Devitt

SUMMARY
In this article these three authors dive into the discourse community topic and define in their own opinions what and how genres are used. Devitt goes in to describe the topic of discourse communities and how the definition is always changing. Also she discusses how in court you are given instructions that are only understood by those in the court system. Words may have different meanings in this discourse community than how the rest of the world understands them. Author Bawarshi discusses these languages and texts that are used for us to understand the discourse community and it's purpose. Also, Bawarshi breaks these genres into different pieces and how genre can be conflicting towards each other. Then author Reiff describes genres as "keys" that teach us how to participate in these communities. Her definition of genre is more of a map that guides you through these communities.

CONNECTIONS
I connected this article with Swales article. Although, we have read many articles about discourse communities. Swales article describes the steps that one would have to go through to become part of a discourse community like the authors in this article they break this down even more and mainly focus on genres and what they mean to the discourse community.

DEFINITION
Bawarshi describes genre as the language used in the discourse community and how one learns this language. While Swales never really goes into defining genre since he believes his readers should already understand it. I think both authors agree that genres are mainly used for communication between the discourse community. However, Bawarshi describes how genres can often contradict each other and can be different things. Genres are not set in stone, they change based on the discourse community itself. I personally think that Bawarshi's definition is more suitable for a classroom setting since language is always changing and the way we communicate in the classroom will always alter.

OPINIONS
I liked reading this article since it was broken into three different articles by three different authors. It gave different points of view as well as different opinions on this subject. They also gave different examples that I could imagine personally.