English 1102
Jonathan Sanders
Inquiry
Although this is the same video from the discourse community section, watch the second half of the video to learn about inquiry:
In the video above, the teacher goes into inquiry. To define inquiry, we look at an article from Greene and Lidinsky. According to their work, inquiry is the process of asking questions to help conduct research and get results. Some questions you may ask about an author’s motive to write his/her piece and when I write are: “What are the concerns of the authors I've been reading?”, “What situations motivate them to write?”, “What frames or contexts do they use to construct their arguments?”, “What is my argument in response to their writing?”, “What is at stake in my argument?”, “Who will be interested in reading what I have to say?”, “How can I connect with both sympathetic and antagonistic readers?”, “What kinds of evidence will persuade my readers?”, and “What objections are they likely to raise?”. From these questions, you should use these three steps to help you guide you to creating a very concise and thoughtful question. These steps are: 1.) identify an issue, 2.) understand the situation, 3.) formulate a question. To help get an idea about all of this, in the class before we were assigned to develop an inquiry in groups, we had to develop an inquiry of our own in a discourse community that we were in or interested in. So for me, since I was a lifeguard I wrote about how lifeguards can prevent drowning’s.
Here is the formal proposal:
In the video, she goes into talking about how inquiry and discourse community are related. To back up what she said, when a group of people in a discourse community have a question, they convene and create Discourse amongst one another and start to answer the inquiry. Using old texts from people who were in the community in the past, they create new questions and add on to the contribution that their predecessors have created. During this whole process from in initial question to the resolution, the community informs its other members through various genre and also gets feedback from its members. After my pitch proposal, we were assigned to inquiry groups. In my group, we did Efficiency in America, is America the best? In the inquiry assignment section, I will show you our inquiry process, drafts, and final paper. To relate to writing, asking questions and forming a inquiry is a great way to start a research paper and from there you can really express yourself through the question. What I mean by this is, if there is a concern that really presses you in your discourse community, then you can question it and answer it. Do you have any questions that you have about your discourse community? Ask them below!