Discourse Communities

Academic Discourse is a Public Activity

The Knowledge Cycle: From desk to coffee table, the formal discourse cycle has three major parts

Do you feel as though you have nothing important to add to the discourse community, that your papers are so much regurgitation?  That's O. K.  We all had to serve similar apprenticeships. It's like weaving to catch the rhythm in order to keep from getting slapped in the face with the jump rope when you were a kid.

The Knowledge Cycle

As everyone who has ever tried to find out anything becomes uncomfortably aware, it takes a certain amount of knowledge even to find what you need, or know if information even exists out there. The first step is investigation of the existing knowledge base. I can't begin to number the amount of people who have spent vast amounts of time reinventing a product or process when a few minutes in a good library would make it clear that the thing already exists. And that, my darlings, is why we call it research.

The Publication Cycle

We really don't know a thing until we can explain it well enough to make it understandable to others. Our initial impression is always one of clarity—right up until the moment when we have to explain ourselves. Countless students, including me, have discovered that to their chagrin at 2:00 a.m. the night before a paper or speech is due. So, sharing our findings is a service to both the researcher and the community.

The Access Cycle

Publication is only useful if the material becomes readily accessible. That is why the libraries at research institutions are so large (and expensive). In the past, research was quite expensive in terms of both travel time and money as scholars traveled to the materials. Indexes often consisted of handwritten lists or physical card catalogues at the institution.

Materials could literally disappear for decades if someone tore a card from the catalog. More often than we would like to imagine, materials were silently stolen when both card and book went missing. Books, manuscripts, and other materials were damaged, deliberately or through heavy use.

More recently, of course, librarians and others have digitized the materials in their collections, making them at once more readily available and vastly safer. For a book or article to be readily accessible, it must be researched, written, reviewed, published, reviewed again, acquired or made accessible by some institution, and...here's where it gets tricky...someone has to have need of its information and be able to find and acquire a copy.

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Dr. Bonnie Duncan
bduncan@millersville.edu
1-717-871-2080
English Department
Millersville University
Millersville, PA 17551

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