My Argument & Purpose

In this blog I want to claim that in language and literacy everyone can use the knowledge they have learned from previous discourses to help them advance in other discourse communities, even if they have nothing that anyone can see in common certain things could apply. 

But first what are discourse communities? 

To put it plain and simple a discourse community is a group of people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals. Or as Linguist John Swales defines discourse communities "groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals."

I want to make a point to get high school and college students to understand that even if you have no prior knowledge of anything to relate to that discourse the new knowledge can be learned. For example as a child we had no knowledge of what we were taught in school but we all learned through time. That can apply to any discourse community. We all have the ability to learn new things. It is all up to us if we chose to join or not. I want high school and college students to see that we can be involved in many different discourse communities. To create an argument against James Paul Gee, another linguist who states that we cannot be a part of more than one discourse community.  After reading my blog I hope my readers go out and join many different discourse communities they might have been afraid of joining do to the feeling of being unable to connect with the members without giving the discourse community a chance. By joining new discourses it can also expand ones social groups and make a person more diverse in society which is helpful to get ahead in life in many different ways.

http://joinmany.blogspot.com/2014/04/join-many.html

http://joinmany.blogspot.com/2014/04/my-own-experiences.html