Scott Wortman
WRT 105
Unit 2 Essay
28 Oct 2013
A discourse community, at the most basic level, is a group of people who share a
common goal, who share basic values, and who communicate through the same channels.
Swales, linguist and author of “The Concept of Discourse Community”, further explained
discourse by attributing specific characteristics to them. For the purposes of this essay, these are
the relevant descriptions. “A discourse community has a broadly agreed upon set of
goals”(Swales, 471), “A discourse community has acquired a specific lexis”(473), and “a
discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content
and discoursal expertise”(473). The discourse communities I have chosen to discuss in this essay
are that of Air Force ROTC and the community of undergraduate students at Syracuse
University. Although members of ROTC are also members of the undergraduate community,
there are many important distinctions to be made between the two groups, and I believe that they
interact in a way that reveals a lot about the relationship between the military and the nation as a
whole, which is often strained. Unfortunately the general public’s views of the military and its
members is sometimes negative. As members of the Air Force ROTC discourse, we have the
opportunity to present a more positive view of the military in our relationship with the discourse
of the university as a whole.
Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps is a commissioning program for college
students, with over 140 active detachments throughout the country. There are many requirements
and responsibilities involved with being a member of Air Force ROTC. We are held to a much
higher standard than an average college student. The core values of the Air Force are as follows -
integrity first, service before self, and excellence in all we do. As members of Air Force ROTC,
we seek to live out these values everyday. What this means for us in a practical sense is that we
have to avoid doing anything that could portray a bad image for the Air Force and the United
States armed forces as a whole, and that we must strive to be good people. The Air Force puts
integrity first in our core values for a reason. For us to function as a fighting force, members
need to have integrity at all times. Airmen can’t be the type of people to cut corners, or do sloppy
work. Every job in the Air Force has direct and lasting effects on the lives of other airmen. For
example, if an airman is too lazy to perform an aircraft safety inspection and decides to declare
an aircraft safe for flight anyway, he is putting the lives of a pilot and crew in danger.
Ann Johns, linguist, discusses the concept of the discourse community in her article
“Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice.” One factor she identifies as being a part
of a discourse community is an associated “cost of affiliation”. She stated “If students want to
become affiliated with academic discourse communities,...they may have to make considerable
sacrifices.”(Johns, 511). She also says “They often must drop, or at least diminish in importance,
their affiliations to their home cultures in order to take on the values, language and genres of
their disciplinary culture”(511). Upon joining a discourse, you are expected to pick up the values
and beliefs of that discourse. It is part of what makes a discourse community a discourse
community. You certainly have to do this to be a part of Air Force ROTC. Upon joining the Air
Force, you learn very quickly the importance of the core values, and you take seriously the need
to incorporate them into your life. Further, you have to make significant sacrifices in order to
maintain your membership. You have to plan to spend most of your day friday doing ROTC
related things. Leadership lab, cadet training exercises and squadron meetings take up hours
each. Plan on adding an Aerospace Studies class to what is already a very busy course schedule,
and don’t forget the mandatory physical training sessions to attend. If you want to stand out as a
cadet, you have to plan to participate in at least one of the many ROTC extra-curricular
activities. These include Arnold Air Society, Drill Team, and Pershing Rifles. Participation in
any of these will add hours and hours to an already intimidating weekly commitment. Consider
members of ROTC are preparing to be part of a profession in which one has to be prepared to lay
down their life for country, and it becomes clear that the cost of affiliation to this discourse is
particularly high.
Further, the discourse community of Air Force ROTC, and indeed the military as a
whole, has certain ways of speaking as well as channels of communication that simply aren’t
found in the civilian world. The average civilian does not know the meaning of commonly used
acronyms such as ftx, aafes, cob, nlt, llab, v/r, abu, ptu. There is no official formal for written
communication in the civilian world, such as exists in the military world. The Oxford
Companion to American Military history says the following regarding military jargon. “The
ability to manipulate and control and insider linguistic form identifies one as a member of the
institution, forging an automatic link between those who have the same ability, while reinforcing
the distinction between insiders and outsiders. Indeed, military service has it’s own jargon,
acronyms, phrases. Not only do different services use different terms, sometimes the same word
can mean different things to different services.”(Chambers, 381)
Perhaps the most obvious identification of a member of Air Force ROTC is the uniform.
It immediately identifies members as being part of not only the detachment here on campus but
the military as a whole. It is unmistakeable. It has been said that one could pick a military officer
out of a crowd simply by the way he carries himself. I would say that one could pick an ROTC
cadet out from a group of civilian college students in the same manner. Part of being in Air Force
ROTC is adopting this “identity kit” that includes all of the working language used by military
members, as well as the military uniforms and mentality. According to James Gee, author of
“Literacy, Discourse and Linguistics” and linguist, “a discourse community is a kind of ‘identity
kit’ which comes complete with a costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often
write”(Gee, 484). There are very few communities with as clear of an “identity kit” as ROTC.
We are easily identified by our uniforms, and clearly set apart by our values and means of
communicating. An Air Force ROTC detachment on a college campus “hits the nail on the head”
when it comes to Gee’s definition of discourse community.
The average college student follows a certain stereotype. They like to wake up around 10
am, maybe skip a class or two to bounce back from a hangover, procrastinate and end up
working on a project last minute. They like to party, they like to smoke, and they tend to be
ideologically liberal. In many ways, the average ROTC cadet is the opposite of the average
college students. We are up at 6 am for physical training. We like to accomplish tasks on
schedule, and we don’t like to skip class. We, for the most part, stick to the Air Force’s zero
tolerance policy for drug use and underage alcohol possession and consumption. And
ideologically, we tend to be more conservative.
These differences create tension between members of Air Force ROTC and the student
population as a whole. This tension is exacerbated by the fact that it is not uncommon for ROTC
cadets to be proud of what they do, to be proud to wear the uniform and proud to have a future in
the military. Civilian college students often misinterpret this pride as hubris. A suitable, concrete
example of this tension arose a few weeks following the start of the semester. On a friday
afternoon, a flight of Air Force ROTC cadets were out on the quad, working on drill and
ceremonies. These particular cadets were wearing the Airman Battle Uniform, the Air Force’s
camouflage uniform, more commonly known as ABUs. As they were marching, a civilian
student took a picture and attached it to a tweet reading “Syracuse University is being
invaded...this is the quad, not a warzone”. ROTC cadets making their presence known on
campus by working out and drilling in busy areas leads to a certain heightened tension between
cadets and civilian students.
There are many college students who understand and have respect for the military, and
those who have chosen to serve. There are still many who don’t understand our values, our
choices, our lifestyle. They see the military in a different way than we do - they don’t see us as
selfless, rather they see us as people who do wrong, who kill the innocent, who are just an arm of
carrying out the political agenda of the government. Although less prevalent among the general
populace, there are still many civilians who have similar feelings about the military. We have an
opportunity as Air Force ROTC cadets to present a more positive view of the military, with the
hope that those who support the military will look upon us proudly, and those who do not
support the military will reconsider. People will continue to see the military and therefore ROTC
in a negative light unless as cadets we represent the armed forces in a positive manner.
Works Cited
Chambers, John Whiteclay., and Fred Anderson. The Oxford Companion to American
Military History. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.
Gee, James P. "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics." Writing about Writing: A College Reader.
By Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. N. pag. Print.
Johns, Ann M. "Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice."
Writing about Writing: A College Reader. By Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs.
Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. N. pag. Print.
Swales, John. “The Concept of Discourse Community.”
Writing about Writing: A College Reader. By Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs.
Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. N. pag. Print.