Discourse Communities & Problems

Create a little context by talking about the discourse community and problem you decided to study for Writing Project #2. For this step, compose a short paragraph (3-5 sentences) that explains your discourse community and lays out the problem you plan to work with.

Step 2

reate Your Research Question

For this step:

1. Write down three questions you have about your discourse community and/or problem.
   Remember: your objective in Writing Project #2 is to collect and annotate resources that help us better understand your discourse community and problem. So: what do you want to better understand? (Make sure you phrase this list as questions!)
2. Revise one of your questions.
   Use the information in “Characteristics of a Good Research Question” to make sure that your question is complex, clear, focused, concise, and arguable. (Your question will be evaluated based on these criteria!) 
   *Note: if you don’t think your question needs revision, pick another one!
3. Write down your revised question.

Remember, your research question can change as you continue to research, and you don’t need to stick to exactly what you come up with here!

Step 3

Create a Research Strategy*

Scholars have many, many different strategies for approaching their research, and there is no “one size fits all” research strategy. But there are some strategies that we might consider “best practices.” One such strategy is deciding where to look for research on a given topic. Or put differently: scholars take time to consider what texts, communities, and spaces can help answer research questions.

In Explore – Discourse Communities, you read Cassie Hemstrom and Kathy Anders’ “Creating, Using, and Sharing Information in Research Communities.” Research communities, Hemstrom and Anders tell us, use “methods of communication in order to share information and offer commentary with/to each other” (p. 186). Research communities are exactly the kinds of communities that can help you answer your research questions! Further, Writing Project #2 requires three (3) of your sources to be scholarly–to come from, in other words, research communities! So, in this step, you’ll identify scholarly disciplines that could potentially help you answer the question you revised in Step 3.

For this part of the assignment, you will do the following: 

1. Write down two (2) scholarly disciplines that you think can help you understand your chosen discourse community and or/problem.
2. Explain (in 2-3 sentences each), why you think that each scholarly discipline could help you better understand your chosen discourse community and/or problem. Be specific! Your submission will be evaluated (in part) based on how well you explain why you think this research community could help you with Writing Project #2.
3. Write down, for each discipline, two (2) scholarly journals–places where members of that discipline regularly share their knowledge in writing.

*You will develop more research strategies in Module 3.