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Expository Writing

PROJECT 2 ESSAY

The first project had you focus on “What is it?” in regards to your discourse community.
This project builds from that by focusing on “How does it work?” Here when we refer to
“it” we mean the discourse in your discourse community.

Your goal in this assignment is to explain how your discourse community works as it
relates togenres and discourse conventions. To accomplish this goal you will include
evidence from the readings, as well as from your experiences interacting with your
discourse community and the course theme discourse community.

Learning Outcomes
• Identify discourse conventions of a discourse communities

• Apply conceptual understandings of “discourse communities” to actual discourse circulated in discourse

communities, including lexical characteristics, visual elements, and communicative methods

• Develop an understanding of how discourse functions to both reinforce and structure group identities, and how

discourse conventions reflect power dynamics within and among discourse communities

• Identify the role of genre in discourse

• Practice applying principles of rhetoric and discourse to a specific discourse community

• Practice skills of analysis and critical thought in an extended written document
• Practice the principles that characterize effective writing

Questions and Considerations to Guide You
You will write an essay in which you discuss and analyze the linguistic, stylistic, and
genre conventions of a chosen discourse community. To complete this project, you will
address the following questions:

IDENTIFYING DISCOURSE CONVENTIONS AND THE ROLE
OF GENRE IN DISCOURSE

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• How do members of this discourse community interact and communicate with each other in writing? What evidence
can you see that supports your answer?

• What questions or conversations are members of this discourse community currently engaged in? Do most of the
participants follow the conventions of the community? What evidence supports your observation? Are their outliers?
If so, how do you know and where to do you see outliers within the community?

• How do topics circulate within the community? Have you observed any topics circulating outside the community or
shifting from one medium to another (e.g., from online discourse to written articles or visuals)
Focus on a topic and explain how circulates. What are the differences in genre and conventions? What does this
circulation tell you about the discourse community itself?

In order to answer these questions, you may incorporate the following:
• Observations of online discourse circulated in the community
• Articles discussing the discourse community
• Media coverage of the discourse community
• The role of online discourse in political organizing
• Historical trends that have shaped the discourse community over time

Focus of Your Essay
You will identify key elements that distinguish your specific group as a discourse
community. Your claims depend on a clear understanding of what constitutes
“discourse” and a “discourse community,” as you have defined the terms in Project 1.

In this Project 2 essay, you will develop your definition of a “discourse community”
(you may use articles and evidence from Project 1) by explaining whether and how their
chosen discourse community meets that definition; they will also identify any ways that
their chosen community challenges or causes them to re-think their established definition.
The bulk of this essay should focus on the elements of discourse (both the discourse itself,
and the way discourse circulates) that are unique to their specific discourse community.
You will also draw analytic conclusions about the ways in which the conventions of
discourse reinforce community identity, while also reflecting power dynamics within
and among individuals and groups within and outside the discourse community. You
will do this work in the first one or two introductory paragraphs of the essay. Subsequent
paragraphs develop your examples from observation and participation as you show how
concepts of discourse conventions and genre inform your understanding of the discourse
community.

Deliverable
Length: 1000-1500 words
This essay is primarily text based, but students should also substantiate their claims (where
appropriate) with hyperlinked media, embedded video and/or images, and embedded
screenshots of social media posts. Other analytic claims may need to be substantiated
with secondary research from popular, academic, professional, or public policy sources.