Haley Sanchez

10-16-22
ENGL-1110-055

Discourse Community Reflection

Part 1: Overall Reflection

1. My discourse community project's goal was to educate my peers on cheerleading, a
topic I am well-versed in but that others aren’t as educated on. Due to the way I
organized my website, I believe it succeeded in educating my peers about the subject of
cheer. Many people undervalue cheerleading and consider it to be a "girly sport." I
wanted my audience to understand the true challenges of cheerleading as well as the
fact that it was originally a male-dominated sport.
2. My professor and peers were my target audience for this project. This did alter the way I
chose to present my project. If I was making the same project for my cheer team, who
is already very educated on cheer, I would have made it very different.
3. My impressions of the technology I chose to compose my project was that there were
some pros and cons of the site I used. I think that adding photos made it easier for me
to communicate my thoughts and facts about cheerleading. My photos and videos
added to my project and brought more attention to it, making people want to read
about what the pictures were.
4. Rhetorical decisions that impacted my decision to choose the technology presented on
my website was that I wanted mt audience to see the different types of cheer, what
cheer looked like when it first began, and what my progress from kindergarten to now
looked like as a cheerleader.
5. Challenges I faced with this project was the history portion of my website. I realized that
after 12 years of being a cheerleader, I barely know anything about the history of cheer.
I was learning about it at the same time as my peers even though I have been involved
with the sport for so long.

Part 2: Outcome Reflection

B. My discourse community was targeted towards everyone in all-star cheer, specifically. I

briefly talked about high school and college cheer, but I have never done either of those. While
talking about all-star cheerleaders, I took into consideration that we all have our own
community and I wanted to get my point across for all of us, not just myself. My audience was
my peers and professor. To describe and show my discourse community to my peers, I
organized my website into sections with explanations and pictures. The pictures helped me get
my point across. Just by the picture you could see how different each type of cheer is and how
intense it is. I want my audience to be impacted in a way that they understand cheerleading
more and have more of a respect towards it.

E. I think that one of the main things that helped me show the value of cheerleading was the
about me page. On that page of my website, you can see how committed my teammates and I
really are to the sport from the pictures. My audience can see a picture of me from when I was
just in kindergarten doing school cheer, to me on the highest level of cheerleading as a senior. I
Haley Sanchez
10-16-22
ENGL-1110-055
was able to represent how committed I was by showing pictures and videos of my progress and
evolution through the years.

H. I was able to incorporate other people’s voices that are in my discourse community by
adding a link to YouTube that was an episode of a famous cheer teams’ regular practice. In the
episode it shows the conditioning they go through and how hard they struggle to be the best
they can be. In the episode it shows some of the athletes doing interviews and talking about
cheer and the practice. This made me feel like my peers could hear from other cheerleaders
and actually see what their practice is like.