Discourse Re-Runs its Course

I can't procrastinate this post any longer.

Over the past few days, I've been awaiting the voice of my muse; on the subject of discourse communities, she's been frustratingly silent. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure when the idea of discourse communities finally "clicked" -- the "click" may have been absent until we discussed Bartholomae in class.

Perhaps my awakening had its roots in middle school. Seduced by the poetic timbre of the romance languages, I began studying French. French, or any other foreign language, is a pretty marked example of how individuals, in order to interact with others in a speech community, must learn the commonplaces of that community. "Bonjour" is merely a beginning.

The importance of commonplaces later became evident in other subjects, as well. In high school, my peers and I realized that if we could mimic the historian's voice, we could get good grades in history; in literature class, the critic's voice; in chemistry, the chemist's; etc. Because our graduation requirements stipulated compulsory baccalaureate tests, which would be assessed by anonymous third parties, our teachers stressed time and again the importance of learning vocabulary. When writing about Germany in World War II, they said, be sure to throw in words like "Luftwaffe," "blitzkrieg," and "fuhrer"; when writing about literature, mention "irony," "paradox," and "archetype"; and for chemistry, "energy levels," "carbon bonding," and "valance."

We became master regurgitators. Our teachers evidently ascribed to the old repetitia est mater scienciae theory of learning, supposing that genuine understanding of the terms we used so liberally in our writing would, somehow, percolate in our young minds at some later date.

Once in college, I was particularly drawn to the technical writing program. The first rule of that field, we learned, is Know thou thy audience. Every word and sentence structure that appears on a page must be tailored towards a specific audience's specific needs. This approach to writing made sense, but being born and raised in the United States, I simply assumed that as technical writers, we needed to make our customers happy. Our instructors certainly implied the concept of discourse communities, but they never summoned that idea to life by giving it a precise, scholarly name.

As I re-read the preceding paragraphs, I still feel that, until we discussed the Bartholomae article in class, discourse communities were merely allusive to me. Considering the volume of academic and pseudo-academic writing done by students at the university level, an awareness of these communities certainly eases the counter-individualistic shock that initially results conforming to officially canonized formats, methodologies, and lexicons.