Reasons why Swales articles sucks:

• It’s boring
• It’s too long
• There is excessive wording, trying to make himself sound intelligent
• Speaking within and only to linguistic discourse community.
• It is hard to follow
• The intended audience is not us
• Rhetoric is a way to make a persuasive argument.
• I think the intended audience are groups or organizations that are perfect examples of a discourse community. He gives an example of what a discourse community could be on page 8. The description he gave lead me to believe he is talking to those that are thinking about forming a group. Fellow colleagues
• The issue is the lack of a clear definition of discourse community.
• He thinks that the audience does not know what a discourse community is.

1. The gap: Not knowing what a discourse community really is.
2. This essay fills the gap by actually going step by step to explain the definition of discourse community.
3. The audience are those who are also linguists
4. The danger is that it is only directed to a specific group of people and instead of multiple groups of people.

1. John Swales was a linguist and was known for his work on genre analysis. He was a professor at University of Michigan where he did his writings about discourse community.
2. I think his attended audience was other professors or students that were also linguists.
3. I think the issue he is trying to address is the definition of discourse. He is trying to give examples of it and the actual definition.
4. I think he believed the gap was that people did not really know what makes a discourse community strong, the characteristics of one.

1. I think Stein is addressing people who share his point of view.
2. Stein comes off aggressive but at the same time treats those that see through his perspective in a nice way.
3. Information given
4. The gap is that there could be serious backlash on other countries that agree to sign with the Bush administration for lucrative war time contracts
5. It does not fill the gap
6. Yes
7. The danger that people do not understand what this essay is really implying therefore the writer did not get his point across to the audience.

How Do Communities Shape Writing

• Discourse: group members shared “ways of being in the world”
• Ex: in dorm and talk with your roommates 
• Biology class 
• In biology class you learn about evolution but that conflicts with how your religion or bible study course views it.
• Discourse Community: when a group of people share the same goals or purposes and uses communication to achieve them
• Multiliteracies: people read not only texts but other people and activities 

The Concept of Community Discourse

• Genre- types of texts that are recognizable to readers and writers, and that meet the needs of the rhetorical situations in which they function.
• Ex: when asked to write a paper you don’t turn in a poem instead.
• For a wedding it would be the wedding invitation to tell those when and time it will take place

• Discourse community gathers it’s members by the use of persuasion and training.

• 6 characteristics of a discourse community: It has public goals, different methods of communicating to other people, different genres that define a group, a lexis (specific language) or feedback given to one another and members that have a lot of knowledge.

D.W Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation is a film that portrays a very strong but frightening message. The film is about two families: the Stonemans of the North and the Camerons of the South who were on two different sides during the Civil war and Reconstruction era. During this era the discourse communities believed that whites were superior. Griffith tries to argue his claim about race in America that whites are superior and blacks are inferior and frightening.

• Dr. Cameron is about to bash her head with his gun so that she is not taken by the black men. I’m assuming he would rather have her die than be with a black man. That intermixing is a terrible idea, it is not what God would have wanted. We read this before in the text “Race Amalgamation”. This text was saying if races intermix that they would be in danger of living, that they can’t coexist.
• I think Griffith is trying to tell us that white supremacy is how they keep the peace in the world and that Jesus wanted it that way since black and white are not the same. Therefore they are superior by right.
  

1. Gus is looks like he is wearing a uniform that is dirty and not fancy. Makes us feel like he is old and probably a mess.
2. Flora looks like she is wearing a clean dress which looks like something an adolescent would wear. Makes us feel like she is way younger than Gus.
3. The lighting used on Gus is dark which makes him look creepy and scary.
4. The lighting used on Flora is bright and shows like she is happy and a gentle human being.
5. He crunches his back in a downward position and he moves at a smooth pace. He is moving like a predator by not making any sudden noises while following her and he is eye balling her like she is a full course meal.
6. She is carrying a bucket and skipping around in the woods until she gets to the place that has water. Seems like she might have been singing as well. There was also a scene where she was trying to interact with a squirrel. These are somethings a child would do.
7. The music associated with Gus is at a faster pace than Flora’s. Flora’s is soothing and pretty calm.
8. The cross-cut editing shows what each person is doing at the same time. One scene where flora is running away from Gus, then the camera shows Gus chasing her and then another scene of flora’s brother trying to find her.
9. They enforced the belief that African Americans were like predators when it came to them messing with white women, that they can be dangerous and aggressive towards them and not know when to give up.

• Reflection question: I think it helped the audience look at the video through a white mans perspective who is racist. The law and science discourse communities helped push the idea that blacks are inferior and that the Ku Klux Klan that killed Gus was not necessarily a bad thing. This would definitely cause white audience to see that group and this idea as a positive movement which is what cause the historical time period to be even a more mess.
• Griffith wants the viewer to feel pity for the family and the south. The use of the iris (zooming in and out) on the family showed that they were scared and very emotional. They decor showed that they were probably a lower middle class family in the south.
• Wants to show us their relationship considering the time period this takes place in.

• Camerons=The South. Evil forces that are the source of conflicts are black Americans-Black American who are of mixed percentage (Molato Quandroon)
• Stonemans=The North
• The film in a nut shell