Mona Alkarsh
ENG 3010/Response 3
Joseph Harris’ main argument in “The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing” is how we can
improve the definition of a discourse community. He also states that there is a problem with the term
community in that it doesn’t include negative aspects and is never criticized or questioned. His solution
to “discourse communities” is polyphony/repositioning. That is that each individual is a combination of
different communities and ideas and one is able to take part or be a part of a new discourse community
by readjusting or repositioning their skills that they learned or acquired from other discourse
communities to fit the new discourse community that they are never leaving one discourse community
for the next. This is also what he means when he says, “One does not step cleanly and wholly from one
community to another, but is caught instead in an always changing mix of dominant, residual, and
emerging discourses”.
According to Joseph Harris, when in a discourse community one can improve, reject, and take
part in a discourse community. Gee however, states that one can only participate in a discourse
community when one is fully in that community and Swales states that one learns the ways of
communication in that community.
Three discourse communities that I am a part of are English, Psychology, and family. The goal of
my psychology 3060 class/community is to understand the mind and learning and how they work
together, whereas my English 3010 class’ goal is to learn how to write a paper that will communicate to
an audience of readers in a given discourse community with different positions and norms. My family or
primary discourse community goal is to be there for each other. I reposition between these
communities quite easily however some things such as things happening in my psychology or English
discourse community are different and at times difficult to comprehend by my primary discourse.
Another is that one deals more with writing where the other is just reading/ studying and understanding
certain concepts and the last is primarily at times a whole different language. There are some things
that I do bring from my other communities to my writing class and that is the ability to communicate or
be open and aware of the different communities so that my writings are not so biased towards one
group.
There is also some things that hinder my assimilation of my writing class at least my current writing class
and that is how I have been taught to write whether it be in my psychology discourse or other English
discourse communities is quite different than my current English class.