwide contribution
• Coach and athletes’ communication strategy
• Celebrities’ impact on politics
• Social media marketing for brand promotion
• What makes listening the most effective communication technique?
• Excessive social media usage and its consequences
• Web-based organizational discourses: climate change
• Media as a tool to cause intense emotions
• Verbal and nonverbal communication skills for presentations
• New media technologies and the development of relationships and communication
• Features and issues of the American political system
• Association between social media use and FOMO
• Communication issues between stakeholders
• Why is political opportunity theory essential for social movement studies?
• How do social media and the Internet connect people?
• How can communication be used for self-presentation?
• Does social media limit personal freedom?
• Hamlet’s universality and contemporary cultural discourse
• Is it possible to apply Goffman’s theory of the presentation of self in digital communication?
• The Democratic and Republican party’s position on the issue of terrorism
• How does social media affect families?
• How communication affects the individual’s development
• Characteristics of a political issue
• Ageism in media and society
• Possible mobile communication technologies of the future
• How does social media technology improve democratic processes?
• Persuasion and public communication
• The signs of social media addiction
• Psychometric approach and discourse analysis in the psychology of laughter
• The role of media in a political system
• Cultural differences in nonverbal communication
• The politically socialized vision of the world
• The negative effects of digital media platforms on the lives of young people
• Core beliefs of different political ideologies
• Approaches to overcome miscommunications in the workplace
• The effectiveness of social media tools for educational purposes
• Is technology a threat to face-to-face communication?
• What issues come with using electronic media ?
• Difficulties connected with the development of communication technologies

Thanks for reading till the end! We hope you’ve enjoyed the article and found lots of helpful information. If you did, feel free to share it with your friends. We wish you good luck with the discourse analysis essay!

Further reading

• How to Write a Discursive Essay: Tips to Succeed & Examples
• Case Study Analysis: Examples + How-to Guide & Writing Tips
• How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay Step by Step
• How to Write a Rhetorical Analysis Essay: Outline, Steps, & Examples

❓ Discourse Analysis FAQs

Literary discourse analysis is a type of discourse analysis that deals with literature and is viewed as a relatively new approach to it. It integrates the analysis of literature and non-literary genres in an innovative study of discourse.

Rhetoric uses language to appeal to emotions to persuade, inform, or motivate the audience. Rhetorical discourse is used to study texts aimed at specific audiences. Such texts often try to convince or persuade people by using particular language and arguments.

Discourse analysis is a blanket term that encompasses a range of qualitative research approaches that analyze the use of language in social contexts. These techniques help understand the underlying message of what people say and how they say it, whereas in face-to-face conversation, non-verbal interaction, documents, or images.

To write a discourse analysis of any community, you need to examine and understand it. Ask yourself these questions and try to identify the patterns:

1. What ideas or concerns keep the community together? 2. What kind of langue does it use? 3. Does it produce any written documents?

• Discourse: The University of Chicago
• Definition and Examples of Discourse: ThoughtCo
• Discourse: British Council: BBC
• Use Discourse Analysis: Emerald Publishing
• Discourse Analysis—What Speakers Do in Conversation: Linguistic Society of America
• Critical Discourse Analysis and Information and Communication Technology in Education: Oxford Research Encyclopedias
• Political Discourse Analysis: Exploring the Language of Politics and the Politics of Language: Research Gate
• Discourse Analysis and Everything You Need to Know: Voxco
• Multimodal Discourse Analysis: Diggit Magazine
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1995 Articles

THE DANGERS OF WILLFUL IGNORANCE

Pollack, Robert

In the collection of essays titled Beyond the Academy: A Scholar's Obligations (ACLS Occasional Paper No. 31), the authors—George R. Garrison, Arnita A. Jones, Robert Pollack, and Edward W. Said—explore the roles and responsibilities of scholars toward society. Each essay contributes a distinct perspective, yet together they form a cohesive argument about the ethical and civic duties of intellectuals. In the article "The Dangers of Willful Ignorance," Robert Pollack addresses the significant ethical responsibilities of scholars, particularly those in the scientific community, towards the broader public. He emphasizes the importance of "speaking truth to power" and warns against the consequences of avoiding the political implications of scientific work. Pollack reflects on historical instances, such as the misuse of genetics during the Nazi regime, to illustrate the dangers of neglecting the ethical dimensions of scientific advancements. He argues that modern scientific discoveries, especially in genetics, present both opportunities and risks, highlighting the need for careful consideration of how these technologies impact privacy and individual rights. Pollack calls for a stronger integration of scientific understanding into broader societal discussions, urging scholars to engage with the public and ensure that scientific knowledge is used ethically and responsibly. He also stresses the importance of teaching science in a way that makes it accessible and relevant to all, not just those within the scientific community. Pollack's overarching message is that scientists must not only pursue knowledge but also consider the ethical implications of their work and strive to prevent its misuse in society. Edward Said, in "On Defiance and Taking Positions," echoes Pollack's concern about the dangers of disengagement, but he expands the argument to emphasize the importance of intellectuals resisting orthodoxy and maintaining a critical, independent stance. Said stresses that scholars must engage in public discourse, not just within their disciplines, but in broader societal debates, particularly when human suffering is at stake. George Garrison and Arnita Jones also contribute to this dialogue by framing the scholar's role within the context of historical and social responsibility. Garrison discusses the moral obligations of educators to foster social development and progress, while Jones reflects on the challenges historians face in making their work relevant and accessible to the public. Together, these authors interact by building on each other's arguments about the responsibilities of scholars. Pollack’s focus on the ethical use of science is complemented by Said’s broader call for intellectual engagement beyond the academy. Garrison and Jones provide the historical and social contexts that ground these responsibilities, highlighting the need for scholars to be active participants in addressing the moral and civic challenges of their time. This interplay of ideas reinforces the central theme of the collection: that scholars have a profound obligation to engage with and contribute to the well-being of society.

• Medical sciences

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7 Understanding Discourse Communities

This chapter uses John Swales’ definition of discourse community to explain to students why this concept is important for college writing and beyond. The chapter explains how genres operate within discourse communities, why different discourse communities have different expectations for writing, and how to understand what qualifies as a discourse community. The article relates the concept of discourse community to a personal example from the author (an acoustic guitar jam group) and an example of the academic discipline of history. The article takes a critical stance regarding the concept of discourse community, discussing both the benefits and constraints of communicating within discourse communities. The article concludes with writerly questions students can ask themselves as they enter new discourse communities in order to be more effective communicators.

Last year, I decided that if I was ever going to achieve my lifelong fantasy of being the first college writing teacher to transform into an international rock star, I should probably graduate from playing the video game Guitar Hero to actually learning to play guitar. [1] I bought an acoustic guitar and started watching every beginning guitar instructional video on YouTube. At first, the vocabulary the online guitar teachers used was like a foreign language to me—terms like major and minor chords, open G tuning, and circle of fifths. I was overwhelmed by how complicated it all was, and the fingertips on my left hand felt like they were going to fall off from pressing on the steel strings on the neck of my guitar to form chords. I felt like I was making incredibly slow progress, and at the rate I was going, I wouldn’t be a guitar god until I was 87. I was also getting tired of playing alone in my living room. I wanted to find a community of people who shared my goal of learning songs and playing guitar together for fun.

I needed a way to find other beginning and intermediate guitar players, and I decided to try a social media website called “Meetup.com.” It only took a few clicks to find the right community for me—an “acoustic jam” group that welcomed beginners and met once a month at a music store near my city of Sacramento, California. On the Meetup.com site, it said that everyone who showed up for the jam should bring a few songs to share, but I wasn’t sure what kind of music they played, so I just showed up at the next meet-up with my guitar and the basic look you need to become a guitar legend: two days of facial hair stubble, black t-shirt, ripped jeans, and a gravelly voice (luckily my throat was sore from shouting the lyrics to the Twenty One Pilots song “Heathens” while playing guitar in my living room the night before).

The first time I played with the group, I felt more like a junior high school band camp dropout then the next Jimi Hendrix. I had trouble keeping up with the chord changes, and I didn’t know any scales (groups of related notes in the same key that work well together) to solo on lead guitar when it was my turn. I had trouble figuring out the patterns for my strumming hand since no one took the time to explain them before we started playing a new song. The group had some beginners, but I was the least experienced player.

perienced player. It took a few more meet-ups, but pretty soon I figured out how to fit into the group. I learned that they played all kinds of songs, from country to blues to folk to rock music. I learned that they chose songs with simple chords so beginners like me could play along. I learned that they brought print copies of the chords and lyrics of songs to share, and if there were any difficult chords in a song, they included a visual of the chord shape in the handout of chords and lyrics. I started to learn the musician’s vocabulary I needed to be familiar with to function in the group, like beats per measure and octaves and the minor pentatonic scale . I learned that if I was having trouble figuring out the chord changes, I could watch the better guitarists and copy what they were doing. I also got good advice from experienced players, like soaking your fingers in rubbing alcohol every day for ninety seconds to toughen them up so the steel strings wouldn’t hurt as much. I even realized that although I was an inexperienced player, I could contribute to the community by bringing in new songs they hadn’t played before.

Okay, at this point you may be saying to yourself that all of this will make a great biographical movie someday when I become a rock icon (or maybe not), but what does it have to do with becoming a better writer?

You can write in a journal alone in your room, just like you can play guitar just for yourself alone in your room. But most writers, like most musicians, learn their craft from studying experts and becoming part of a community. And most writers, like most musicians, want to be a part of community and communicate with other people who share their goals and interests. Writing teachers and scholars have come up with the concept of “discourse community” to describe a community of people who share the same goals, the same methods of communicating, the same genres, and the same lexis (specialized language).

What Exactly Is a Discourse Community?

John Swales, a scholar in linguistics, says that discourse communities have the following features (which I’m paraphrasing):

• A broadly agreed upon set of common public goals
• Mechanisms of intercommunication among members
• Use of these communication mechanisms to provide information and feedback
• One or more genres that help further the goals of the discourse community
• A specific lexis (specialized language)
• A threshold level of expert members (24-26)

I’ll use my example of the monthly guitar jam group I joined to explain these six aspects of a discourse community.

A Broadly Agreed Set of Common Public Goals

The guitar jam group had shared goals that we all agreed on. In the Meetup.com description of the site, the organizer of the group emphasized that these monthly gatherings were for having fun, enjoying the music, and learning new songs. “Guitar players” or “people who like music” or even “guitarists in Sacramento, California” are not discourse communities. They don’t share the same goals, and they don’t all interact with each other to meet the same goals.

Mechanisms of Intercommunication among Members

The guitar jam group communicated primarily through the Meetup.com site. This is how we recruited new members, shared information about when and where we were playing, and communicated with each other outside of the night of the guitar jam. “People who use Meetup.com” are not a discourse community, because even though they’re using the same method of communication, they don’t all share the same goals and they don’t all regularly interact with each other. But a Meetup.com group like the Sacramento acoustic guitar jam focused on a specific topic with shared goals and a community of members who frequently interact can be considered a discourse community based on Swales’ definition.

Use of These Communication Mechanisms to Provide Information and Feedback

Once I found the guitar jam group on Meetup.com, I wanted information about topics like what skill levels could participate, what kind of music they played, and where and when they met. Once I was at my first guitar jam, the primary information I needed was the chords and lyrics of each song, so the handouts with chords and lyrics were a key means of providing critical information to community members. Communication mechanisms in discourse communities can be emails, text messages, social media tools, print texts, memes, oral presentations, and so on. One reason that Swales uses the term “discourse” instead of “writing” is that the term “discourse” can mean any type of communication, from talking to writing to music to images to multimedia.

One or More Genres That Help Further the Goals of the Discourse Community

One of the most common ways discourse communities share information and meet their goals is through genres. To help explain the concept of genre, I’ll use music since I’ve been talking about playing guitar and music is probably an example you can relate to. Obviously there are many types of music, from rap to country to reggae to heavy metal. Each of these types of music is considered a genre, in part because the music has shared features, from the style of the music to the subject of the lyrics to the lexis. For example, most rap has a steady bass beat, most rappers use spoken word rather singing, and rap lyrics usually draw on a lexis associated with young people. But a genre is much more than a set of features. Genres arise out of social purposes, and they’re a form of social action within discourse communities. The rap battles of today have historical roots in African oral contests, and modern rap music can only be understood in the context of hip hop culture, which includes break dancing and street art. Rap also has social purposes, including resisting social oppression and telling the truth about social conditions that aren’t always reported on by news outlets. Like all genres, rap is not just a formula but a tool for social action.

The guitar jam group used two primary genres to meet the goals of the community. The Meetup.com site was one important genre that was critical in the formation of the group and to help it recruit new members. It was also the genre that delivered information to the members about what the community was about and where and when the community would be meeting. The other important genre to the guitar jam group were the handouts with song chords and lyrics. I’m sharing an example of a song I brought to the group to show you what this genre looks like.

This genre of the chord and lyrics sheet was needed to make sure everyone could play along and follow the singer. The conventions of this genre—the “norms”—weren’t just arbitrary rules or formulas. As with all genres, the conventions developed because of the social action of the genre. The sheets included lyrics so that we could all sing along and make sure we knew when to change chords. The sheets included visuals of unusual chords, like the Em7 chord (E minor seventh) in my example, because there were some beginner guitarists who were a part of the community. If the community members were all expert guitarists, then the inclusion of chord shapes would never have become a convention. A great resource to learn more about the concept of genre is the essay “Navigating Genres” by Kerry Dirk in volume 1 of Writing Spaces .

A Specific Lexis (Specialized Language)

To anyone who wasn’t a musician, our guitar meet-ups might have sounded like we were communicating in a foreign language. We talked about the root note of scale, a 1/4/5 chord progression, putting a capo on different frets, whether to play solos in a major or minor scale, double drop D tuning, and so on. If someone couldn’t quickly identify what key their song was in or how many beats per measure the strumming pattern required, they wouldn’t be able to communicate effectively with the community members. We didn’t use this language to show off or to try to discourage outsiders from joining our group. We needed these specialized terms—this musician’s lexis—to make sure we were all playing together effectively.

A Threshold Level of Expert Members 

If everyone in the guitar jam was at my beginner level when I first joined the group, we wouldn’t have been very successful. I relied on more experienced players to figure out strumming patterns and chord changes, and I learned to improve my solos by watching other players use various techniques in their soloing. The most experienced players also helped educate everyone on the conventions of the group (the “norms” of how the group interacted). These conventions included everyone playing in the same key, everyone taking turns playing solo lead guitar, and everyone bringing songs to play. But discourse community conventions aren’t always just about maintaining group harmony. In most discourse communities, new members can also expand the knowledge and genres of the community. For example, I shared songs that no one had brought before, and that expanded the community’s base of knowledge.

Why the Concept of Discourse Communities Matters for College Writing

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, I didn’t understand that each academic discipline I took courses in to complete the requirements of my degree (history, philosophy, biology, math, political science, sociology, English) was a different discourse community. Each of these academic fields had their own goals, their own genres, their own writing conventions, their own formats for citing sources, and their own expectations for writing style. I thought each of the teachers I encountered in my undergraduate career just had their own personal preferences that all felt pretty random to me. I didn’t understand that each teacher was trying to act as a representative of the discourse community of their field. I was a new member of their discourse communities, and they were introducing me to the genres and conventions of their disciplines. Unfortunately, teachers are so used to the conventions of their discourse communities that they sometimes don’t explain to students the reasons behind the writing conventions of their discourse communities.

It wasn’t until I studied research about college writing while I was in graduate school that I learned about genres and discourse communities, and by the time I was doing my dissertation for my PhD, I got so interested in studying college writing that I did a national study of college teachers’ writing assignments and syllabi. Believe it or not, I analyzed the genres and discourse communities of over 2,000 college writing assignments in my book Assignments Across the Curriculum . To show you why the idea of discourse community is so important to college writing, I’m going to share with you some information from one of the academic disciplines I studied: history. First I want to share with you an excerpt from a history course writing assignment from my study. As you read it over, think about what it tells you about the conventions of the discourse community of history.

Documentary Analysis

This assignment requires you to play the detective, combing textual sources for clues and evidence to form a reconstruction of past events. If you took A.P. history courses in high school, you may recall doing similar document-based questions (DBQs).

In a tight, well-argued essay of two to four pages, identify and assess the historical significance of the documents in ONE of the four sets I have given you.

You bring to this assignment a limited body of outside knowledge gained from our readings, class discussions, and videos. Make the most of this contextual knowledge when interpreting your sources: you may, for example, refer to one of the document from another set if it sheds light on the items in your own.

Questions to Consider When Planning Your Essay

• What do the documents reveal about the author and his audience?
• Why were they written?
• What can you discern about the author’s motivation and tone? Is the tone revealing?
• Does the genre make a difference in your interpretation?
• How do the documents fit into both their immediate and their greater historical contexts?
• Do your documents support or contradict what other sources (video, readings) have told you?
• Do the documents reveal a change that occurred over a period of time?
• Is there a contrast between documents within your set? If so, how do you account for it?
• Do they shed light on a historical event, problem, or period? How do they fit into the “big picture”?
• What incidental information can you glean from them by reading carefully? Such information is important for constructing a narrative of the past; our medieval authors almost always tell us more than they intended to.
• What is not said, but implied?
• What is left out? (As a historian, you should always look for what is not said, and ask yourself what the omission signifies.)
• Taken together, do the documents reveal anything significant about the period in question? (Melzer 3-4)

This assignment doesn’t just represent the specific preferences of one random teacher. It’s a common history genre (the documentary analysis) that helps introduce students to the ways of thinking and the communication conventions of the discourse community of historians. This genre reveals that historians look for textual clues to reconstruct past events and that historians bring their own knowledge to bear when they analyze texts and interpret history (historians are not entirely “objective” or “neutral”). In this documentary analysis genre, the instructor emphasizes that historians are always looking for what is not said but instead is implied. This instructor is using an important genre of history to introduce students to the ways of analyzing and thinking in the discourse community of historians.

Let’s look at another history course in my research. I’m sharing with you an excerpt from the syllabus of a history of the American West course. This part of the syllabus gives students an overview of the purpose of the writing projects in the class. As you read this overview, think about the ways this instructor is portraying the discourse community of historians.

A300: History of the American West

A300 is designed to allow students to explore the history of the American West on a personal level with an eye toward expanding their knowledge of various western themes, from exploration to the Indian Wars, to the impact of global capitalism and the emergence of the environmental movement. But students will also learn about the craft of history, including the tools used by practitioners, how to weigh competing evidence , and how to build a convincing argument about the past.

At the end of this course students should understand that history is socially interpreted, and that the past has always been used as an important means for understanding the present. Old family photos, a grandparent’s memories, even family reunions allow people to understand their lives through an appreciation of the past. These events and artifacts remind us that history is a dynamic and interpretive field of study that requires far more than rote memorization. Historians balance their knowledge of primary sources (diaries, letters, artifacts, and other documents from the period under study) with later interpretations of these people, places, and events (in the form of scholarly monographs and articles) known as secondary sources . Through the evaluation and discussion of these different interpretations historians come to a socially negotiated understanding of historical figures and events.

Individual Projects

More generally, your papers should:

• Empathize with the person, place, or event you are writing about. The goal here is to use your understanding of the primary and secondary sources you have read to “become” that person–i.e. to appreciate their perspectives on the time or event under study. In essence, students should demonstrate an appreciation of that time within its context.
• Second, students should be able to present the past in terms of its relevance to contemporary issues. What do their individual projects tell us about the present? For example, what does the treatment of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans in the West tell us about the problem of race in the United States today?
• Third, in developing their individual and group projects, students should demonstrate that they have researched and located primary and secondary sources. Through this process they will develop the skills of a historian, and present an interpretation of the past that is credible to their peers and instructors.

Just like the history instructor who gave students the documentary analysis assignment, this history of the American West instructor emphasizes that the discourse community of historians doesn’t focus on just memorizing facts, but on analyzing and interpreting competing evidence. Both the documentary analysis assignment and the information from the history of the American West syllabus show that an important shared goal of the discourse community of historians is socially constructing the past using evidence from different types of artifacts, from texts to photos to interviews with people who have lived through important historical events. The discourse community goals and conventions of the different academic disciplines you encounter as an undergraduate shape everything about writing: which genres are most important, what counts as evidence, how arguments are constructed, and what style is most appropriate and effective.

The history of the American West course is a good example of the ways that discourse community goals and values can change over time. It wasn’t that long ago that American historians who wrote about the West operated on the philosophy of “manifest destiny.” Most early historians of the American West assumed that the American colonizers had the right to take land from indigenous tribes—that it was the white European’s “destiny” to colonize the American West. The evidence early historians used in their writing and the ways they interpreted that evidence relied on the perspectives of the “settlers,” and the perspectives of the indigenous people were ignored by historians. The concept of manifest destiny has been strongly critiqued by modern historians, and one of the primary goals of most modern historians who write about the American West is to recover the perspectives and stories of the indigenous peoples as well as to continue to work for social justice for Native Americans by showing how historical injustices continue in different forms to the present day. Native American historians are now retelling history from the perspective of indigenous people, using indigenous research methods that are often much different than the traditional research methods of historians of the American West. Discourse community norms can silence and marginalize people, but discourse communities can also be transformed by new members who challenge the goals and assumptions and research methods and genre conventions of the community.

Discourse Communities from School to Work and Beyond

Understanding what a discourse community is and the ways that genres perform social actions in discourse communities can help you better understand where your college teachers are coming from in their writing assignments and also help you understand why there are different writing expectations and genres for different classes in different fields. Researchers who study college writing have discovered that most students struggle with writing when they first enter the discourse community of their chosen major, just like I struggled when I first joined the acoustic guitar jam group. When you graduate college and start your first job, you will probably also find yourself struggling a bit with trying to learn the writing conventions of the discourse community of your workplace. Knowing how discourse communities work will not only help you as you navigate the writing assigned in different general education courses and the specialized writing of your chosen major, but it will also help you in your life after college. Whether you work as a scientist in a lab or a lawyer for a firm or a nurse in a hospital, you will need to become a member of a discourse community. You’ll need to learn to communicate effectively using the genres of the discourse community of your workplace, and this might mean asking questions of more experienced discourse community members, analyzing models of the types of genres you’re expected to use to communicate, and thinking about the most effective style, tone, format, and structure for your audience and purpose. Some workplaces have guidelines for how to write in the genres of the discourse community, and some workplaces will initiate you to their genres by trial and error. But hopefully now that you’ve read this essay, you’ll have a better idea of what kinds of questions to ask to help you become an effective communicator in a new discourse community. I’ll end this essay with a list of questions you can ask yourself whenever you’re entering a new discourse community and learning the genres of the community:

• What are the goals of the discourse community?
• What are the most important genres community members use to achieve these goals?
• Who are the most experienced communicators in the discourse community?
• Where can I find models of the kinds of genres used by the discourse community?
• Who are the different audiences the discourse community communicates with, and how can I adjust my writing for these different audiences?
• What conventions of format, organization, and style does the discourse community value?
• What specialized vocabulary (lexis) do I need to know to communicate effectively with discourse community insiders?
• How does the discourse community make arguments, and what types of evidence are valued?
• Do the conventions of the discourse community silence any members or force any members to conform to the community in ways that make them uncomfortable?
• What can I add to the discourse community?

Works Cited

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” Writing Spaces , vol. 1, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press, 2010, pp. 249–262.

Guitar Hero . Harmonics, 2005.

Meetup.com . WeWork Companies Inc., 2019. www.meetup.com.

Melzer, Daniel. Assignments Across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing . Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2014.

Swales, John. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings . Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Twenty One Pilots. “Heathens.” Suicide Squad: The Album , Atlantic Records, 2016.

Young, Neil. “Heart of Gold.” Harvest , Reprise Records, 1972.

Teacher Resources for Understanding Discourse Communities by Dan Melzer

Overview and teaching strategies.

This essay can be taught in conjunction with teaching students about the concept of genre and could be paired with Kerry Dirk’s essay “Navigating Genres” in Writing Spaces , volume 1. I find that it works best to scaffold the concept of discourse community by moving students from reflecting on the formulaic writing they have learned in the past, like the five-paragraph theme or the Shaffer method, to introducing them to the concept of genre and how genres are not formulas or formats but forms of social action, and then to helping students understand that genres usually operate within discourse communities. Most of my students are unfamiliar with the concept of discourse community, and I find that it is helpful to relate this concept to discourse communities students are already members of, like online gaming groups, college clubs, or jobs students are working or have worked. I sometimes teach the concept of discourse community as part of a research project where students investigate the genres and communication conventions of a discourse community they want to join or are already a member of. In this project students conduct primary and secondary research and rhetorically analyze examples of the primary genres of the discourse community. The primary research might involve doing an interview or interviews with discourse community members, conducting a survey of discourse community members, or reflecting on participant-observer research.

Inevitably, some students have trouble differentiating between a discourse community and a group of people who share similar characteristics. Students may assert that “college students” or “Facebook users” or “teenage women” are a discourse community. It is useful to apply Swales’ criteria to broader groups that students imagine are discourse communities and then try to narrow down these groups until students have hit upon an actual discourse community (for example, narrowing from “Facebook users” to the Black Lives Matter Sacramento Facebook group). In the essay, I tried to address this issue with specific examples of groups that Swales would not classify as a discourse community.

Teaching students about academic discourse communities is a challenging task. Researchers have found that there are broad expectations for writing that seem to hold true across academic discourse communities, such as the ability to make logical arguments and support those arguments with credible evidence, the ability to use academic vocabulary and write in a formal style, and the ability to carefully edit for grammar, syntax, and citation format. But research has also shown that not only do different academic fields have vastly different definitions of how arguments are made, what counts as evidence, and what genres, styles, and formats are valued, but even similar types of courses within the same discipline may have very different discourse community expectations depending on the instructor, department, and institution. In teaching students about the concept of discourse community, I want students to leave my class understanding that: a) there is no such thing as a formula or set of rules for “academic discourse”; b) each course in each field of study they take in college will require them to write in the context of a different set of discourse community expectations; and c) discourse communities can both pass down community knowledge to new members and sometimes marginalize or silence members. What I hope students take away from reading this essay is a more rhetorically sophisticated and flexible sense of the community contexts of the writing they do both in and outside of school.

• The author begins the essay discussing a discourse community he has recently become a member of. Think of a discourse community that you recently joined and describe how it meets Swales’ criteria for a discourse community.
• Choose a college class you’ve taken or are taking and describe the goals and expectations for writing of the discourse community the class represents. In small groups, compare the class discourse community you described with two of your peers’ courses. What are some of the differences in the goals and expectations for writing?
• Using Swales’ criteria for a discourse community, consider whether the following are discourse communities and why or why not: a) students at your college; b) a fraternity or sorority; c) fans of soccer; d) a high school debate team.
• The author of this essay argues that discourse communities use genres for social actions. Consider your major or a field you would like to work in after you graduate. What are some of the most important genres of that discourse community? In what ways do these genres perform social actions for members of the discourse community?

The following are activities that can provide scaffolding for a discourse community analysis project. To view example student discourse community analysis projects from the first-year composition program that I direct at the University of California, Davis, see our online student writing journal at fycjournal.ucdavis.edu .

Introducing the Concept of Discourse Community

To introduce students to the concept of discourse community, I like to start with discourse communities they can relate to or that they themselves are members of. A favorite example for my students is the This American Life podcast episode that explores the Instagram habits of teenage girls, which can be found at https://www.thisamericanlife.org/573/status-update . Other examples students can personally connect to include Facebook groups, groups on the popular social media site Reddit, fan clubs of musical artists or sports teams, and campus student special interest groups. Once we’ve discussed a few examples of discourse communities they can relate to on a personal level, I ask them to list some of the discourse communities they belong to and we apply Swales’ criteria to a few of these examples as a class.

Genre Analysis

One goal of my discourse community analysis project is to help students see the relationships between genres and the broader community contexts that genres operate in. However, thinking of writing in terms of genre and discourse community is a new approach for most of my students, and I provide them with heuristic questions they can use to analyze the primary genres of the discourse community they are focusing on in their projects. These questions include:

• Who is the audience(s) for the genre, and how does audience shape the genre?
• What social actions does the genre achieve for the discourse community?
• What are the conventions of the genre?
• How much flexibility do authors have to vary the conventions of the genre?
• Have the conventions of the genre changed over time? In what ways and why?
• To what extent does the genre empower members of the discourse community to speak, and to what extent does the genre marginalize or silence members of the discourse community?
• Where can a new discourse community member find models of the genre?

Research Questions about the Discourse Community

You could choose to have the focus of students’ discourse community projects be as simple as arguing that the discourse community they chose meets Swales’ criteria and explaining why. If you want students to dig a little deeper, you can ask them to come up with research questions about the discourse community they are analyzing. For example, students can ask questions about how the genres of the discourse community achieve the goals of the community, or how the writing conventions of the discourse community have changed over time and why they have changed, or how new members are initiated to the discourse community and the extent to which that initiation is effective. Some of my students are used to being assigned research papers in school that ask them to take a side on a pro/ con issue and develop a simplistic thesis statement that argues for that position. In the discourse community analysis project, I push them to think of research as more sophisticated than just taking a position and forming a simplistic thesis statement. I want them to use primary and secondary research to explore complex research questions and decide which aspects of their data and their analysis are the most interesting and useful to report on in their projects.

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Understanding Discourse Communities Copyright © 2020 by Dan Melzer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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