MLK "I Have a Dream" 50th Anniversary

This week during class we went over last week’s article, "Materiality and Genre". Apparently, I misunderstood the law part of the article. According to my classmates, the discourse community is not among the jurors, but from what the lawyer is communicating to the jurors. For example a lawyer might use “big words” that might confuse the jurors to mislead them and use more “elementary” words for something that will benefit his case and win the jurors over. I’m still wondering if there can be a discourse community among jurors that can also negatively affect the verdict of a case.

Wednesday August 28^th was the 50^th anniversary of the great Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I was very happy when Professor Dadurka told the class that would be watching the ground breaking speech. During this speech the class had to analyze the rhetorical strategies Dr. King used to make his speech more effective. I noticed that he used a lot of repetition throughout his entire speech. The first time Dr. King used repetition was when he was speaking about the “one hundred years” that African Americans were emancipated but were still oppressed by the color of their skin. The use of repetition made the people realized “wow, it’s really been this long since we’ve been freed, and nothing has changed”. This realization inspires the people to take their rights into their own hands as they rightfully deserve. As you can see, use of repetition also plays a large part on the people’s emotions, logos. I enjoyed this class very much and I learned a lot. I really like that my classmates and I can voice our opinions on a certain topic. LOVE IT!

Discourse Communities

August 21 was my first ENC 1102 class. I enjoyed my first class very much and I found my professor to be very interesting. All college students know that the first class is usually a class that's pointless because the professor just goes over the syllabus and students zone out. Surprisingly, I learned a lot during this class. The topic that interested me the most was "discourse communities". This was a term I had never had never heard of before. According to an unknown site “a discourse community is a group of communicators with a common goal or interest that adopts certain preferred ways of participating in public discussion.” In simpler terms a discourse community is a way a group of people, doctors, teachers, musicians, etc., communicate with each other. To me it’s when a group of friends have “inside jokes” that other people don’t understand or have to learn to understand. Another example  that came to mind during class is how my Trinidadian family communicates with each other. For example , when my mom asks someone “you put on weight?” or “you gettin’ fat?” that might seem offensive to someone of another culture but to her some people look better with more weight on and she is just making a friendly observation. There are many different types of discourse communities, and I’m learning to understand those of law, medicine, and pedagogy (teaching). I’m very excited to learn the different ways these professionals communicate through text. I truly hope that my understanding of discourse community is correct or else I’m going to be really confused while I’m reading this article. lol