Gee’s Building Tasks for Discourse Analysis

Building Evidence for an Analysis of Science Discourse

 

For each of these seven building tasks, Cripps has modeled one example of a passage and brief explanation. Find your own quotes and do your own explaining.  You are not required/expected to have an example in each of the seven building tasks.

 

Significance

“The abstract should be definitive rather than descriptive” (Nair and Nair 17).

 

The author italicized definitive and descriptive to signal the significance of the difference between the two structures of an abstract. This helps the reader know that they are two key words and concepts.

 

“A “myth” of autonomous texts that seems to operate in academic settings at every level” (Haas 45).

 

Haas uses the word myth in quotations to help readers identify that reading is not actually autonomous.

 

“This myth has been well described-and well critiqued- in other contexts by Nystrand (1987), Cazden (1989), Brandt (1990), and Farr (1993)” (Haas 45).

 

Haas uses the many citations to give an example of how scientific texts connect to others and that they do not act independently.

Practices (activities)

“Although Eliza (a pseudonym) may have tacitly subscribed to the doctrine of autonomous texts early in her college career, by the time she left college she had come to a greater awareness of the rhetorical, contingent nature of both the activities and discourses she participated in within her chosen field, biology” (Haas 46).

 

The author uses a real world example of using scientific discourse instead of simply giving facts without context to the reader.

 

Relationships

“Entering college students may hold an arhetorical or asituational theory of written discourse” (Haas 46).

 

When the author uses this type of language to signal what type of relationship students have with scientific reading.

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