thirteen challenges
Discourse Conventions
Discourse
Verbal expression in speech or writing.
Convention
General agreement on or acceptance of certain practices or attitudes:
  • By convention, North is at the top of most maps. 
A practice or procedure widely observed in a group, especially to facilitate social interaction; a custom: the convention of shaking hands.
  Excerpted from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition Copyright © 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Various groups of people use the same language (e.g., English) in different ways, and these differences go beyond matters of pronunciation and rate of speech. 
  • The sources of these differences are the various common practices (involving language) "adopted" by each group. 

These common (language) practices are called discourse conventions, and

  • discourse conventions can be used to differentiate one discourse community (a group of people who share a homogeneous set of values and practices) from another discourse community.


Common (Academic) Discourse Conventions

Below is a list of discourse conventions typically included in essays/articles written for academic purposes:

  1. a Font Color of Black
  2. a Title (for the essay/article)
  3. the Name of the Writer(s) (of the essay/article)
  4. uniform Margins (among the pages of content)
  5. well-formed Paragraphs (to aid the target audience of the essay/article)
  6. the Sequential Numbering of Pages (in ascending order)
  7. a Thesis Statement (not necessarily a desired consequence statement)
  8. a One-inch Indentation (from the left margin)
    for each long quotation (a quotation that is longer than three lines of text)
  9. several In-text Citations (the acceptable formats vary by major)
  10. an end-of-text List of Citation Sources (the acceptable formats vary by major) for:
    • the information (originally record by others and) used (by the writer) to ground/make the arguments of the essay/article, and
    • in-text citations

Discourse conventions typically excluded from essays/articles written for academic purposes are:

  1. a Satiric Tone
  2. instances of Hyperbole
  3. an Ironic Tone
  4. a Facetious Tone

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© 2009 by bruce erickson. All rights reserved.