Peer Review

Overall, I liked your paper, especially the layout of it. It made it very easy to read. There were a few problems however. The first paragraph is very misleading with the subject matter as you mention the Hong Kong Study Circle twice and the music scene only once. You also fail to show the other types of music available on campus. Your paper also lacks a proper synthesis as you only introduce Swales in the opening, which leads to another problem: You assume that your audience knows about Swales. Be sure to show his credentials and why you are using him as a source.

There aren’t many problems with the paper and I don’t have the time or the willpower to point out everything great about it but one slight annoyance was how you thought you needed to use every response to every question from every interview. It would be better to just use the best answers for each question.

Every time you used AMC, I immediately wanted to stop reading and watch Breaking Bad or The Walking Dead. But I did like how you pointed out what it meant right away.

The thing I said about introducing Swales also goes for Gee. Why is he an authority? Pretend I don’t know he is.

The overall paper is nicely written and well organized. Just make sure to clean up the few things that aren’t up to par and your paper will be much better.

Gee

“All of us acquire at least one initial discourse”

The initial discourse is how you first familiarize with the world. Usually this is our families or schoolmates in elementary school.

“Dominant groups often apply constant ‘tests’ of fluency in specific discourses”

This makes sense as people generally hate it when people pretend to know of something they don’t. I hate it when people talk about something and get everything wrong. “Halo is about a robot that fights aliens and saves people” No, he is not a robot, he is human.

“Not all discourses involve reading or writing”

This is very true. Discourse communities can be anywhere. They could involve anything that groups of people could talk about. There are communities that play video games, in which case would involve little writing and little reading. Same would happen with sports teams or fishermen and the like.

“Mushfaking has to do with something lesser when the real thing is unavailable.”

People do this all the time. I remember in grade school using the lid to a pudding cup as a spoon because I couldn’t get a real one due to my excessive laziness at the time. Sometimes in communities you have to do this in order to make due with what you have. Like in the discourse community of Machinima (using video games to make movies) you have to make do with the tools the developer gives you, which is why Halo is a popular machinima platform because of its theater mode which was born from the popular machinima “Red vs Blue”.  The creator used to just sit there with a character that wasn’t holding a weapon to make it look like an actual camera, which once theater mode was introduced into Halo 3, was no longer an issue.

Swales

 “A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common goals”

This quote is pretty straight forward. Swales means that discourse communities have a specific set of “end games” to reach or at least a set of “check points” For each community, this can be different. The goals can be anything from changing to world or to simply winning the next game.

“A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members”

This quote is slightly harder to decipher, but it means that each community has its own mean of communication be it forums, phone calls, or just a pregame lobby of a video game.

“A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback”

Everything is constantly changing, including discourse communities. You need a way to get out word of new changes. What was true once could be false soon. Earth is no longer flat nor is it the center of the universe. Who decides the change? People; people who notice problems, then find ways to fix them. This quote means that the communities use its participants to garner information for what changes would be welcome and what changes are not welcome.

“A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.”

This one is a doozey. Basically every group has their own ways of doing something. Gamers wouldn’t solve certain instances the same way action figure collectors would. It is all relative to the groups you are from or belong to. There is a proper and improper way to do something. Like with gaming, there is a proper strategy to winning in Runescape PvP and a wrong way.

“A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discourse expertise.”

Simply, there are people who know a lot about what the discourse community surrounds and can input relevant content and information towards conversation 

Outline

Synthesis Discourse Community

There are many layers to the discourse community of Halo fans. You have the “Pros”(People who play only ranked multiplayer all day every day!) , People who play the game for the story of the campaigns, and casuals who only play the multiplayer, but not to the same extent as the pros. In terms of the “campaigners”, many of them don’t just keep the narrative to the actual game but extend their knowledge of the Halo universe by immersing themselves into the books. I fall under that category. For the most part, I am actually a reputable source of information when it comes to the first five Halo books on the old Halo forums (before they were moved late in 2011).

When Halo: Reach was announced in 2008, a lot of campaigners jumped for joy at the thought of playing the beginning of the war as described in Halo: The Fall of Reach, which is the first book written and takes place just before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved. From a campaigner’s perspective however, the game was very disappointing in terms of story as it didn’t follow the book at all! It only even shows two of the characters in the book (Captain Keyes and Dr. Halsey). Fan cried out in honor of the Halo canon to which was answered with re-writes of the original books with slight variations made to fit the new fiction. 

With the Halo Community, there is a clear ranking system of seniority and moderators. Having been exposed to Halo since 2003, I rank pretty high on the seniority level. People also can use their ranks in-game to show their seniority. In Halo: Reach, even though I don’t play many ranked games, my BPR (Battle Percentage Ranking) is very high at 93 out of 100 and gives me some sway when strategies are being discussed on various maps. Like how it is not a good idea to try and snipe directly from the sniper tower as it is too obvious on the map Ascension.

Halo is a genuine community that I belong to and I could talk about it for hours.