Discourse Community Analysis

Han Lin

Discourse community analysis

Design of an Efficient IIR Filter for SIGMA –DELTA Modulation

Have you noticed an interesting phenomenon? Sometimes when you meet a professor, you can infer his department from the way he talks, the register. In my mind, science professors talk more precisely, while literature professors prefer to use more rhetoric.

Every discourse community has its’ own register, which is used by the members in the community to give a speech and write paper. In this essay, I will make a brief analysis of the register of my discourse community, electrical engineering. To prepare for this topic, I read about the paper “Design of an Efficient IIR Filter for SIGMA –DELTA

Modulation” written by Essam E. Hassan and Hassan A. Ragheb, in the journal named

Elektrik.

As we are concern about the vocabulary of this essay, we can see that there are many specific words and technical term. Obviously, it is important to know those specific words and the conceptions they present, if people want to understand this kind of essays. The essays related to electrical engineering are difficult for general readers due to their highly specific vocabulary. For example, even in the first sentence in the introduction part “Sigma-Delta ( Σ−Δ ) modulators are now an integral part of many devices using analog to digital (A/D) converters.”, you may find that most of the nouns are strange to you. Only people in this discourse community can understand it. When considering the modality, voice and tense, expectably, the modality is very certain and precise, while the voice basically is passive and the tense is present. It is easy to explain the author’s choices about the grammar structures, because this discourse community concern about the science and natural truth. The author is supposed to be completely certain about his idea of essay, otherwise readers may prefer to read it after the author is certain about what he writes. Because the author is talking about the natural rules in his essay, the tense is basically present.

This essay is divided into 4 parts, introduction, theory, result and conclusion. The introduction part briefly introduces the background of the topic, how to design an IIR digital filter. In the theory part, the author gives us more details and analysis to support his theory. Then he gets the result from his analysis and data above.

Having a scan at this essay, the most impressive part is the plenty of equations, graphs and charts. In essay of science, authors prefer to use math language to provide evidences to support their idea, because formula is a precise and most strongly convincible tool in science. Graph can give you a clear look at the result, and make the prediction about the behavior of a variable as another variable changes. The chart can make you compare the results easily and clearly. Those evidence are the most important features of the essays about natural science.

To conclude, I realized that it is very critical to learn about the register of a discourse community in order to get success in this area. Being familiar with the specific is the most basic requirement. And you also need to know how to convince your readers by using the appropriate modality and strong evidence, when you are writing a paper.