Bai !

Yu Bai

Professor Marie Webb

Linguistic 12 Tuesday 9AM

11 March 2019

UCSB IEEE as a Discourse Community

Every student who majors in electrical engineering or computer engineering must have

heard about the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which is a worldwide

professional organization mainly composed of engineers and scientists. The institute contains

various other groups, such as student branches at universities and colleges, young professionals,

women in engineering, and many other groups of people. Currently, I am a member of the UCSB

IEEE Student Branch, and I realize the student branch is considered as a discourse community

(DC) when I read about the concept of a discourse community from one of my class reading

materials written by the linguist John Swales, who argues that there are six characteristics of a

DC. They are commonly shared goals, mechanisms of communication among members,

providing information and feedback through communication, utilizing one or more genres in

communication, a specifically developed language, and a threshold level of members (Swales

471-473). The UCSB IEEE Student Branch is a successful discourse community since it

perfectly satisfies all six characteristics that Swales puts forth.

One essential fact of a discourse community is that members of a group have to share a

commonly agreed goal, and the student branch does have one. According to Swales, members of

a discourse community must share purposes (471). The shared purpose of every UCSB IEEE

member is to “develop and apply technical and social skills through hardware and software
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projects and informational workshops” (“Welcome to IEEE!”). In others words, The aim of the

student branch is to encourage college students to practice and improve their skills by various

projects and workshops from the branch. For successfully achieving its goal, it provides different

hardware and software projects and small lectures, such as the Smart Lamp Project, the

Computer Vision Project, and the Portable Speaker Project. I attended the Smart Lamp Project,

which required me to get familiar with one of the printed circuit boards from Texas Instruments,

and we needed to build a wireless communication system between our laptop and the board to

control the lamp. I learned a significant amount of supplementary knowledge, and I spent almost

all my spare time on reading project materials and practicing them. Sending a signal effectively

is the most useful skill I developed during the project, and I applied it to my advanced courses.

Since IEEE successfully inspires me and supports me in my other courses, it may be valuable for

all engineering students.

Another crucial element stated by Swales of a discourse community is that members use

communication to achieve their target (471). Currently, the student branch is comprised of

around two hundred undergraduate students, roughly twenty graduate students, five leaders, and

several professors. Members use various ways to communicate, such as quarterly meetings for

introducing projects, messages in a messenger group, project pages on Google Sites for sharing

relevant information, and weekly reports posted on Google documents. The main mechanism of

communication for students in a project group is the weekly report in an online Google

document. Every group poses a report to describe the work its members have done during the

week for other groups to learn. I was in a team of two. When neither my project partner nor I

have the solution to a problem, which cannot be worked out even after keeping trying for several
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times, we could look through other groups’ reports to see if any of them encountered the same

problem and find out the solution. Sometimes, if we can not solve our problem with other

reports, we will forward the question to our mentors to seek extra help. Moreover, as we are

recording weekly reports of our project, mentors will regularly check our reports in order to give

us some feedback, which is about the third characteristic of a discourse community. According to

Swales, “a discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide

information and feedback” (472). In other words, communication mainly uses to provide

information and to give on-going feedback. As I previously mentioned, the quarterly meetings

and project pages on Google Sites mainly focus on providing information to the students, and the

report is the best way to provide feedback based on the records each group writes. Hence, the

communication of UCSB IEEE Student Branch is significant and conducive to members because

they can obtain information and receive on-going feedback.

Besides having the mechanisms of communication, another characteristic that Swales

describes is to utilize and possess one or more genres to further the goal of a discourse

community (472). In other words, a discourse community needs to utilize one or more kinds of

writings for achieving its purpose. Memoirs, narrative stories, and academic writings are

examples of genres I have analyzed in class. Compared with the genres I learned, the student

branch requires members to utilize and possess proposals, budget statements, reports, and data

records. For a deep understanding of genres used in UCSB IEEE, I interviewed the chairman of

the student branch, Boning Dong, and I asked him a few questions. When I asked him about the

types of writing that he was always required to write, he said: “it must be experiment reports.”

The experiment report needs to incorporate pre-experiment questions, which are made for
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understanding the experiment, in-experiment procedures, theories, schematic diagrams, and post-

experiment problems students faced during the experiment. Since engineering students need to

do a great number of experiments for their projects, they inevitably have to write laboratory

reports frequently. Then, my next question was to ask the most conducive type of writing to his

career. Boning answered seriously: “Proposals, without any doubts.” After answering my

questions, he found several proposals and reports for me, and he let me take them home. One

proposal should include a clear title, device functionality, hardware components, design

timelines, documents used in the proposal, and budget. Every section of the proposal must be

detailed and practical in order to convince professors or the organization’s leaders. For example,

for the section of the budget, students must list every component of the project with a purchasing

way, quantity, and price. Boning encouraged me to study proposal writing as soon as possible

since it is extremely conducive to my career life. IEEE demands members to write in certain

types of genres in order to further its aim, it is a relatively outstanding discourse community.

Special terminology is obviously used in the UCSB IEEE Student Branch. Swales claims

that “a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis” (473). “Lexis” is a specific

language developed for certain groups of people, and it is extraordinarily difficult for people that

do not belong to that group to understand. For example, during conversations among members, it

is common to hear phrases like “L-R circuits”, “R-L-C circuits”, “phasors”, and “sinusoidal

electromagnetic waves.” Most people cannot understand them since some of them are the

abbreviation of a certain type of circuits with inductors and capacitors, and some are technical

terms in physics., but all of IEEE members know the meaning of these terms. Take sinusoidal

electromagnetic waves as an example. Electromagnetic waves are formed by the cross product of
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an electrical field and a magnetic field, so the waves are perpendicular to both of the two fields.

Since they are sinusoidal, their waves look like sine and cosine functions, which just look like

wavy lines. Since the electromagnetic waves do not require media to propagate, it can be applied

to the universe where does not have air as propagating media.

The last characteristic of a discourse community is defined by Swales as “a threshold

level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise” (473). In

other words, members always come into the community as beginners and leave with an amount

of knowledge. For students of the UCSB IEEE Student Branch, they join it for developing their

skills, and most of them will leave after they graduate from colleges or universities, but some

will stay as counselors to provide extra help for future generations of students. However, the

example given by Hope Jahren in her book Lab Girl describes the last characteristic differently

for the discourse community of the CVS pharmacy, where employees move to higher positions

like supervisor and may transfer to other stores (45-51). Both of two discourse communities

satisfy the definition of the last characteristic since they all have changing memberships.

After the analysis and explanations, it is appropriate to consider the UCSB IEEE Student

Branch is a successful discourse community because it perfectly fulfills all six characteristics of

a discourse community. These six features can be obviously observed: a clear and explicit goal

of developing and practicing technical skills, weekly reports as the effectively main way of

communication to provide information and give feedback among members, several specific

genres including proposals and experiment reports, the creation of special terminology including

abbreviation and terms, and the improvement members made as they spend time on the DC.

Members build strong relationships among them by the mechanism of the UCSB IEEE Student
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Branch, and it is definitely a successful and significant discourse community for engineering

students.
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Works cited

Swales, John. "The Concept of Discourse Community." Writing about Writing, edited by

Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs, Bedford / St. Martin' s, 2011, pp. 466- 480.

Originally published in Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings,

Cambridge UP, 1990, pp.21-32.

“Welcome to IEEE!” UCSB IEEE, https://ucsbieee.org. Accessed 20 February, 2019.

Dong, Boning. Personal interview. 20 Feb. 2019.

Jahren, Hope. Lab Girl, 1st ed., Vintage Books, 2017.