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Ali Zeliff English 106 Rough Draft Executive Board Discourse Community Introduction The community that I decided

to research is the community of the executive board of the Odyssey newspaper. I recently began to work for the Odyssey as a member of the executive board. My specific job in this discourse community is to make sure that the customers are happy with their adds that we put into our paper every week and assist them to make adds that are geared towards the Greek community. This is a discourse community for six main reasons. For one this community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals. Our goal as an executive board is to produce a well rounded and well presented twenty page paper every week and continue to have happy customers that give us their adds. This community also has many mechanisms of intercommunication among its members. We have a group me, which is an app where you can have large group messages, where everyone on the executive board is able to be in constant contact with each other. We also have occasional meetings with the board to discuss what direction the paper is going and if there are any difficulties going on with anything involving our board. In addition to this the president of the Odyssey executive board along with the chief editor, who are both on the executive board, send us weekly updates in our group message of the paper that week. We also communicate with the executive board of franchise of the Odyssey who are based in Indianapolis each week individually. These

short meetings consist of them catching each of us up to speed on where they want our board to take the paper and the face of the Odyssey and to hear about our progress. This community also has different genres. When we talk in our group message it is much different to when we have physical meetings and discuss problems. We also have some words that are unique to our community. We say things that have to do with the paper and with Greek life, and even about the overall executive board that an outsider would not understand. Due to the face that everyone who works for this paper is in Greek like there are many terms that we specifically understand that someone who was not involved in Greek like would be impervious to. In addition to everyone on the executive board having to be in Greek life, we also have to be in undergraduate college and have a major that has to do with marketing, public relations, advertising, phycology, business, and so on. I chose to study this community because since I recently joined it I had a non-bias view and was interested to learn more about it. As a student that is pre-com and I wish to go into either corporate communications or public relations this discourse community is extremely important to me. Understanding this community not due to this research will hugely help me in the future work force. Methodology To begin my research for this community I conducted two interviews with the president of the executive board along with the editor and chief. These two people were fundamental to fully understanding the way that our group has grown and works. I also observed one of our meetings where we discussed our current direction we were trying to go and our goals as an executive board for this semester. In addition to this I used the

online archives and more observation of communication via group me to conclude my research. When I conducted my interviews I asked each of the people I chose to interview the same list of questions with only a few alterations because I was interested to see what their different perspectives were of the executive board. I conducted my interview with the president of the executive board at her Sorority house in a private room and the interview with the editor and chief was conducted at Lawson in a private room. The observation of the meeting was also done at Lawson. When I researched using the online archives and our group message I was at the Hicks underground library. I chose to interview the president and the editor and chief for a few reasons. For one they are both seniors here at Purdue and have almost four years of experience of being in this discourse community. They both have become very invested in this community and given it countless house of their time over the years and I believed them to be the most reliable and experienced members of our community. I chose to observe our group message because that is where the majority of our communication occurs and the dialog back and forth is very interesting. It includes a lot of words that are only relevant to our community. It was a good comparison of different generas to observe the group message compared to a formal face-to-face meeting that we had. I observed this meeting to not only see the difference in genera but to see how everyone physically interacted together. Results I observed my discourse community while we were having our monthly group meeting. This meeting typically covers the progress that each member of our executive board has made with the paper over the past month and any problems that have occurred.

We have these meetings at Lawson in a large room with a tall celling. The meeting is at 8:00 at night so there are normally only a few people left studying in the main room at this point. We all pull up the large chairs and stools that are there and sit around in a semi circle. At the meeting that I observed the whole board was there. The meeting started a little late because there was one of the members that were running late. We sat patiently and waited for about five minutes until the president of the board, Paige, said to me, Will you text Rebecca and see if she is on her way? Yes of coarse! I quickly responded by putting down my notebook and pen to grab my IPhone from my purse to text her. Before I could even get my phone out she walked in and with that the meeting began. In the beginning it was very formal and Paige just briefed us on what headquarters has been doing and the direction that they want us to go. So this week is the Valentines Day issue and we are working on getting the businesses whose ads are in our paper to change up their current adds to have a V Day theme. Ali and Rebecca, when you go to deliver the papers this week make sure to talk to the owners about this. Okay what if they arent in the store? asked Rebecca. Just e-mail them and if they dont answer then we will just not make any changes, replied Paige. Emily, the editor and chief said, Okay so we need to work on getting a lot more writers especially male writers! Ali and Rebecca since you two are a freshman and sophomore we need you guys to recruit new writers so that they will be here for a while. Okay texting in my Group Me right now! I said.

The small conversations continued for another fifteen minutes about customers who had been needy and annoying the week before. There were new proposals due from the sales reps, that was Rebecca and I, by the end of the week and this was a topic of conversation for a while. The groups dynamic was interesting this week because it was the first time we had all met this semester. Some of us were catching up, others checking their phones constantly and looking bored. There was a general feeling of wanting the meeting to be over and Paige could sense this right when we ran out of things to talk about. Thanks for coming guys it was a good meeting! See yall next month! She beamed her huge smile at us as we all started bundling up in our coats, scarfs, and everything else that we had to keep us warm. As much you could tell everyone was ready to leave no one wanted to go outside. A few people looked to the left at the huge wall of glass windows to see what the weather looked like. The wind swirled the snow around in mini tornadoes and it looked cold as ever. As everyone finally was about to walk out the door Paige said, just check Group Me this week Ill keep everyone updated! With this everyone said their last goodbyes and with mixed emotion of wanting to leave and not wanting to be cold they walked out into the swirling winds of snow. While observing and doing my interviews on my discourse community I found that there are two different sides to this group. One side is the business side that I saw while doing my observation on the monthly formal meeting. The group started off with strictly business but while the meeting went on everyone became less worried about the business side and began having small conversations about personal lives. The other side that I saw while observing was the funny side where everyone in the group cracks jokes

and sometimes even gets a little upset. I saw this while observing our Group Messages. In these the members say what ever is on their minds. It also really helps our community to stay connected over the time that we do not meet in person. During my interview that I conducted on the president and editor and chief of the executive board I made a few general findings about this discourse community. They both had similar goals for this year, which goes along that our community shares the same goals and values. When I asked Paige, the president of our community, about communication she had a very helpful answer that helped me understand fully how we communicate. She said, Our group communicates through a couple different mediums. First off, we have a Group Me messaging group for the executive board where we can all simultaneously message each other about important deadlines and meeting times. I find this effective, since we are a newspaper and a newspaper is full of several deadline it is easy to send a quick text and get an equally quick response. But overall, I think our best way to communicate is with our weekly meetings where we all sit down and discuss things that are going on with the paper. We are able to talk about lengthy things that we otherwise wouldn't be able to talk about though our Group Me. This answer to the two interviews helped me put together everything that I had observed and researched. Discussion/ Conclusion One pattern that I found in my community was that we are constantly in tough via Group message. Not a single day goes by that there arent multiple messages involving things from cooperate wanting us to try something new to their house having a philanthropy event and asking us to come support it. The president and other members of the executive board that are higher up than some all communicate in the same way that

we do. They have more experience and knowledge but they use it only to help us grow instead of make us feel inferior. I found this to be very interesting that the leader of the executive board communicated in the meetings and in the Group messages the same way that someone who was new. Granted they talked more in both and were more informative due to their vast knowledge about this community, but I still found it interesting that there was nothing that they did that made anyone feel below them. There are a few terms that we use in this community that are unique our group. Since we are a Greek newspaper when we talk about our philanthropies, rush, formals, new pledge classes and much more someone who was not Greek would not know what we were talking about. Secondly we use newspaper lingo as some people in our executive board call it. This consists of talking about print day, delivery day, reprinting, page spreads and the ads we have in the paper. These all make our discourse community unique and special. This community has a lot to offer and it makes its members better and more rounded people.

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