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Marie Mattel
Professor Julie Kopp
ENC 1101
12 February 2019

Major Project

Tennis as a community is very diversified. Everybody can become a member of this community if
they want to. It has many ways to join it, but the easiest way is to simply play tennis. You can discern
two kinds of players: the ones who like competitions and the ones who play just for fun. Everyone can
approach tennis in a different way. You can socialize with other players (public), and if you play for the
competition (professional tennis player), you have your own team (private). When you are a
professional tennis player, you attract sponsors. Members of the tennis community use a specific jargon.
When you listen to two tennis players speaking about tennis, you probably don’t understand every part
of the conversation. In fact, moonball (a very high ball), dropshot (a short ball in the box), Fed Cup
(women’s team competition), and other words aren’t used in current life, only tennis players use them.
Through the analysis of my community, we will see that, we can bridge the gap between private and
public players. First, we will analyze the differences between public and private. In a second part, we will
analyze the similarities between them. Next, we will use articles to support these arguments and I will
explain how my replication mirrors the genre of my community.

Firstly, in my community, there are two sectors: the private and the public. Understanding the
difference between the two discourse community is important when choosing the right path as an
athlete. Like Johns says “professionals may affiliate at various levels of specificity within their discourse
community” (326). The private one is composed of private tennis clubs and professional tennis players.
Private tennis clubs are mostly attended by the upper class, because their admittance is expensive.
There is a kind of “selection” due to, most of the time, the reputation of the tennis club and its location.
Also, the infrastructures are more developed in the private sector, thanks to the money coming in from
private players. The second component of the private sector of my community are professional tennis
players. They have their own team and they stay with it. Moreover, professional tennis players attract
sponsors. Sponsors are very important in tennis, because they help you to achieve your goals and they
can allow you to reach a higher place and rank in the tennis community. A sponsor can be a company, a
person, a club, or anyone with an interest in the game.
The public sector is composed of open tennis clubs and amateur players. As Johns mentions,
“these community affiliations vary in terms of individual depth of interest, belief, and commitment”
(322). We can see that it depends on how involved we want to be in the sport. Open tennis clubs give
everybody the possibility of joining the community. When you are in an open tennis club, often, you can
see that all the courts are occupied by amateur players. In private tennis clubs, it’s not the case because
there are less people. Moreover, to develop themselves, public tennis clubs need the money of
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donations, fees, and government grants; private tennis clubs in comparison, only need investors.
Amateurs players, who allow open tennis clubs to flourish, are the biggest part of my community. There
are more interactions between them because they are not competitors. It’s easier for an amateur player
to meet new people than a professional player. However, these players don’t attract sponsors and they
must pay everything (clothes, rackets, shoes, etc...) by themselves. For example, a professional tennis
player like Serena Williams is sponsored by Nike, so she has all of the new clothes for free. Nevertheless,
an amateur player will have to buy these clothes if she/he wants them. What occurs in the private sector
may not happen in the public one. As we can see, there are a lot of differences between the private and
the public sectors of my community. Nonetheless, in the next paragraph, we are going to see that there
is not always a gap between these two worlds.

The similarities between public and private players are the foundation of my community.
Without similarities, no community would exist; on that vein, “people also share many of the same
literacy experiences” (Brandt 69). In the tennis community, the most important similarity between its
members is the jargon. Every tennis player uses a specific jargon to talk about the game. For example, if
a professional tennis player says, “my backhand was so good today,” an amateur player will
automatically understand what the professional player is talking about, because he knows this jargon.
My community offers a lot of opportunities, especially in the field of work (professional players,
managers, politicians, etc...). Everybody brings their contribution to my community and that is what
makes it work. Another similarity concerns the players. Every player, amateur or professional, has the
same goal: to try to improve their game. In fact, in tennis, we can improve our game at any age. To help
us to increase our level, private and open tennis clubs give us access to infrastructures like tennis courts.
Even if private clubs have a better quality, infrastructures are mostly the same. One last similarity that I
want to talk about is the access to sponsors.“Usually richer, more knowledgeable, and more entrenched
than the sponsored, sponsors nevertheless enter a reciprocal relationship with those they underwrite,”
(Brandt 73). Even if I said that the private sector of my community attracts more sponsors, the public
sector has the same access to these sponsors. Moreover, the public sector composes the greater part of
my community. So, sponsors have a big interest to help them because they will attract the curiosity of
the public. After seeing the differences, we saw the similarities between the two sectors of my
community. We are now going to analyze articles and points of view that speak about this topic to
support our comments.

To demonstrate that the gap between public and private players can be filled, we are going to
rely from website’s articles. The first article is a blog about the differences between professional
(private) and amateur (public) tennis players. Through it, we can discern more specifically what differs
between professional and amateur players. In this article, the specific jargon of my community is used to
provide more specific details. The second article shows what can emerge from the combination of the
private and public sector. We can see that by working together, members of the same community can
accomplish many things.
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My community’s genre is attempting to connect the private and the public. As a result, there will be
more interactions between these two sectors. Like Miller says, “a rhetorically sound definition of genre
must be centered not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to
accomplish,” (151). To do so, open and private tennis clubs organize events to bring together
professional and amateur players. Most of the time,​ a club invites a famous player, who began to play
tennis in this club, and permits all the members to come and exchange balls with the professional
player.​ This is a good initiative which helps fill the gap between private and public. ​I think people are
waiting for these kinds of events, because it’s a pleasure for a professional tennis player to meet his
fans, and it’s also a great memory for the amateur player to play with his idol. Moreover, it can motivate
young players, “if genre represent action, it must involve situation and motive,​”​ (Miller 152). ​Clubs can
also schedule a tournament in which they invite professional players. This scheme is used to make
people want to come to watch the games and create a friendly atmosphere.
In the same way, in my community, we have four grand slams (Roland-Garros, the US Open,
Wimbledon and the Australian Open). These are the most famous and prestigious tournaments for a
tennis player, but if you want to participate, you have to have a good ranking, which is registered on the
website of the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) or the WTA (Women’s Tennis Association). They
bring together the public and the private sectors, professional and amateur tennis players. “We learn to
understand better the situations in which we find ourselves and the potentials for failure and success in
acting together,” (Miller 165); these tournaments give to everybody the chance to have a good time.
During these tournaments, one day is reserved for the kids, to give them the opportunity to meet their
idols and play with them.​ ​By these moments of sharing, private and public sectors bridge the gap
between them.

My replication is made thanks to an article of Jean-François Nys. The genre of my replication is


the relationship between medias and sports. This replication can be used in my community because
tennis is a sport and medias play an important role in it. There is a relation of sponsor and sponsored
between tennis and medias. This is the main expectations of the medias in sport. Nowadays we can
watch live games on our smartphones or on television, it is the media that allows this broadcast.
My genre can apply to the five areas of Miller’s definition of a genre. First of, “genre refers to a
conventional category of discourse based in large-scale typification of rhetorical action; as action, it
acquires meaning from situation and from the social context in which that situation arose”. In my
community, this genre is present, for example, when commentators (medias) comment on tennis
games. With the help of their cards, they describe the situation by using an adapted jargon.
Secondly, “as meaningful action, genre is interpretable by means of rules; genre rules occur at a
relatively high level on a hierarchy of rules for symbolic interaction”. Rules are not the same at all levels,
for example, last year, f​rench tennis player Alizé Cornet was given a code violation by US Open officials
after she temporarily took her shirt off during her first-round match loss to another player. The violation
sparked debate about whether USTA officials were being sexist and was later called "unfair" by the WTA,
so they changed the code. ​This kind of situation can’t happen on the amateurs circuit.
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Thirdly, “genre is distinct from form: form is the more general term used at all levels of the hierarchy.
Genre is a form at one particular level that is a fusion of lower-level forms and characteristic substance”.
For example, in my community, ​the rules are written for all the players but, depending on your level,
different rules may apply, as we saw in the previous example with Alizé Cornet​.
Fourthly, “genre serves as the substance of forms at higher levels; as recurrent patterns of language use,
genres help constitute the substance of our cultural life”. ​It is always useful, when we are on the tennis
court, to use the correct vocabulary. Not always understood by everyone, the tennis jargon has its own
environment and its own codes. That’s why, if you make some researches, you can find websites
dedicated to tennis’s jargon.
Fifthly, “a genre is a rhetorical means for mediating private intentions and social exigence; it motivates
by connecting the private with the public, the singular with the recurrent”. Public and private sectors of
my community are still connected through the medias. In fact, fans (public) can watch or follow the
match of their idols (private) using means of retransmission set up by medias, like mobile phone, radio,
TV, etc...

In conclusion, in my community, we write to establish rules, describe the game, give advices on
how to play, etc… This is the reason why my replication is an article about the relationship between
tennis and medias, because ​they use different ways of communication especially in writing. ​Moreover,
by analyzing the tennis community and its genre, we have seen that the two sectors which compose my
community are complementary. Even if there are differences between the public and the private
sectors, my community’s genre helps them to be closer.
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Work Cited

Wardle, Elizabeth and Downs, Doug. ​Writing about Writing: A College Reader.​ Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2017. Print.

URL:​https://www.etennisleague.com/en/blog/post/main-differences-between-professional-tennis-play
ers-and-amateurs

URL:​https://abc7news.com/realestate/a-private-feud-led-to-public-tennis-court-upgrades-around-san-fr
ancisco/3675881/

URL: ​https://www.cairn.info/revue-legicom-2000-3-page-1.htm

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