Discourse Community Reflection Paper

Not too long ago, I was part of a group in my English 101 class. We were assigned with researching and writing a paper on a discourse community of our choice. The community we decided to focus our work on was the Edge at Mason, a group that helps bring people together through team-building strategies. The need that our work was attempting to respond to was the need to come up with a solution to a potential problem within the discourse community. This problem arose from the lack of any formal supervisior or scribe during the community's half-hour discussions following each day. These discussions are meant to provide information about various things that went on during the community's normal operation hours, however, without any formal supervision, there is no official way to document any important suggestions or information presented during these meetings. As such, our work was supposed to explain how the community could resolve any potential problems in their
We spent a handful of days gathering information and analyzing it. We then needed to write about our findings in order to discuss what genres and materials were researched while finding out more about the discourse community. We also needed a way to disclose what we had found out about any potential problems that may have arisen due to any troubles in some form of communication between members of that discourse community. The work we had done was done so in a classroom setting, for our English 101 course. We were given the resaerch assignment as a group assignment. As a group, we were expected to conduct research on the Edge at Mason and compose a formal paper on the genres we researched and any protential problems we found within the discourse community. Such a setting also made it obvious that certain people would be expected to read our work. Such expectations shaped the way we wrote our