Discourses can be the difference between getting the job you want and working at Mcdonald’s flipping burgers for the rest of your life: It can be the difference between finding your future wife and being lonely for the rest of your life. Discourses simple come down to Black and white but, they make a lot of grey.
According to Gee, discourse is how people act, value things, and do things with different groups of people (6). For example, you wouldn’t talk to your boss the same way you would talk to your kid. I wouldn’t act the same way in a bar as I would act in the office. Discourses are like a costume they are interchangeable and with this costume comes with the character if you were to dress up as a cowboy for halloween you wouldn’t go around saying Arrgh!! Wheres me Booty? You would talk and act like a cowboy. This is how you act in discourses you follow along with what you’re in. For example when I am at football I am a completely different person then I am around my family and friends. As soon as I walk into the Athletic complex it is all business I am more serious then I am anywhere else. This is part of that discourse, my behavior is more serious than otherwise. This can also be completely flipped around depending on the discourse you are in at the moment. The way you speak,act, think, dress everything is depending on what discourse you are trying to be part of at the moment. With that said they can change rapidly if needed. Sometimes you are needed to be part of certain discourses for a very long time and this can either be good or bad.
Discourses give us the ability to not always be our truest self. It gives us the freedom to either persuade people or hide from others. You can get jobs from using discourse the right way. It gives you the ability to show off character and to use things differently. Discourses allow people to connect with people they usually wouldn’t connect with. Discourses are developed according to Gee by “Two Discourses can be transferred to another Discourse, as one can transfer a grammatical feature from one language to another. (9)” What Gee is explaining is that you learn discourses from one another they all connect one way or another. For example when I was learning American Sign Language I was able to understand it better by connecting the signs with words and terms that I used every day. By doing this I allowed myself to understand the concept of the language.
Discourse is gained by experience and time. Over a lifetime you will learn different discourses, these can be also called costumes. And just like learned about costumes it takes time to learn them how to act in them and what ones mean what. With time and experience with older and wiser people you can acquire multiple discourses. Like most good things in life it takes time to acquire many discourses. In order to get good discourses you need to live life. You can’t be shy or be not around people and real life simulations you need to experience things in life.
