Discourse & Dillard

After I read and thought about page 106, I couldn’t help but think of how cool language is. I find it so fascinating how we have a word for everything, including words that we describe such as when she described the birds that she saw and their songs. We all somehow know what those words mean (at least those who speak that same language) and can even get a rough image of what that word means.

Sometimes I find myself staring at a word like “food” and I think deeply about it. I think about how strange it actually sounds, and about other people who don’t speak English and what those people think about that word (Like this video for instance). I think about how society constructed meaning to go with each word that we read so that way we can understand what we’re reading. I think of how you, yes you, can understand what I’m saying and to some level interpret it in a similar way that I am interpreting it right now. I think of how you and I are even understanding to some level what I’m even talking about (at least those who are Writing majors). I think of how the words that we write in this class, such as for narration in a feature, speak to a specific audience and what those words are. How do the word choices and sentence structure speak to the target audience? In what specific ways do they vary if our target audience was different?

When I thought about those types of questions while reading Dillard, I also thought about my ASA. Within my ASA, I found it interesting how my accommodated pieces held a conversational tone in which mimicked oral communication. It then made me think of our features and how they’ll also share similar sentence structure/format/word choices to other features. No, those things won’t be the same, but I think they’ll all have a similar formula that they abide by to capture a specific audience.

Now by the time I read to page 220 I’ve come to realize that Dillard is sort of dancing around the topic of Discourse. I suppose the idea of Discourses also came into my mind partly due to my LIT 382 class. In there, we’re currently exploring the discourse of adolescence and how that’s a cultural construct. It made me think about since oral communication and literature books share/express ideologies of adolescence then perhaps that same principle may apply to non-literature works too like these features and why we have to read things like Hancock to guide our writing to accommodate our audience.

I’m opting to not write option 1 for our feature, but instead I’m going to focus on option 2, which is the critical analysis. If there’s one thing I can take away from this class in addition to exploring ideas and making personal discoveries is that I definitely don’t want to dabble in journalism or newspaper writing as a career. I find that I love thinking about and analyzing language. It’s probably the coolest thing ever, and every time I think about language and how it came to be, it makes me so incredibly happy. In a lot of ways this thinking game beats my minor even though I love my minor to pieces.

Now going back to the idea of Discourse, I think it’s so interesting how when it comes to Writing/Literature classes and my psychology classes that I’m always in a different mindset. For my psychology classes I read the chapters and take notes on passages that I think are important. Then about a week before a test my professors will (usually) post a study guide on D2L (or at least give one out during lecture) and I’ll then use that to make study cards to study with during the week before my exam. For my Writing/Literature classes, however, it’s different. In contrast to psychology, the learning is more laid back and is more of a playground where I get to think about ideas in a more malleable way that isn’t present in my psychology classes. I also find that I value and share similar feelings with my psychology classmates that differ from my writing/lit major friends. For example one of my psych friends also experiences how people think we’re analyzing them just because we’re getting a degree in psychology (that’s not the case for me at all – especially since this is just my minor and not my major)

And if I think about it in a less broad sense: My focus is different for all the pieces we’ve written in this class because the target audiences are different. (Are there numerous categories of Discourse?) I only have a basic understanding of Discourse, but I do have a general sense of it from WRIT 205 and my LIT 382 class. Currently I wonder how exactly the discourse communities vary from target audience to target audience in all the pieces we’ve written.

Ah, well, I best start on that Discourse article that I've sort of put off. …. :)

P.S. I like that even when I think this post will be shorter than usual, it seems to end up being between 700 and 1000-ish words.

Also, I’m going to try to make another blog post later that connects Discourse with context, certainty/uncertainty, objectivity, truth, interpretation, visual meanings and other words that have come up in this class. Hopefully I’ll have time for it – I think it’ll be fun to dive into.