Welcome mechanical engineering amateurs, prodigies, and experts. You are probably all here because you are either planning on joining or are already a part of the field of mechanical engineering and are looking for some information about what it means to be part of such a prestigious field. Good thing for you all that is exactly why I am writing this blog, to give you all the information you need in order to enter the field or advance even further in the field if you are already in the field. As I am a current student of English Composition 2 at the University of Central Florida and last semester I was a student of English Composition 1, so I have been studying rhetoric and composition for quite some time now. I have learned a great deal about the field of rhetoric and composition allowing me to have the incite of some aspects of various professional fields more specifically what discourse and discourse communities are according professionals of rhetoric and composition.
Those terms, discourse and discourse communities, are two of the most important terms in the field of rhetoric as i have learned in this past year. They have been the sources of much debate as to what they truly mean and two scholars of rhetoric and composition have come the closest to defining what they truly mean. These two scholars are James Paul Gee with his five characteristic combinations and John Swales with his six characteristics that define a community as a discourse community.
Gee explains in Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction that discourse is a combination of saying (writing), doing, being, believing, and valuing and that they are "ways of being in the world". He explains that in order to be considered a member of a discourse one must have those combinations because according to him you are either fully in the discourse or your out, there is no in between in his definition.
Swales on the other hand in The Concept of Discourse Community, describes six different characteristics that must be identified in order to claim that a certain group of people are part of a discourse community. His six characteristics include: a broadly agreed upon set of public goals, has methods of communication among its members, has participatory mechanisms in order to get feedback and information, has one or more genres, has a specific lexis, and finally has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and experience in the discourse.
Scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition have yet to define a specific definition for either of the two terms and the debate continues even today due to the fact that they are such complex terms. According to Swales though, every professional field ranging from medicine to engineering should be considered to be a discourse community while on the other hand getting a full grasp on Gees definition of a discourse community, not many can say they are members as defined by Gee but I am not saying that their aren't people that do because there most definitely are.
In the next five posts I am going to go into greater detail about James Pauls Gee's five elements of "discourse", saying, doing, believing, and valuing in conjunction with the professional field of mechanical engineering.
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