In regards to my studies of my discourse community, I’ve found that hearing
the individual stories of a singular individual can say a lot about said
community. I conducted an interview with one of the experts included in the
threshold, and I asked questions regarding her stories of the community. My
community was my school's newspaper, and I’ve already done some
observing of my own, however I was recently prompted to schedule an
interview, and it helped me learn a lot both about her and the community
she belongs to.
I've found truth in the statement of individual literacy in a discourse
community. Each lesson a person has ever learned can be spread once they
join a community, and it goes beyond that. Memories, experiences, lectures,
and more all are pieces of knowledge that we as people can assimilate and
put to use with our communities. My interviewee talked about how she had
already had a strong fixation on English and reading, and that it helped her
get into writing as well. As a lower tier member of the community, I can say
from personal experience that I have indeed learned grammatical– and
other– advice from her relating to our common goal of writing material.
The relation to that feeling of “here's what i've learned,” and the “here's
what you should take from it,” are both very strong. Taking acquired,
feasible knowledge is only important to those who choose to spread their
lesson learned. Without it, there's no knowledge to gain, and that expert can
no longer be called an expert. In addition, the discourse community will slow
down in its intake of information/data and the community will only be a little
successful in comparison to its potential.