Discourse refers to an exchange of ideas through written or spoken communication. Academic discourse is the use of speech and writing to construct and disseminate knowledge in educational institutions, from schools to higher educational establishments such as universities. Engagement in academic discourse also constructs the identity of the author or speaker as “a scholar” and negotiates his or her status within the academic community. A discourse community is a group of people who share certain characteristics and interests and, as a result of ongoing communications within that group, share language practices for communicating the group’s goals. A discourse community may describe a group of people with common interests or a group of people who use highly technical language; any group that uses a common language to communicate the group’s goals may be defined as a discourse community.

Examples and Implications for Your Research

In the academic world, discourse communities are usually defined by field and subfield. That means that the discourse community of geology represents the common scholarly conversation that takes place among geologists. If an audiologist entered into their conversation (or picked up one of their journals), it’s likely that many of the terms and concepts would be unfamiliar, and a geologist would have the same problems in a conversation about audiology. Getting a grasp on your academic discourse community and its conventions is the first step to becoming a successful researcher in your field.

Just as discourse communities have specialized vocabularies and standards, different discourse communities pursue different kinds of questions. Let’s take a big problem like global climate change and focus on Alaska. An environmental scientist, a pathologist, an economist, and an anthropologist would raise different kinds of questions about the same problem:

• The environmental scientist would ask questions like: how much has the water risen since we last checked? How have the increasing temperatures and rising water levels affected the vegetation and animal life?
• A pathologist would take a different approach: what new diseases have emerged in correlation with global climate change?
• Economists would ask how global climate change is affecting the economic situation in Alaska. How has the lumber or the fishing industry been affected by global climate change? How has global climate change affected tourism?
• An anthropologist might ask how global climate change is affecting the ways of life of certain indigenous groups.

*Consult the University Writing Center's Guidelines for Writing in the Disciplines for more information - each major at AppState is listed.

Putting This into Practice

Because questions vary significantly from discipline to discipline and from field to field, it is important that you assess your questions according to the discourse community you are writing within. Once you’ve selected a major, one way to develop a sense of the types of questions posed in your selected discipline is to read articles published in that field. For example, read a few of articles published in the field and identify the questions these articles raise at the beginning of the texts. Of course, these questions are not always explicitly stated, so identifying an article’s motivating questions might take some work. Write the questions out, make a list of defining characteristics, and assess your own questions next to this list. Also, pay attention to the documentation style the authors use in the articles to cite and share their research - this is another important component of your discourse community. Community members use an agreed upon style unique to that discipline, though sometimes related disciplines may use the same style.

*Consult the University Writing Center's Documentation Guidelines page for a list of common styles and accompanying guidelines.

Sources: Credo Reference | Lumen Learning Open Course | Salem Press Encyclopedia