Academic Discourse

Dynamics of Discourse

In order to properly grasp academic discourse, a discussion of discourse theory is necessary. Discourse is a set of language and rhetorical practices that individuals employ in order to navigate various communicatory environments. One of discourse's more crucial elements is that every person possesses a number of discourses that inform that person's day-to-day communication. For instance, the discourse one shares with one's family and friends differs from the discourse one utilizes in educational settings. Despite these different discourses, there is a dynamic fluidity that enables a person to both change and combine her or his language practices based upon experiences and situations. This characteristic of discourse can create a number of positive outcomes as individuals learn how to communicate with greater numbers of people; however, such developments can also marginalize or supplant non-mainstream discourses in favour of the dominant discourse. Indeed, discourse serves as a crucial environment within which power struggles take place. Language and rhetoric are shaped and reproduced by dominant relations of power and ideology, like those of capitalism, and have a tendency to prohibit critical or marginal discourses from entering important conversations. Therefore, the dynamics of discourse often revolve around issues of power, our very language reflecting boundaries and restrictions existing in the social world.

Academic Discourse and the Compositional Process

Academic discourse is both a concept and a process rooted in a number of academic communities. Most visibly, scholars engage in the discursive process when composing research articles and other academic texts. In participating in this process, authors draw upon genre conventions within their disciplines in order to maximize the communicative potential of their work. Some of these rhetorical conventions could be discipline-specific vocabulary or jargon, rhetorical devices, organizational procedures, tone, style and genre. Knowledge of vocabulary is perhaps one fundamental aspect of academic discourse. Every discipline has its own array of words and concepts that scholars must know to properly interact within that subject. Additionally, disciplines have differing meanings and usages for particular words (e.g. space, production and discourse), which further complicates academic discourse from discipline to discipline.

If academic vocabulary serves as one obvious feature of discourse, then genre serves as the larger contextual background in which discourse is situated. Genres are defined by the communicative conventions that have been normalized within a particular cultural setting. For example, the absence of first person pronouns in much lab-based writing is a common genre [Page 2]convention in the sciences. Genres are fluid and evolve as social groups change. The genres common to academic discourse vary significantly, and each genre possesses subgenres that are employed in specific situations, such as conference presentations. Different forms of research, embedded in different fields, tend to draw upon the genre conventions most common in that field, for example, classroom-based research in education.

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