Peter Cestrone

10/3/2015
UWRT-1102

Mid Term Reflection

This writing class at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte is called UWRT 1102.
In the beginning of this course we were challenged to think about all the discourse communities
we are a part of. After thinking about the communities we were told that we will have to write an
inquiry about one specific discourse community and that this inquiry will be due at the end of the
semester. Each class we began by practically free writing in our journals about our communities
we belong to until we finally chose one. We are tasked with going beyond the norm when writing
about our discourse communities because an inquiry is not just some report on a given topic. An
inquiry is for the purpose of this course is asking a question that does not have one simple
answer, yes/no, and elaborating on that answer so that all spectrums of the question are
addressed.

To start off the on the topic of discourse communities we watched a short video in class
about how the people who live in the Appalachian Mountains talk. This video was meant to
introduce an example of a discourse community to the class. This gave me my first idea of
exactly what a discourse community was. After watching this video I thought a discourse
community could be considered the town you grew up in or currently live in. So far everything
about discourse communities outside of the video was new to me and I had struggled very hard
to find and decide upon a specific community I can inquire into.

To select a specific community for this course it has to be small enough to where it is
unique and it has to be broad enough to where you can ask in depth questions about the
community. For me this is difficult because I am not a part of many small communities and even
for the big communities I am a part of I do not participate often. Before some classes we were
assigned to read from a textbook called writing about writing. In my opinion the purpose of these
reading assignments from this textbook was to help us think about our communities and help us
choose one to inquire about. Once we finally selected a discourse community we used the first
fifteen minutes or so to write about our communities. The purpose of this was to challenge us to
think in depth about the community we chose. After this we were assigned to make a collage of
the artifacts used in our community and present it to the entire class which is supposed to lead us
into the next phase of creating a question within our community that interests us. To do this we
were given a list of questions to think about in our community. The questions are as follows,
What must one know to be a part of the community?, What is the culture of the community?,
What are some issues you see in your community that might be in similar communities?,
Who is your audience?, What will you look into?, and Is there scholarly work on this
issue? Each of these questions in itself was designed to aid us in the development of our own
personal inquiry question. For me I chose the biomedical engineering community and the
question I created was, how is 3-D printing prosthetics affecting the medical field?

When I think back to the first time the inquiry was mentioned I remember thinking Oh
my God there is absolutely no way I will be able to complete this assignment and I am definitely
going to fail this course. As time went on and we further discussed what an inquiry does and
how we should approach the one we are going to write I started to realize that maybe I can do

this assignment. We have been taking this assignment step by step which helps me to think about
where to go next and gives me time to develop my thoughts about the inquiry I propose. Doing it
this way has helped me research more into my community and has taught me that each
community has its own culture and literacy. For instance as I researched the biomedical
engineering community I found that the culture is based solely around making life easier for
those in need as opposed to a normal medical professional, which is to reduce, remove and
prevent harm toward people. The literacy for a biomedical engineer is not entirely different than
a normal medical professional because it is a hybrid between medical literacies and engineering
literacies. This alone has shown me that literacy is not pertained to knowing how to read and
write but it can also deal with the ability to communicate effectively in daily life and in your
daily surroundings.