Introduction
Both James Paul Gee’s Literacy, discourse, and linguistics: Introduction and Gail Hawisher & Cynthia Selfe’s Becoming literate in the information age: Cultural ecologies and the literacies of technology both address the role discourse plays in our writing and how it varies. James Paul Gee suggests that there are four types of discourse: Primary, Secondary, Dominant, and Non-dominant. There is some overlap between the groups so you can have, for example, Dominant Primary discourse. Gail Hawisher & Cynthia Selfe address the role of discourse and how important it is to be able to identify discourse.
Primary v. Secondary
The way I understand Primary and Secondary discourse, as described by Paul Gee, sounds like code-switching. Primary discourse is the way we normally talk and the form of discourse we are most fluent with that you use at home with family, i.e. A.A.V.E. while Secondary discourse is the discourse we use that is more appropriate for the situation. Despite my most common form of discourse being AAVE it wouldn’t be appropriate to use that kind of language with my boss or a professor per se. Instead, I speak and write in a more formal and dramatically correct way. This goes both ways though because if I was with my friends I wouldn’t respond to them as if I were answering a question on an exam.
Dominant v. Non-dominant
The difference between Dominant and Non-dominant discourse was the most difficult for me to understand. The way I imagine it is that if I were to write an article for the NYT about the comic book industry as a whole and the effect it has on the economy, that would be the dominant discourse. I would be writing the essay for the NYT because it benefits me financially. The Non-dominant discourse would be the topic of comics because it doesn’t benefit me but it does build my relationship with the comic community.
Identity
The way we use discourse is highly dependent on the group or community we are trying to appeal to or are a part of, this should go without saying. If I were writing about dinosaurs the verbiage I would use would be very different depending on if my audience was a group of kindergarteners as opposed to a group of paleontologists. With the paleontologists, I would likely use the dinosaur’s scientific names and more biological descriptors, like bone structure, skin texture, etc. On the other hand, if I were writing to the kindergarteners I would talk about their colors and diet, and use their common names. This ability to identify the differences between the two groups, as proposed by Hawisher and Selfe, is a necessary ability of anyone in the writing community. As we continue to write we will continue identifying more writing styles as they pertain to certain communities and as we write for a wider variety of communities we will learn more specialized discourse that we can use in our writing.
Leave a Reply