Gee's “An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method”

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     I'm going to agree with Martha and say that I thought the aspirin warning was a great example that got the author's point across. I really enjoyed the anecdote involving "Jane" as well. After that, a lot of the chapter didn't make too much sense to me until the part about Ebonics. I feel like most of it was unnecessary and could be simplified into the ideas of audience and context: the language you use depends largely on who you're talking to and in what situation.

     My students have always struggled with the language they should use in an essay. Slang and curses generally riddle their papers. I tried to correct this by asking them to imagine how they talk to their friends versus how they talk to their parents. Treat the essay like a conversation with your parents. Unfortunately, many of my students are on a first name basis with their parents. They would swear up and down that they speak the same to both groups. Unlike Jane from the chapter, I believe them. (I wanted to substitute a priest for their parents, but I was worried about what I might hear.)

     Ebonics became a big topic when I was in high school, so I never really looked into it too much. The way it's presented in this chapter makes it sound like the children were ELL students from a foreign country that only spoke Ebonics, not kids who had grown up in America going to public schools. At the risk of sounding insensitive, I don't know if I would consider an ELL student and an Ebonic speaking student as equal.

     This chapter does a good job of demonstrating just how frustrating the English language can be. When you have to take into account all the secret hidden meanings each sentence might have, it's amazing that we can communicate effectively with one another at all. Using the number of meanings the sentence about lung cancer may carry, I can determine that this blog post has upwards of 1,425,673 possible interpretations.

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