For this assignment, you will research a discourse community and analyze its functions and significance. A discourse community is, in short, a group of people who share the same goals, interests, genres, and ways of communicating.
For this project, you will choose a discourse community to analyze. You may choose a discourse community that you participate in or write about a community that you have only observed from the outside. You may focus on any community that interests you, provided that you are able to find relevant sources to aid you in your research. You will research this community using both primary and secondary sources. Primary sources might include interviews with members of the discourse community, surveys, and your own rhetorical analysis of the genres, forms, and conventions employed by the discourse community. Secondary sources consist of research that has been done by others, such as scholarly articles, articles from websites, journalistic writing, podcasts, video essays, or any of a variety of other sources.
Your essay should strike an analytical tone, but does not necessarily have be written in standard “academic” style. You might consider a genre like a feature story as a way to balance analysis with personal voice and commentary. If you’re unfamiliar with that genre, a feature story provides a more in-depth and narrative style than traditional news reporting. Feature stories often incorporate elements of storytelling, including character development, descriptive language, and scene-setting, to engage readers and provide a deeper understanding of the subject matter. Unlike hard news stories, which typically focus on breaking events and factual information, feature stories may explore more abstract or complex issues, such as social trends, cultural phenomena, or human interest stories. They may also include interviews with experts, personal anecdotes, or historical context to provide a broader perspective on the subject matter.
You should organize your essay around a larger claim about the discourse community’s function and significance, which might take many different forms. For instance, you might claim that the Harry Potter series’ continued relevance is largely due to its fan community, and point to specific conversations on Twitter to support your point. Or you might discuss the specifics of being a member of the /r/bodyweightfitness community on Reddit, how that community approaches fitness, and what that suggests about how its members see their lives. Or you might look at “booktok” (on TikTok) and examine how and why it values certain books over others. Ultimately, your goal in this project is to show how your target discourse community creates “rules” for being a member, what the general character of the community is, and any larger implications of the existence of this community.
Your essay should be roughly 1250-1500 words, not including a reference page. The essay is due by the end of Friday of Finals Week (3/24).
