Discourse Community

The older I get the more I notice that there are a lot of different discourse communities. A discourse community is a group of people who speak the same language or who are interested in the same things. Different people belong to different groups but primarily you belong to three. I belong to sorority, volleyball, and tennis.

My first discourse community deals with a sorority because unless you are in one you do not really understand a lot about them. The way I became apart of this discourse community is because I was about to start college and I became interested in getting involved and joining one. I wasn't really sure if this was for me because I didn't really understand what it was or how it worked, all I had seen was from television shows. So I began to talk to my cousin about joining and she started saying all this stuff I had no clue what she was talking about until she began explaining the words to me. She started using all these terms that I had no clue what she was talking about, such as: bid day, panhellnic , chapter, and big/little. Before I actually joined one I had an idea of what I thought it was going to be like which made me very spectacle about joining one. I thought it was like the ones you see on television, where it was a bunch of stuck up girls who just partied and were very girly. My idea of them was very off most people involved with sororities are sweet and willing to help other. All of them of a philanthropy which is a cause in which they raise money and give it to organizations that need it, Alpha Gamma Deltas' being juvenile diabetes.  I ended up joining one and my outlook of them has changed very much so and I try to explain to other people about how they really are not just what people think they are.

 My second discourse community I am apart of is volleyball. I had always been interested but just never gave it a chance and stuck to softball all of my younger years. So my friends and I decided to tryout our freshmen year of high school. The first practice we went to we were so lost because they used all this terminology that we had no idea what it meant. For example the coach said "Okay girls lets go practice spikes.", which we had no clue what that meant. A spike is when you go up to the net and they setter sets, gets the ball up, and you have to hit it as hard as you can down on the other teams side of the court. My first outlook on this sport was that you didn't have to be very athletic to do it because you only cover a small amount of the court but once I started playing that changed very quickly. You have to have arm strength to get it over the net no matter where you hit it from on your side of the court, and leg muscles to be able to jump to spike it over the net. Once I became apart of the team I slowly began to learn more and more about it. My teammates and I would easily confuse you if you overheard us talking because we used all this terminology and volleyball isn't a very known sport. I grew a passion for volleyball even though I no longer play I still love the sport and could talk about it for hours without any problem.
Another discourse community is tennis. Watching a tennis match, you immediately have a hard time understanding the scoring system. Love, 15, 30, 40 are the terms used to keep track of each set. Being an outsider, you would not know that "love" really meant zero. If you heard a score 15-30 called out, you might believe that a player is actually 15 points ahead. Other terms used in tennis such as volley, most people would relate that to volleyball. There is also shots called overhead, net shot, lob, cross, court, and line shot. None of this terminology could be easily understood by someone outside of this community. I started watching tennis my freshmen year because the guy I was dating was playing and at first I knew absolutely nothing and thought it was the most boring sport ever created once people started explaining it to me I began to enjoy watching it and even started becoming competitive while watching it.
I know many people that are involved in different discourse communities, and they try to teach me how to better understand their languages. I am interested in venturing out and trying to learn about new discourse communities.