Read and Response for April 20th

Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict, and Diversity

By: Ann M. Johns

“It has been suggested that people can join communities at will and remain affiliated at levels of their own choosing.  For a number of reasons, this is not entirely accurate.  In some cases people are excluded from communities because they lack social standing, talent, or money, or because they live in the wrong part of town.  In other cases, community membership requires a long initiatory process, and even then there is no guarantee of success.” (Johns, 511)

            I thought that this passage was important because it is a counter argument to what every other article that we’ve read has said.  The passage is the main idea that the writer is trying to get to the reader: that it is not as easy to join a community as people make it out to be.  There are several factors that people take into account when you are trying to join an established group.  It is up to that group whether they want to accept you or not and it comes down to whether you have the necessary attributes that the community is looking for.  For example, if you wanted to join some kind of political community, it is most likely that you and your family are well off and have some kind of role in the community already.  What the basic message is in this passage is that there are factors beyond a person’s control that affect their success in anything they do.

The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing

By: Joseph Harris

“The troubles of many student writers, Bartholomae suggests, begin with their inability to imagine such a position of privilege, to define their views against some “common” way of talking about their subject.  Instead, they simply repeat in their writing “what everybody knows” or what their professor has told them in their lectures.” (Harris, 587)

            I thought that this passage was very important because I found it to be very true in my eyes.  I feel like so many people are programmed to write what the professor wants to hear or what they think is factually right.  When talking about a subject in a community, people tend to have the same thing to say about it because that is the social consensus on the matter.  It is important for people to have their own opinion on things and when people are constantly telling you what to do and how to do it, it tends to shape the way you do things in a way that makes your work the same as everyone else’s.  Both Johns and Harris challenged the idea of discourse communities by pointing out the flaws in a discourse community and some of the problems people could run into when trying to become a part of one of these communities.  You get the idea the both writers are trying to make the point that being in a discourse community is not as easy and as beneficial as some of the past readings indicated them to be.  I think that being in a discourse community could be both beneficial and detrimental because it does provide a good social network for people to be in and broadens someone’s experience with others but also could be bad because of all the restrictions and standards that could possibly take away from someone’s individuality.