Writer's Journal #3

In the video we watched in class it talked about discourse community and what that meant. It talks about how discourse communities are a group of people who share common behaviors or come in ways of working with language. It mentioned how many of us belong to a variety of different discourse communities. I belong to a couple myself. I belong to a discourse community at work, in my personal life at home with my family, with my other student peers, and my group chat that I have with my best friends. These are different groups that I spend using different languages with. My work discourse community involves more professional language and more accounting terms. Then my family, my student peers, and my best friends each have their own different types of slings I use.

In my job at TSS Accounting, I work as a tax resolution manager. This is someone who helps people manage IRS debt. When clients are around, we generally speak in a highly professional manner. We use accounting terms like tax preparation, bookkeeping, and software terms like Logic and Pitbull. When clients are not around we use similar terminology but more relaxed tones and words. At home with my boyfriend and I we generally use very relaxed and unprofessional terminology. For example sometimes he calls me baby which would not be something we would say out in public. With my friends we sometimes use things like LOL and different texting terminology. With my friends I generally talk to them via text message. Sometimes we do hang out but generally we are too busy to. These are all unique to their own discourse community because we wouldn’t talk like that to anybody else but just in that group of people.

I entered into that discourse community by first talking in a very professional way and then slowly we got more and more comfortable with each other and we realized what the norms of that group was. For example at work I was dealing with a lot of clients which had a higher level of professionalism versus my friends who I see regularly and who have known every aspect of me and who I am as a person. At work though my clients do not see me for just as a friend but they see me as someone that they can go to for support and help and a different level of professionalism. It takes time to build a discourse community I believe and it’s something that we kind of have to learn because if you do not participate and get a custom to it then you’ll stand out and seem like an oddball and generally you won’t make very many friends.