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.
