Major Paper 3: Communities of Practices and Their Genres

Major Paper 3: Community of Practices and Their Genres

Purpose

In Ann Johns’ article “Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict, and Diversity” she discusses some types of communities that you may join in your life. Particularly she breaks communities down into different types -- social, professional, academic, political and recreational-- and then asks her audience to consider questions, such as “Why do individuals join social and professional communities? What appears to be the relationships between communities and their genres? Are there levels of community?” just to name a few.

As we near the end of the semester, we turn our focus from the writing you have done in the past and the writing you are currently participating in, to the writing that will be required of you in the future. To do this, we will research a community of practice to analyze how someone becomes a productive member of that community. This is your opportunity to study your major at UCF, a career you are interested in joining, or a hobby you’d like to pursue.

Task

For your final Major Paper, you'll write an IMRaD research paper that investigates the genres your chosen community of practice uses to accomplish their goals. In order to do this, you will:

• Choose a community of practice that you anticipate joining in the future
  • Once you choose the community, think about Ann Johns’ article and describe the community for your audience. As researchers interested in communities of practice and genre, what information would be useful for us to know?
  • This will require you to collect secondary sources about the community of practice you are focusing on to learn about the way the community functions, how long they have been established, and other useful information.
    
    
• Choose a research question about how some element of writing and communication works within the community of practice.
  • Your research question should be a "how" or "why" question about how members use writing and/or communication within the community. This question will be developed early in the unit and it will guide the primary data you collect and the argument your research paper ends up making.
    
    

• Identify and collect genre(s) used by the community
  • You're required to collect four examples of genres used by the community. You can either choose to collect two examples of two different genres used by your chosen community of practice or collect four examples of one genre used by the community.
  • To identify the genres to collect you'll want to think about the following questions: What kind of writing do they usually do? What kind of texts do they work with? How do genres do work in the community of practice?
  • In your paper, you'll conduct a thorough genre analysis of the identified genre(s) using a provided worksheet as a guide.
    
    
• Develop claims and sub-claims based on your research
  • You'll answer your research question to create an argument about the community you've researched. This argument will be supported by your genre analysis and readings from the course.
    
    
• Write up your research in an IMRaD research paper
  
  • The IMRaD is a genre of research papers that separates the paper into 4 sections. You'll begin your paper with an Introduction that discusses the community of practice you've chosen to research and what research question has guided your project. Then you'll write a justification of the Methods you used to answer that research question. In your Results section you'll summarize and analyze the texts you've collected. Finally, in your Discussion section you'll answer your research question and defend it's important with evidence from the genre analyses and course readings.

Criteria