Journal 4 - Maggie Weeks

Based on your reading of Gee's article, what keywords do you notice him using? In other words, what terms does he focus on? how does he define these terms? what are the connections among them? What connections do you see between our class discussion about genre, audience, and knowledge and Gee's article on discourse?

Gee very often discusses discourse, acquisition, learning, and literacy. Primarily Gee discusses discourse and discourse communities. He describes discourse as a group of individuals who are associated through the way they think, speak and act. Members of a discourse community can identify themselves as a member when they have a thorough enough knowledge of what needs to be known to be a member of the community. An example of this is a member of a sport who understands the vocabulary and actions that are used in the sport, and can be understood by all who have a knowledge of the sport and how it works. He defines learning as a way of obtaining knowledge through the form of specifically being taught to know a specific skill. Acquisition is naturally the same thing as learning, it's the skill of obtaining or understanding the knowledge of a a habit or quality. Literacy I define as the ability to read, write, and understand a language. Gee discusses many of the same things that we discuss in class about genre, audience, and knowledge.

Next, consider the discourse community that you are interested in researching for project two. What is the discourse community? What "ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting" (Gee p. 29) distinguish this discourse community from others? How does one become a member of this discourse community? What role does writing seem to play in this discourse community?

I'm interested in research Accounting or more broadly, finance. In finance, there is various discourse communities that use their own language for the different actions that occur withing them. Depending on the type of accounting or financial calculating, the actions are very different. The thinking is also different because the way of calculating or determining the different ways to solve issues. The accounting discourse commmunities is very different than others because the vocabulary used in the community is specific to only accountants, not many others who haven't studied accounting can understand or comprehend it. One becomes a member of this discourse community by studying accounting thoroughly enough to get a complete understand of the language and actions used, in order to communicate with others in the discourse community, other accountants. In this particular discourse community, writing is used to explain reports, communicate with others and describe things more simply to clients.
Finally, what interests you about this particular discourse community, and how can you use that interest to develop your research project? In other words, think about why you want to become a member of this discourse community and what you need to know and be able to do in order to join it.
What interests me about this discourse community is my interest and desire to become an account or something within the finance department after I graduate from Florida State. I'm interested in learning more about my desired profession, and the language they use as well as what they have to do, I believe the interest I have in accounting will cause me to research the topic much more thoroughly. I want to become a member of this community because I enjoy math, and accoutning is a stable and interesting profession that I wish to be a part of some day. I'm interested in researching the various things and courses I must take and complete in order to become an accountant.