ROW: Devitt

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

2: When you're asked to write a paper for a writing/English class vs an Art class it can be a big difference because you have different criteria to follow for different classes. You might be more comfortable and more intelligent in one class than the other causing you to struggle on one of the papers. All this creates conflicts because its two different classes with two different papers with two different purposes for each paper.

3: One discourse community I'm apart of at Ohio University is Phi Kappa Tau and within Phi Kappa Tau one of our genre's are chapter meetings. The purpose of these meeting are to re-cap what happened the past weekend and gets us prepared for the following week/weekend. Its basically a meeting where everyone can touch base and ask questions for whatever purpose. If we didn't have these meeting everyone would be quite confused.

Applying and Exploring

3: In a discourse community that I'am apart of at OU is a fraternity. The way we work and communicate is through texting and emailing. If your were new to a fraternity like me some of the lingo used would be quite confusing to you. I have been a pledge at Phi Kappa Tau for a few weeks now and have caught up on the lingo. It is different probably from other Greek life organizations or any other clubs at OU. This could be because we all don't share a common set of values and beliefs causing us to work with different communication behaviors.

Meta Moment

I believe the best route to understanding a discourse community would be through ethnographic fieldwork rather than scholarly research. Gaining first hand experience is the most important part to understanding something your interested in, unless you have a different type of learning style, but for me ethnographic fieldwork would even have me more interested than reading a paper and trying to figure it out that way.