Response To: Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers by Tony Mirabelli

I think this essay is a good example of a discourse community essay. It is centered around the community of restaurant servers and how serving is a much more skilled profession than its perceived as. The essay had a very intriguing opening. Mirabelli introduces the website bitterwaitress.com and its context. He shows a response to a post on the site that strongly criticizes servers as unskilled and unintelligent. He then goes on to describe responses to the critics comment that show how near sighted, hypocritical, and one-sided his comment is. This sets up the purpose of the essay as to show how the profession of serving food is much harder to be good at than it seems. He then goes on to talk about literacies and how they're defined. I did not like that section because it seem unrelated a bit and was a bit boring. He includes a section to describe his method of obtaining his information. He became a waiter to earn some money while at college at a restaurant called Lou's Restaurant. This is where he did his observation of the servers. He describes the restaurant as a diner and he introduces his coworkers John and Harvey. John is a very experienced waiter working as a server for ten years unlike Harvey who has been job hoping and has just joined the staff of Lou's two weeks before Mirabelli joined. After describing Lou's Restaurant Mirabelli begins to explain how a waiter can take advantage of the menu and other things to get the customer to view him as useful and then get a better tip. Mirabelli uses dialogues of him and his coworkers to convey good and bad serving behaviors and techniques. He says that you must be proactive as a server to server to satisfy the customer and try to meet their desires. The menu is mentioned as a tool to help the server give the customers options. There also techniques Mirabelli describes that the server can use to persuade the customer to buy a certain item from the menu. He describes many more techniques that actually portray servers as very smart and the profession as very difficult to master. I think the essay is very successful in achieving its desired effect as it did change my view on the difficulty of being a server.

I would like to shape my essay like this one because like servers skateboarders are criticized as being troubled youth or juvenile. I might incorporate that into my current theme of skateboarders of being different but still remaining to the same group. This essay also kind of reminded me that an important thing to mention is what makes a person an effective member of their desired discourse community.

Discourse Communities

For my discourse community I'm going to choose skateboarding because I kind of already understand why and how they're in this group.Skateboarding is a very interesting and very big group. Its hard not to find a skateboarder in any urban or suburban area. Im going to follow a few of my friends that skateboard around campus and to a few skateparks. I think this will be very easy for me because I have already spent seven years of my life centered around skateboarding.
Skateboarding as a discourse community:
- All Skateboarders want is to get better or have fun skateboarding. Some skaters want to become professional one day but that is extremely hard.
- Most skaters communicate through text or cell phones. Also there are many skate videos and skate tutorials online.
- Online is a huge resource for any skater trying to learn. Also skateparks great places where you can find other skaters who can you show you how to do something.
- There is an entire language to skateboarding do to the hundreds of tricks there are. There is also a kind of surfer dude slang adaptation that some skaters have.
- There is always older more experienced skaters who are willing to teach younger people if they ask.

The reason I chose skateboarding is because I feel like I could get people to like and understand skateboarders. In the public eye many people see skateboarders as a menace. With this project hopefully I can change that.

Response to: The Concept of Discourse Communities

This reading was hard but I understood it. This passage explains what a discourse community is. A discourse community is explained misty like a clique. Its a group of people with a common interests who have similar tendencies and all communicate with each other because of their similarities. It also briefly talks about Speech communities which is like a discourse community with out the common interests. For example, new yorkers all have a similar way they speak and may even act similar sometimes. But New Yorkers all have different cultures and interests. Discourse communities will also have their own version of speech but does not make it a speech community because this speech they have is common to them and relates to their interests. Another example, Skateboarding is a discourse community. Skateboarders may talk the same and may not but they all have a similar knowledge of skateboarding words. The six defining characteristics of discourse communities mentioned in the passage are:

1. Discourse communities has a broadly agreed set of common goals.
2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunications among its members.
3. A discourse community uses participatory mechanism primarily to provide information and feedback.
4. A discourse community uses multiple genres in communication.
5. Discourse communities also have specific lexis (Its own words)
6. A discourse community has a threshold level level of members with suitable degree of relevant content and expertise.

I liked the reading because throughout the reading I thought about the discourse communities i know and may belong too. I wonder if you can divide discourse communities into smaller parts because some communities can be huge. I look forward to studying discourse communities more.

Response To: Genre Theory by Deborah Dean

This reading was hard for me because I never thought genres were that complex. I always thought a genre was the type of book you were reading like science fiction, non-fiction, or a biography. I really thought it was interesting once I read further.
Dean first starts off telling us what a genre is, which helped me because I wasn't clear on what they were. She tells us that genres are not about literary texts anymore but instead genre can have a social aspect. Imagine how you talk around your friends then imagine how you talk to your employer. The different ways you talk are different genres of social interaction. Dean also says that Genres are more than forms. You can't define a genre because there are so many different aspects that contribute to a genre. Genres are also not fixed, Dean states. A genre can be change by a certain event. For example, the communication between spouses would be different after one lies or cheats on the other.
Then Dean goes on to characterize genres so it can be easier to understand what a genre is. The characterizations of genres are social, rhetorical, dynamic, historical, cultural, situational, and ideological. Genre can be social because you talk to certain people different ways like I mentioned before. Genres can also be rhetorical because they establish and enforce relationships. A leader has to talk like a leader to assert himself as the leader. If a leader talked with a tone of a friend or a follower then his followers will feel like he's not a very good leader. The common change in genres makes it easy to understand that genres can be dynamic. Also history can effect a genre. If your friend has often lied to you, that history is going to affect your genre of communicating with him. Culture has a huge effect on your genre. Many cultures have different ways of communicating and they definitely speak and write with a genre unique to there culture. For example, many languages have different contexts they speak in so learning a new language can be difficult cause it may have different genres than your first language. Genres can also be varied on the situation your in. Imagine going to your friends birthday party and talking with the people there, would you act the same way at a classy charity event? Finally genres vary highly on your ideas. A democratic politician would have a completely different genre than a dictator. They both have different ideas and they will communicate differently because of these ideas.
 After all that Dean goes on to explain the genre theories. The theories are about how genres are constructed. There are three different theories how genres should be developed and they are genres as text, genres as rhetoric, and genres as practice. The genres as text theorist look directly at the genre and what makes it that genre. Theorist who choose the genre as rhetoric look what effected the genres and how it came to be that genre. Finally, the genres as practice examine class rooms to see how students learn their genres.
I thought this text was similar to learning what literacy's were. It was interesting and often made made think of my own genres. I thought about how my genres came to be and who influenced my genres. Dean said that this text is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to genres so I would like to learn more about the theories and how genres develop.

Response To: Shitty FIrst Drafts by Anne Lamott

I really liked this passage. It made me feel better about my writing and gave me insight on how to improve my writing. The main idea of this story is that writing does not come easily. Lamott says most published and accomplished writers never sit down and just take off with beautiful writing. I thought that writers specifically knew how to write once and idea was in there head. Lamott continues and says that most writing is done draft by draft, the first being horrible until the writer holds a draft that is near perfect in their opinion. In my writing I usually write only two or three drafts and I never really got the feedback I wanted. This advice from Lamott is really going to help me cause I now get what I need to do to get my writing where i want it. The idea is to start your first draft with what ever you want to write, however you want to write it. This draft will be terrible but you can go back and improve it sentence by sentence and even add new ideas and subjects. After each draft look over it and read it as if  it wasn't yours. Lamott shows the audience this by using the example of her writing restaurant reviews for a magazine she use to work for. She said it was horrible trying to start writing and became really frustrated, but she decided to write a horrible draft and then come back to it later. The thing she said that was most difficult getting past were the judge mental voices in her head. I have problems with this too because I'm often scared of turning in a paper that is horrible and imagining a teacher or peer insulting my writing. The way Lamott got around this was a trick she learned from a hypnotist where you focus on these voices isolate them and put them in a jar and tune them out in your mind. I'm definitely going to try this and see if it works. This passage mad me feel much better about writing this essay, I just have to know that my writing is going to be bad at first and slowly improve it everyday.

Response to: If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I? - Geeta Kothari

I really liked this reading because it was about one of my favorite things: food. The reading was about the author, Geeta Kothari, and her experiences with cooking and eating foods from different cultures. Kothari said she came from India but lives in america. The start of the reading she tells us about her childhood and how at her school many of the her classmates were eating typical american foods, but she didn't because her mother would always make her Indian foods. Kothari's mother did not want her eating american foods because she didn't know much about it. Also it was a common not to eat any beef in India so Kothari's mother did not let her have any. As she gets older Kothari gets many chances to indulge in food from different cultures and she enjoys it sometimes. Although when she was sent to boarding school in London she had the chance to eat foods with beef in it, but she declares her self a vegetarian. Which I thought was weird considering she wanted to eat meat when she was younger. Later in life Kothari regrets not enjoying the foods of her childhood because she no longer had the opportunity to get these meals cause she have the recipes or anyone who knew how to cook them. Many restaurants she went to didn't cook indian food the proper way. So she tries to gather as many recipes she can over the phone from relatives. She eventually got married to american who often ate the foods she wanted as a child but then she seemed to miss her Indian foods more. Kothari also talked about this unfamiliar smell she recognized on him that was like the meat foods he ate. She said she didn't like but she used to want those foods she want as a child which is a bit ironic.
After reading it i felt like I could relate to Kothari missing her childhood foods. Now as a college student I really miss my parents cooking even though it was not always the best its sure beats eating microwave dinners and fast food. Like Kothari I also didn't like my parents food all the time. I loved eating at my friends house because his mom was from El Salvador and I loved getting a chance to experience new types of food. I think many kids do not just dislike they're parents cooking it's just that they get used to it and it gets boring after 10 years of the same cooking. I think we should all be open to new foods becuase we never know if we like them until we try.

Response to: The Sponsors of Literacy

I really liked reading  The Sponsors of Literacy by Deborah Brandt. I got really interested in the part about Dwayne Lowery and how he went from a hard labor job to becoming a key communicator in a employee union. Lowery went on a trip to DC to get more educated on the behalf of a work union. This trip helped get more literate which made him very valuable to the union. Brandt calls this trip for Lowery a Sponsor. Sponsors are anything that helps us become more literate. She emphasizes a lot on how important sponsors are for us and I agree they are. If Lowery never had that trip as a sponsor he'd still be working at the production line. Brandt's essay made me think about my own sponsors and if my level of literacy is high enough to get me a worthwhile career.

Response to: Literacy in Three Metaphors by Silvia Scribner

In the article Literacy in Three Metaphors, the author Silvia Scribner talks about literacy and what it is. Scribner says that there is no solid definition to the word literacy and she tries to show how literacy can be defined in different ways. I personally liked her section about the case study on the people of the Vai village in Africa. The village of the Vai people created their own type of literacy for there community. The language has not been taught in schools but passed down trough generations of families. They are taught English in school and many also learn Arabic cause many people in the area are Muslim. The Vai language serves the people many purposes for the community like keeping records, general economic transactions, and it helps that the national government doesn't know it.
This makes me think literacy is largely based on the community or culture like the Vai have there own language. I come from the Washington D.C. area and its a very diverse community. There are many different ethnicities and its often that you here many different languages walking down the street. I think this produces a lot of slang and combinations of languages. I have even picked up on a lot of spanish and a little german and dutch from some of my different friends. I've also come to use some slang that many of my friends use. When I came down to charlotte it doesn't seem as diverse with literacy as my home. There is barely any slang and i haven't heard many other people speaking other languages than english. This leads me to believe that we can't really have a national or international type of literacy because literacy thrives in the community and is where it is most commonly used. DC, Charlotte and the people of Vai all have different types of literacy. I think its best that literacy is undefined because we bring our literacy with us and experience new literacy where ever we go.