Devitt

Before You Read.

I uses lots of different types of communication everyday. I do not have a smart phone but when I am at a computer I use Facebook. I also have my phone to talk and text on. Visual is with my phone and Facebook. Audible with programs like Skype, music, and my phone too.

Summary.

In Devitt's article, "Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities", she basically argues that genres a combination of communities working together that are either specialized or non-specialized. She goes on to say how that can be a problem because the specialized and non-specialized people are different and have different lexis'. She also uses authors to prove her point.

Synthesis.

One person that can be related to this article is Porter. The reason I say this is because Porter discusses the intertextuality and community that all people come from which is related to discourse communities. A second person that can be related to this is Swales. The reason I say this is because the main focus around his article is are discourse communities and how people need to learn how to adapt to new situations. A third person that can be related to this article is Gee. The reason I say this is because Gee believed in the idea of singularity in a community.

Response	Quotation
Discourse communities will always be around and popular even if you do not know of them.	“Over the past two decades the concept of discourse community has been one of the most hotly contested notions in the field, subject to the range of by now well-known critiques that claim it is too utopian, hegemonic, stable, and abstract” (98).
For teachers, the concept of discourse communities are limited.	“As a result, the concept of discourse community remains of limited pedagogical value” (98).
Teachers are still trying to teach students all about discourse communities. They are trying different techniques to do so.	“To make communities tangible and their discourse actions palpable to students, writing teachers have begun to use ethnographic research, which, while valuable in locating the study of discourse within the behaviors of real communities, can be difficult to implement in the classroom” (98).
Here, it is talking about the differences between specialists and non-specialists in discourse communities.	“Part of the difficulty when specialized communities write to nonspecialist users lies in technical language, a difficulty commonly recognized and often addressed through defining key terms, but most of the difficulty comes from differences of interest and value that definitions cannot control” (101).
This is talking about a group's social roles, actions and/or genres. All discourse communities have a certain type of genre.	“Ethnographic observation of a community that foregrounds genre analysis allows researchers to explore more fully the complexity of the group's social roles and actions, actions that constitute the community's repeated rhetorical strategies, or genres” (107).

MM.

Personally, I think that the best way to do research is through social interaction. Taking to people in person is much more personable and nice sometimes too.

Thoughts.

Honestly, I didn't really like this article. It was long and boring to read. Yes, I did learn some new things about discourse communities, but other than that, I wasn't too impressed. I did like how there were three different writers though and I was able to connect with some of the things that they said.