Autumn Bradshaw

Rhetoric I
October 15, 2014
Most high school athletesstudents dream of making it to the next level, college athletics.

Comment [M1]: Clarify that this is high

school athletes.

Seeing that only one percent of those kids make it, they have to be pretty good to accomplish that
goal. College athletics is just like having a side job. It is a whole other life outside of school.
As an athlete at Lees-McRae College you are automatically forced into this unknown community
and told heres your new family. Your room mate for the next four years is going to be one of
your teammates. So, you two will be spending a lot of time together. When youre not in class,
or taking that quick power nap, youre sweating your butt off at practice to play out this dream
you have. You dont have a lot of time to mingle and make new friends outside of the team.
This is how you and your team become this discourse community. So I decided to figure out if
the t Track team at Lees-McRae is just as hard as every sport, and count as a discourse
community. Practicing from two to three hours a day, not including personal workouts, these
kids spend a lot of time together. Although with track weather can be an issue; rain, shine, or
snow you have to get that practice time in. So your schedule is everywhere. But just like other
sports the goal is the same, win.
I sat through a couple practices and took notes to determine if this track team is a
discourse community. At the beginning of practice I noticed little groups of friends talking
before they started their workouts, but shortly they got into a group and broke down into
stretching. One upper classman led the stretches before they began. While I watched all the
runners practice I noticed some training hard and some slacking off. Some were talking to
themselves, others were looking off into space. They all were still striving for the same goal, get

Comment [M2]: You bring up track here out

of nowhere. Why track?

better to do their best as they could in the next meet. Because even though you have those times

Comment [M3]: How do you know given

that some really werent working that hard?

where you get lazy and you slow your work ethic down, you still have that dream in your heart
and mind. Continuing watching everyone work, I could hear the teammates cheering each other
on. Lets go, come on man, you can do better than that, what do we work for, was some
of the short sentences I could hear. Being an athlete myself I could understand what and why

Comment [M4]: Put the exact phrases in

quotation marks.

they were saying the things they were, but so an outsider I would bet they would be confused to
why other teammates were yelling at each other instead of the coach yelling at the team mates.

Comment [M5]: Athletes are supposed to

yell at the coach?

So inner communication is definitely within this group of runners. Running after running these
kids wore themselves out. Improving times and sometimes not the coach would still give advice

Comment [M6]: ?

on how to enhance the time or stances of the runners. With him giving this advice the runners
could learn and improve themselves. Continuing my note taking I noticed this community was
doing one or more things. Not everyone was running the one hundred, some were running
farther or shorter distances. So I could assume that this team had more than one genre within
their team. Looking back at my notes I was confused if this team had a specific lexis. My
athletic mind clouding up the obvious, I could tell by what I had written down they definitely had

Comment [M7]: Good concession here.

their own lexis. The way they encouraged and just goofed around with each other was a lexis all
its own. Checking all these off the discourse community check list I came to the last one.
Seeing as their where all types of age groups practicing together it was obvious that they had
new comers just like they had seniors who were leading these new comers around.
I interviewed Cameron Fuller who is a sprinter on the Lees-McRae track team. He is
eighteen years old and a freshman. Coming from Alabama I wanted to know why you would
move from hat warm atmosphere to the cold mountains and about multiple other things. I first
asked him why track, out of every sport? He said that he didnt even start running track until he

Comment [M8]: Why Cameron? Clarify who

he is, age, experience, etc.

was in the eleventh grade, but he was good at it so he went with it. I told him eleventh grade was
impressive to make it to the next level and only participating for two years of high school. He
explained he was either go to the military or run track in college so track saved him from making
the military choice. I asked him how he prepared for practice and what he told me was
interesting. Its more of a mental preparation than a physical. Of course you stretch and warm
up, but you have to approach everyday with your mind set on getting better every day. said
Cameron. I guessed he wasnt satisfied with where he currently was, and he told me he would
never be satisfied because when you get satisfied you lose your drive to be better than your
opponent. I was really impressed with everything he said, and even more impressed when he
actually did exactly that in practice. Cameron really led me to believe that this sport id most
definitely a discourse community. With the way he talked with passion about is team mates,

Comment [M9]: What does your interview

with Cameron tell you about the discourse
community? Does it help with your discussion
of any of the six characteristics?

their practices, and how much this was a part of him.

Being an athlete myself I could understand this discourse community easily. Even
though they dont dribble a basketball and shoot threw a net, we had a couple physical
challenges that was the same. Track is running, and of course you cant get up and down the
basketball court without running. Another physical challenge would have to be, you have to be
in shape if youre going to be any good at either of these sports. We both have to struggle with
grades in order to even be a part of this community. Although, some out siders would just look
at all of us as mindless jockeys, we are very different. Basketball players dont have to worry
about the weather, because rain or shine the gym is always hot and dry. Track players really
have no clue what their practice is going to be like. I know when Im getting ready for practice
Im going to wear shorts and a jersey. Track players have to be aware of the weather that day in
order to know what they are going to have to wear.

Comment [M10]:
Comment [M11]: You can somehow explore
this final paragraph and make it your
conclusion by expressing how this experience
impacted you. Youre sort of already doing
that. Just make it clearer.

Swales poses several key ideas about discourse communities, arguing that we need a set
of descriptive characteristics for discourse communities. He comments, not all communities
as defined on other criteriawill be discourse communities. Though all the six characteristics of
a discourse community is what sets these communities aside from others, there is way more than
that. These people in these communities are more than teammates, friends, common people with
common goals and interest, they are individuals coming together and becoming a part of
something more important than themselves. They become more than a discourse community
they become a family.
James porter dines a discourse community as, A local and temporary constraining
system, defined by a body of texts (or more generally, practices) that are unified by a common
focus. A discourse community is a textual system with stated and unstated conventions, a vital
history, mechanisms for wielding power, institutional hierarchies, vested interests, and so on.
All and all it is clear that track is a discourse community. Sharing goals, having inner
communication, some genres and lexis, and having new and old members of the team, but this is
more than a community. It is more than just a hobby or a sport. Without this sport some kids
wouldnt be getting the education they are, or being able to make their dreams a reality. So what
is a discourse community? It is a more than a simple example of six characteristics in a group, it
is a family.
Autumn, good start! You have a solid discussion of the teams idea of lexis and genre. You want
to figure out a theme that is running (no pun intended) throughout your notes/essay and work
towards explaining how each characteristic adds to that theme. Remember that you want to find
something that intrigues you and sticks out to focus on after explaining how it is a discourse
community. Currently you are missing that part.

Comment [M12]: Use Swales definition for

our purposes.