Sahl Altalhi

Revised Journal Entries

Writing
Writing has always been the most challenging part of English for me. Having the proper ideas
formulating themselves into your mind and writing them simultaneously wasnt an easy task for
me, and forcing the ideas out seemed worse as it would always turn out disingenuous and
redundant. I do believe that writing skills arent something that you inherently possess but it can
be earned through persistent practice and repetition until you excel the art of writing. Personally,
I always start with writing down small notes and initial unorganized ideas, start from there, and
eventually rearrange them into a somewhat well-structured final piece.

Discourse communities
A discourse community stands for a group of people who share a sensation and actively choose
to join a certain assembly of experts and enthusiasts of almost any topic. Unlike speech
communities, discourse communities require certain level of knowledge of a specific topic.
Members also can join and leave the community at any time, whereas speech communities dont
require expertise but automatically involve members who were born or brought into the
environment of that community whether voluntarily or otherwise.
I personally can relate to many discourse communities; football players, international students,
TV show fanatics, electro music listeners, forgetful people, procrastinators, and forgetful people.
There are countless amounts of discourse communities in society, some of the many I have seen
are book clubs, footballers, writers, actors, cheerleaders, and swimmers. All of those
communities share some mutual characteristics, the most common of which is exclusivity of
those who acquire proficiency and/or certain skill level in the field a discourse community is
centered around.
Punctuation
Following Punctuation guidelines seems like another head aching part of the English language
especially for my fellow non-native speakers, but I personally havent found it very challenging
to learn the proper ways of using punctuation marks in their correct context. In movie lines for
example, punctuation and dialogue are essential for writers in drawing out the emotional state of
a character. Dawkins proposes in his article Teaching punctuation as a Rhetorical tool that
punctuation isnt necessarily drawn and distinctive but rather optional in some cases. This is
especially accurate for advanced writers who intend to convey a certain emotion and highlight
their ideas in numerous ways by using different punctuation marks in different parts of the
sentence.