Discourse Community Paper

Analyzing Discourse Communities
Then and Now As students grow older in life and in school their written as well as, their oral communication will mature and become more sophisticated. I will be informing you of how my written and spoken communication skills have gotten better throughout my years in high school and how they have improved being in college. I will first do this by talking about how my communication was in high school football and how it compares in college. Secondly, I will focus on my current major of communications and how my public speaking has changed over the years. Lastly, I will talk about the oral and written communication within the real estate profession. Communication in football has to be the most important aspect on the field. If a team desires to be successful they must be great communicators. Players need to communicate effectively with each other to play well as a team. Communication not only means simply talking to each other, but non verbal communication plays a vital part in being a successful team. Being able to direct teammates using hand signals is a very important factor. Using verbal and non verbal communication together can be effective in completing a pass, a tackle, or kicking a game winning field goal. Playing football without communicating is impossible and would make winning extremely difficult. Communication does not only have to do with getting the plays from player to player, it also has to do with motivating the team and being a positive leader on and off the field. If a captain is discouraging or belittling to teammates they are not going to put in the effort for practice or games. I had a lot of trouble with this in high school with teammates putting down other players and it resulted in the same effect. They didn’t want to be at practice and it lead to some of my teammates to quitting. Now that I play at the college level the camaraderie and attitudes have turned a complete 180. As a whole, we have the same mentality and the best intentions by wanting to get better each and every day. Along with spoken and non verbal communication in football, believe it or not, we actually have written communication as well. A football play is only a bunch of X’s and O’s until written down. Teams may have hundreds of plays and will remember all of these by constantly writing them down. We also have to write in our playbooks the blocking schemes for the week, depending on who the opponent is. Additionally, every player is required to take a class about coaching and football. We write out our own practice schedules and at the end of the year we complete a one page essay describing what we have learned about being in the coaches shoes. As for my major of communications, there is a great deal of writing along with plenty of oral speeches. When writing or preparing a speech in high school I would procrastinate more often than not and wing it at the last minute. I would be extremely nervous when talking in front of people. In comparison, now that I am older and have communications as my area of study I have taken it a lot more seriously. I now take the necessary time and pride in planning out what I have to say in an outline and utilize brainstorming sessions. I feel I have grown in both my written and spoken communication as a public speaker from high school to now being in college. Orally when talking about communications that’s mainly all there is, but like I stated before there are outlines and brainstorming ideas that students use. When it comes to public speaking our speech is all about how well we present it. There are many different factors that go into how well students can orally present their speech. Some of which include; confidence when presenting in front of a large crowd and how well a student prepared for this topic. With that said, I have also learned to relax and control how nervous I get by ensuring that I am confident about the material and well prepared for the presentation. Finally I will be talking about written communication in real estate. When my dad first started in real estate it was all done at a kitchen table or at an office desk. Today it can be done virtually. Realtors can check all their email, faxes, contracts and more by using a phone. The industries future is mobile. For example, some agents today use DOC U SIGN and/or Digital Ink which enables Agents and clients both to electronically sign required documents from anywhere in the world. Therefore, written communication is now taking out the human factor in real estate and having to verbally communicate to a client is becoming less and less important. Yes, verbal communication still takes place, but it is becoming not as much of a factor. It now has less to do with your personal appearance because most of everything done today is digital. Clear communication is more essential because real estate agents need to be able to convince possible clients to work with them. And when agents don’t have the opportunity to work with clients face to face they need to make a great first impression. With everything that has been said throughout my essay I do agree that spoken communication is a vital part in communicating effectively. However at the same time I feel that written communication in anything today is becoming the new normal. Whether it is in your discourse community of football, the area of study such as communications, or in my future career path of real estate, communication being verbal or written will always be there. It will also determine and be an important factor in how successful you are in life.