The (Twitter) Discourse

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We talk in education classes about a "discourse," or the idea that a community creates its own tailored language, complete with standard conventions, jargon, even inside jokes. Every group has a discourse: academia, Chicago south side urbanites, Big Island locals, Wall Street veterans, junior high science teachers, even the Northwestern University Marching Band, to name a few. Each group speaks a lexicon that is understood by its members, often to the exclusion of outsiders. (NUMB makes a rather strong case, actually.)

One of the goals of education, specifically when teaching writing, is to introduce students to many different kinds of discourses. The hope is that we go beyond what the student already knows and literally expand their world by showing them the lenses belonging to people who are different from them. Usually this begins with the simple task of making sure everyone is on the same page with standard English -- and often that's where we sputter. A communication barrier exists between a student and a teacher that cannot speak the same language, or cannot recognize what creates the differences. That's where creative and compassionate teaching comes in.

But there is so much to teach. We want students of language to appreciate the many ways that language is used, from stuffy academic journals to newspaper articles to cryptic blogs to Facebook wall posts to grocery lists. We want them to know why and how all of this content is created and used; who's doing it and for what reasons. Literacy -- fluency in a discourse -- cannot exist without that understanding of audience, purpose and especially subject.

My latest attempt at learning a new discourse is Twitter. I was familiar with the basic premise -- 140 character max, the concept and usage of the "re-tweet," even the many opportunities for #hashtaghumor. As a n00b of the discourse, I've tread carefully -- I don't want to look silly in front of my new pals, or new connections to old pals. I've learned that pushing the "re-tweet" button, for example, does not allow you to add your own comment; to do so, you have to copy-paste, throw in an @[source of original Tweet], and so forth. These things become natural to us the more we participate in a given discourse. In no time, I'll be throwing hash tags around like nobody's business, holding inherently disjointed conversations with my fellow Tweeters (Twitterers? Twitters? Twits? I still have things to learn).

The hardest part, really, is taking the leap and attempting to join a new community. The learning curve can be intimidating, the fear of failure or embarrassment paralyzing. It's one of the reasons that it's so hard to get students unfamiliar with the academic discourse to trust that they can handle the material. If the community they come from doesn't value canonical authors, the likelihood that the student will care about James Joyce or Shakespeare is pretty much nil. They're irrelevant, even trivial, in the practical life of the student. And it's hard to learn a new discourse -- there's always the fear of not passing, of your peers and teachers seeing through your act and knowing you're a phony.

I finally understand why some of my teachers were so great, and some so disappointing.

This non-traditional, five-paragraph (plus a stinger) essay brought to you by almost 20 years of sometimes great, sometimes terrible, sometimes public, sometimes private, often dull, always under-funded schooling.