Samuel Kelemen
Dr. Alanna Frost
EH101
12/02/2013
Definition Essay
I am researching the writing of Computer Science Graduate Students for
my final project. More specifically, I am researching the way that Graduate
Students of this focus write research articles. I’ve discovered some of the writing
done from a selection of research article on computer science from graduate
students at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. I will need to know many
specific and unique terms for my research and I will need to define some words
that I have come across, and will need to use in my research essay. These
terms are discourse community, technical writing, and also structures of
language. These terms are very important for my research and specific to the
group of Academics that I will be researching.
The first term I will define is a discourse community. John Swales defines
a Discourse Community as a group that meets the following six requirements:
common goals, participatory mechanisms, information exchange, communityspecific genres, highly specialized terminology and high general level of
expertise. In Intertextuality and the Discourse Community, James Porter defines
a discourse community as, “a local and temporary constraining system, defined
by a body of texts (or more generally, practices) that are unified by a common
focus. A discourse community is a textual system with stated and unstated
conventions, a vital history, and mechanisms for wielding power, institutional
hierarchies, and vested interests. I will be using the term, “discourse
community”, to describe the community of computer science and computer
engineering graduate students and researches at the University of Alabama in
Huntsville. The computer science, computer engineering, and information
science graduate students and researchers are a discourse community, because
the students in these categories are unified in a common focus, have stated and
unstated conventions, and share in an information exchange via writing with
highly specialized terminology and level of expertise.
The second term I will define is technical writing. Technical writing is
defined as “a broad field including any form of communication that exhibits one or
more of the following characteristics: (1) communicating about technical or
specialized topics, such as computer applications, medical procedures, or
environmental regulations; (2) communicating through technology, such as web
pages, help files, or social media sites; or (3) providing instructions about how to
do something, regardless of the task's technical nature”, by The Society of
Technical Communications. According to Wikipedia, “Technical writing is a form
of technical communication used in a variety of technical and occupational fields,
such as computer hardware and software, engineering, chemistry, aeronautics
and astronautics, robotics, finance, consumer electronics, and biotechnology.”
The definition I will use will be based off of The Society of Technical
Communications’ first characteristic. Detailed communications about specialized
topics, in this case computer science, computer engineer, and information
science. Graduate students and researches are technical writers, because the
write highly detailed articles on generally highly technical topics, for other
members of their discourse community.
Structures of language are important for computer scientist, engineers, and
researchers. The languages structures that I am discussing are grammar,
syntax, and semantics. In the discourse community of these students, the terms
listed previously have different meanings than are generally associated with the
terms. All languages include these elemental structures of language. Therefore,
mathematics and computer code have these elements, as well. Grammar is a
set of production rules for strings in a formal language. The rules describe how
to form strings from the language's alphabet that are valid according to the
language's syntax. Grammar does not describe the meaning of the strings or
what can be done with the strings (sentences), only the form. Syntax describes
in which order the string will be organized. Computers can only recognize code
and words in a limited number of word or string orders. Semantics is the branch
of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. In computer science, semantics
are the words in the code used to create programs. Chomsky is a famous
psychologist who studies language structure and learning.
These terms are important terms used in the computer science, computer
engineering, and information science fields. Researchers and Graduate
Students in these majors will use these terms, or I will use these terms to
describe the discourse community.