Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Adams
Kaitlyn Adams
Professor Sam
ENC 1101
“Dream boldly, live fully.” These four simple words are displayed all over the Kappa
Kappa Gamma sorority house at the University of Central Florida. They serve as an inspiration
and as motivation for the many young girls that are a part of this discourse community. Though
an English assignment and sorority life are usually seen as two very different things with no
similarities or correlation, my purpose of this essay is to spark the idea that discourse
communities are all around us in our daily life. This is because a discourse community is “a
community of people who share the same goals, the same methods of communicating, the same
genres, and the same lexis (specialized language)” (Melzer 2020) as defined by John Swales in
discourse community because it accurately represents this definition and the six characterizing
house. These are placed in spots that members walk past every day. This is one of the many
things which fulfill the six features that are paraphrased by Dan Melzer, from original ideas from
John Swales. In my opinion, this fulfills the first feature, which is characterized as “ A broadly
agreed upon set of common public goals” (Melzer 2020). Many sororities have their own “motto”, which
serves as something that all members are encouraged to live by. Kappa’s motto being “Dream boldly, live
fully” reminds us of our common public goal to remember that to live fully, we must continue to set high
goals and dreams for ourselves. Though I have only been a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma for about
two months, I have already made such good friends and connections to girls who have these common
public goals as I do. This motto can also be easily seen on both the University of Central Florida Kappa
Kappa Gamma Instagram page as well as the Kappa Nationals Instagram page. The purpose of this
message is to encourage girls who may be interested in joining this discourse community and show them
among members”. We have both a group chat on the app “Flare” with all the members and a
Facebook for Leadership roles to post important topics on. These two, as well as our
always an option. In addition to this, we have a weekly in-person meeting known as “Chapter”,
in which all sorority members attend, and we discuss and learn about topics relevant to us and
our discourse community. “Chapter” also ties into the third feature which is, “Use of these
first Chapter this past weekend, and it was a formal chapter, meaning that we all wear formal
clothes and practice formal rituals that have been passed down since 1870, when Kappa Kappa
Gamma was first founded. An example of one of these traditions would be that instead of
replying “here” during attendance, we use ‘εδώ”, which is Greek for “here” and pronounced as
“ow two”. Since Kappa Kappa Gamma is a Greek organization, it makes sense that we would
use certain Greek words and phrases. This use of a secondary language falls into feature five,
which is that “A specific lexis (specialized language).” We also use many slogans, catchphrases
Kappa Gamma all share certain values. To become a member of this sorority, we had to go
through the Panhellenic recruitment process, in which we met girls from each sororities chapter
and discourse communities, and had discussions which we shared information about ourselves,
and specifically our values. An entire day of recruitment was dedicated to Philanthropy, where
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we learned about each chapter’s charity organizations and what events and activities, they did to
raise money for their specific organization(s). Kappa Kappa Gamma has three different
philanthropies: Mental Health Awareness, Cystic Fibrosis and the Kappa Kappa Gamma
foundation. I would characterize our philanthropies as “One or more genres that help further the
goals of the discourse community”, which is Melzers fourth feature of a discourse community.
Our philanthropy is one of the things that made me love Kappa because I am a big supporter of
Mental Health Awareness. An important and influential figure in my life has struggled with their
mental health in the past, which makes our philanthropy hit close to home for me and many
others. Philanthropy is a common genre amongst all sororities and fraternities, and we all strive
I am interested in in running for our Director of Philanthropy position for the coming
school year. This is one of the twenty-four leadership positions that the UCF Kappa Kappa
Gamma chapter offers. Because of this specific number twenty-four, our leadership satisfies the
sixth and final of Melzers characterizations, “A threshold level of expert members (24-26)”.
(Melzer 102) These leadership positions could be categorized as at the expert level, since
Chapter President and Vice Presidents of many different affairs are a part of this. Since it fulfills
as Read the Room! Navigating Social Contexts and Written Texts written by Sarah Seeley, Kelly
Xu, & Matthew Chenn Melzer also share knowledge on discourse communities. A piece of
information that I found interesting in this artifact was “Regardless of the discourse community,
gaining membership and authority involves recognizing the social context that surrounds
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communication. It demands that we read the room.” With this being said, not every person will
belong in one community, and it is important that we read the room of this discourse community.
For me, ‘reading the room” would be examining the characteristics as well as values and goals of
that discourse community. I did this before joining Kappa Kappa Gamma and can say that my
goals and values align with theirs making this discourse community one that I am proud to be a
part of. My sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma is a discourse community because it accurately
represents this definition and the six characterizing points that are stated in Melzers article.
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Works Cited
Seely, S., Xu, K., & Chen, M. (2022). Read the Room! Navigating Social Contexts and Witten Texts. In
Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing (Vol. 4, pp. 281–300). essay, Parlor Press LLC.
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MA 2 REVISION
I feel that many of my point deductions were from incorrect citations. Upon seeing this, I used
Sam’s comments on what was incorrect and used resources to learn how to correctly cite and format
my paper. I also viewed the student examples and added headings and page numbers as that student
did. I then highlighted it as a revision. I also fixed how I captioned my artifacts and highlighted those
as well. Throughout Sam’s corrections and the redemption assignment, I have learned what mistakes
I commonly make and how to avoid these in the future. I also unfortunately did not include a thesis
statement, so I added that this time around. I also highlighted it to show that I did add it both in my
introduction and my conclusion. One small correction was that one of my paragraphs was in the
wrong font so I fixed this and highlighted this entire paragraph to show this. Another one of my
frequent corrections from Sam was that my in text citations were either missing or incorrect. I also
tried to go through my paper and find all of the quotes I missed in text citations for. Once again, I
used the student examples as a guide for this to help me. I have been out of time and have not been
able to attend the writing center, but I look forward to going in the future to futher my writing skills