how to write an essay about a discourse

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Essays on Discourse Community

Engaging discourse community essay prompts.

Finding the right prompt can set the stage for an insightful essay. Here are some thought-provoking prompts to get you started:

• Evaluate the discourse within an online forum dedicated to sustainability.
• Analyze the communication patterns of a professional esports team.
• Investigate how a local art collective uses language to build community.

Picking a Standout Discourse Community Essay Topic

Choosing a compelling topic is crucial. Here’s how to make sure you land on something engaging:

• Interest : Opt for a community you’re personally interested in or curious about.
• Originality : Seek out topics that aren’t overdone. The more unique, the better.
• Accessibility : Make sure you can access enough information and resources for your essay.

Examples of Discourse Community Essay Topics

To avoid the usual suspects and spark your imagination, consider these unique essay topics:

• Discourse practices in online coding bootcamps.
• Language and identity in expatriate communities.
• How DIY forums challenge traditional expertise.
• Discourse dynamics in feminist activist groups.
• The role of language in local food cooperatives.
• Communication styles within virtual reality spaces.
• Analysis of discourse in mental health support groups.
• Language use in underground music communities.
• How digital nomads create community through discourse.
• Discourse among members of a city council.
• Cross-cultural communication in international business teams.
• Language and power in academic departments.
• Communication strategies in environmental advocacy groups.
• Discourse in online platforms for language learning.
• Community building in co-living spaces.
• Discourse strategies in political campaigning.
• Role of language in crafting a makerspace identity.
• Online forums as spaces for medical discourse.
• Language evolution in multiplayer online games.
• Building a discourse community in coworking spaces.

Inspiration for Your Discourse Community Essay

Need a nudge to get your writing process started? Let these ideas inspire you:

"Exploring the esports team's communication reveals a complex system of language, symbols, and rituals, highlighting the nuanced ways members create a sense of belonging and identity."

"The vibrant discourse within the feminist activist group not only challenges societal norms but also fosters a strong sense of community and shared purpose among its members."

Diehard Sports Fans: a Discourse Community Analysis

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Analysis of a Discourse Community: Craft and Diy Enthusiasts

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Critical Discourse Analysis and Power Relations

Critical discourse analysis of race and racism, critical discourse analysis: historical origins, analyzing gender stereotypes, and empowerment in the always campaign, gender diffrences in political discourse, discourse community, understanding and examples of a discourse community, "discourse community" by john swales: summary, discourse community practices.

A discourse community refers to a collective of individuals who possess a shared set of discourses, encompassing fundamental values, assumptions, and modes of communication that revolve around common objectives.

A discourse community exhibits distinct characteristics that define its identity and functioning. Firstly, they have a common goal or purpose that unites members and serves as a focal point for their interactions. This shared objective creates a sense of belonging and facilitates effective communication within the community. Secondly, discourse communities have specific language and communication practices unique to their group. These can include specialized terminology, jargon, or even non-verbal cues that enable efficient and meaningful communication among members. Mastery of this shared language is crucial for individuals to participate actively and contribute to the community's discourse. Thirdly, discourse communities often possess established conventions, norms, and expectations regarding appropriate behavior, ethics, and standards of communication. These guidelines ensure cohesion, cooperation, and mutual respect among members. Lastly, discourse communities may have gatekeepers who regulate access and maintain the integrity of the community. These gatekeepers may be experts, mentors, or long-standing members who ensure that new participants meet the community's requirements and contribute positively to its ongoing discourse.

The concept of discourse community emerged as a framework in the field of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Although there is no specific historical origin attributed to it, the study of discourse communities can be traced back to the works of scholars such as John Swales and James Gee in the late 20th century. John Swales, a prominent linguist, introduced the term "discourse community" in his influential book "Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings" published in 1990. Swales emphasized the importance of understanding the communicative practices and conventions within specific communities to effectively participate in their discourse. James Gee, another influential scholar, expanded the concept of discourse community and introduced the idea of "situated learning" in his book "Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses" published in 1996. Gee explored how discourse communities shape identity, knowledge acquisition, and socialization processes. Since then, the study of discourse communities has gained prominence in various fields, including linguistics, communication studies, and sociology.

1. Professional Discourse Communities. 2. Academic Discourse Communities. 3. Hobbyist Discourse Communities. 4. Cultural Discourse Communities. 5. Online Discourse Communities:

Academic Discourse Community: Scholars, researchers, and students within a specific discipline form an academic discourse community. They share specialized knowledge, use discipline-specific terminology, and engage in scholarly writing and discussions. Online Gaming Community: Gamers who participate in online multiplayer games create a discourse community. They use game-specific jargon, communicate through forums or chat platforms, and share strategies and experiences related to gaming. Professional Discourse Community: Professions such as medicine, law, or engineering have their own discourse communities. Professionals within these fields communicate using technical terminology, share professional experiences, and adhere to specific codes of conduct. Sports Fan Community: Fans of a particular sports team or sport create a discourse community. They engage in discussions, debates, and analyses of games and players, often using sports-related slang and terms. Social Media Community: Users of social media platforms form discourse communities based on shared interests, such as fashion, food, or photography. They communicate through hashtags, comments, and posts, creating a unique community around their shared topics.

Social Construction of Reality, Situated Learning Theory, Communities of Practice, Genre Theory.

The study of discourse communities holds significant importance as it sheds light on the intricate ways in which individuals and groups interact, communicate, and form shared understandings within specific contexts. Understanding discourse communities allows us to recognize and appreciate the diversity of social groups and their unique discursive practices, values, and goals. Exploring discourse communities helps us comprehend how language shapes social interactions, knowledge construction, and the formation of identities. It allows us to identify the power dynamics and hierarchies that exist within these communities and how they influence individuals' access to resources and opportunities for participation. Moreover, discourse communities play a crucial role in the transmission and dissemination of knowledge, expertise, and cultural practices. By studying discourse communities, we gain insights into how knowledge is constructed, shared, and preserved within specific fields or domains.

The topic of discourse communities is a compelling subject for an essay due to its relevance and wide-ranging implications in various fields of study. By delving into discourse communities, one can explore the intricate ways in which language, communication, and social interaction shape our understanding of the world. Writing an essay on discourse communities allows for an in-depth examination of how different communities form, develop shared understandings, and create meaning through their discursive practices. It offers an opportunity to analyze the power dynamics, norms, and values that influence communication within specific groups. Furthermore, studying discourse communities provides insights into knowledge transmission, expertise, and identity formation. It allows for a critical exploration of the role of language in shaping social relationships, access to resources, and opportunities for participation within specific communities.

1. Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. Routledge. 2. Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press. 3. Johns, A. M. (1997). Text, role, and context: Developing academic literacies. Cambridge University Press. 4. Prior, P. (1998). Writing/disciplinarity: A sociohistoric account of literate activity in the academy. Routledge. 5. Bazerman, C. (2004). Speech acts, genres, and activity systems: How texts organize activity and people. Routledge. 6. Miller, C. R. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70(2), 151-167. 7. Bhatia, V. K. (2004). Worlds of written discourse: A genre-based view. Continuum. 8. Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (1998). Local literacies: Reading and writing in one community. Routledge. 9. Paltridge, B. (2001). Genre, frames and writing in research settings. John Benjamins Publishing. 10. Johns, A. M. (2017). Discourse communities and communities of practice. In T. Johnstone (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of discourse studies (pp. 257-273). Cambridge University Press.

Relevant topics

• Social Justice
• Personal Identity
• Media Analysis
• Sociological Imagination
• Sex, Gender and Sexuality
• Cultural Appropriation
• Social Media
• Effects of Social Media

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How to write a discursive essay: step-by-step guideline

Updated 30 Aug 2024

Many students struggle with discursive writing as it can be tricky. It’s hard to manage different opinions and create a well-organized argument, leaving learners feeling unsure. In this article, we want to make creating discursive essays less confusing by giving helpful tips. If you grasp the essential information and follow our advice, you can tackle the challenges of this essay style and learn how to express convincing and well-thought-out ideas. Come with us as we explore the basic dos and don’ts for making successful writing.

What is a discursive essay? 

This type of academic writing explores and presents various perspectives on a particular topic or issue. Unlike an argumentative essay, where the author takes a clear stance on the subject, discursive writing aims to provide a balanced and nuanced discussion of different viewpoints. What is the discursive essay meaning? The first word implies a conversation or discussion. So, the text encourages an exploration of diverse opinions and arguments.

This homework, commonly assigned in higher academia, serves various purposes:

• Students analyze diverse perspectives, fostering critical thinking as they weigh different viewpoints before forming a conclusion.
• Such essays involve thorough research, requiring students to synthesize information from various sources and present a comprehensive understanding of the topic.
• When struggling with how to write my essay for me, students develop their communication skills as they should express complex ideas clearly and coherently, creating smooth transitions between arguments.
• While not demanding a fixed stance, discursive papers require persuasive writing skills. The authors present each perspective convincingly, regardless of personal endorsement.
• Encouraging an appreciation for the issue’s complexity, the essays promote tolerance for diverse opinions.

In summary, these papers contribute to developing analytical, research, and communication skills, preparing students for nuanced engagement with complex topics in academic and professional settings.

What is the difference between discursive and argumentative essays?

While these documents may exhibit certain similarities, it’s crucial to underscore the notable distinctions that characterize them, delineating their unique objectives and methodologies. 

Discursive essays

• Objective presentation: A five paragraph essay of this type aims to provide a comprehensive discussion on a particular topic without necessarily taking a clear stance.
• Multiple perspectives: Writers explore different viewpoints, neutrally presenting arguments and counterarguments.
• Complexity: These essays often deal with complex issues, encouraging a nuanced understanding of the subject.
• Balanced tone and language: Such writing allows for a more open expression of different ideas using objective and formal language. 
• Flexible structure: These texts allow for a free-flowing topic analysis and may express numerous ideas in separate sections. 
• Conclusion: While a discursive essay example may express the writer's opinion, it doesn’t necessarily require a firm conclusion or a call to action.

Argumentative essays

• Clear stance: This type involves taking a specific position and defending it with strong, persuasive arguments.
• Focused argumentation: The primary goal is to convince the reader of the writer's position, providing compelling evidence and logical reasoning.
• Counterarguments: While an argumentative essay acknowledges opposing views, the focus is on refuting them to strengthen the writer’s position.
• Assertive tone: This type aims to present ideas from the writer’s perspective and convict the reader using evidence and reasoning.
• Rigid structure: These texts come with a clear structure with a distinct introduction, thesis statement, body paragraphs with arguments and reasoning, and a conclusion that highlights the author’s stance.
• Call to action or conclusion: Such papers often conclude with a clear summary of the arguments and may include a call to action or a statement of the writer’s position.

The key distinction lies in the intent: discursive texts foster a broader understanding by presenting multiple perspectives. At the same time, argumentative papers aim to persuade the reader to adopt a specific viewpoint through strong, focused arguments.

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Discursive writing types

When delving into discursive essay format, exploring three primary forms of writing is essential.

1. Opinion essay.

• In an opinion essay, your viewpoint on the discussed problem is crucial.
• State your opinion in the introduction, supported by examples and reasons.
• Present the opposing argument before the conclusion, explaining why you find it unconvincing.
• Summarize your important points in the conclusion.

2. Essay providing a solution to a problem.

• Focus on discussing an issue and proposing solutions.
• Introduce the issue at the beginning of the text.
• Detail possible solutions in separate body paragraphs.
• Summarize your opinion in the conclusion.

3. For and against essay.

• Write it as a debate with opposing opinions.
• Describe each viewpoint objectively, presenting facts.
• Set the stage for the problem in your discursive essay intro.
• Explore reasons, examples, and facts in the main body.
• Conclude with your opinion on the matter.

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Discursive essay structure

Discover a concise outline that will help structure your thoughts and arguments, allowing for a comprehensive and articulate presentation of your ideas.

The length of the discursive introduction example and the number of body paragraphs can vary based on the topic's complexity and the text's required length. Additionally, adjust the outline according to specific assignment guidelines or your personal preferences.

10 steps to create an essay

Many students wonder how to write a discursive essay. With the following guidelines, you can easily complete it as if you were one of the professional essay writers for hire. Look at these effective steps and create your outstanding text. 

1. Choose an appropriate topic:

• Select a topic that sparks interest and is debatable. Ensure it is suitable for discursive examples with multiple viewpoints.

2. Brainstorm your ideas:

• Gather information from various sources to understand different perspectives on the chosen topic.
• Take notes on key arguments, evidence, and counterarguments.

3. Develop a clear thesis:

• Formulate a thesis statement that outlines your main idea. This could include your stance on the topic or a commitment to exploring various viewpoints.

4. Create a discursive essay outline:

• Structure your text with an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.
• Outline the main points you want to cover in each section.

5. Write the introduction:

• Begin with a hook to grab the reader's attention.
• Provide background information on the topic.
• Clearly state your thesis or the purpose of the essay.

6. Create body paragraphs:

• Start each paragraph with a clear topic sentence.
• Present different perspectives on the topic in separate paragraphs.
• Support each perspective with relevant evidence and examples.
• Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each viewpoint.
• Use smooth transitions between paragraphs.

7. Suggest counterarguments:

• Devote a section to acknowledging and addressing counterarguments.
• Refute or explain why you find certain counterarguments unconvincing.

8. Write the conclusion:

• Summarize the main points discussed in the body paragraphs.
• Restate your thesis or the overall purpose of the essay.
• Provide a concise discursive essay conclusion, highlighting the significance of the topic.

9. Proofread and revise:

• Review your work for clarity, coherence, and logical flow.
• Check for grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors.
• Ensure that your arguments are well-supported and effectively presented.

10. Finalize and submit:

• Make any necessary revisions based on feedback or additional insights.
• Ensure every discursive sentence in your paper meets specific requirements provided by your instructor.
• Submit your well-crafted document.

Following these steps will help you produce a well-organized and thought-provoking text that effectively explores and discusses the chosen topic.

Dos and don’ts when completing a discursive essay

If you want more useful writing tips, consider the dos and don’ts to create an impactful and compelling text.

• Thorough research: Do conduct extensive research on the topic to gather a diverse range of perspectives and solid evidence. It will strengthen your discursive thesis statement and demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the subject.
• Clear structure: Do organize your essay with a clear introduction, body paragraphs that present different viewpoints, and a concise conclusion. Use a separate paragraph to introduce every point. This structure helps readers follow your argument effectively.
• Neutral tone: Do maintain a balanced tone and impersonal style throughout the essay. Avoid being overly emotional or biased, as the goal is to present a fair discussion of various perspectives.
• Critical analysis: Do critically analyze each perspective, highlighting strengths and weaknesses. Build your discursive thesis on trustworthy sources and make appropriate references following the rules of the required citation style. This showcases your critical thinking ability and contributes to a more nuanced discussion.
• Smooth transitions: Do use smooth transitions between paragraphs and arguments to create a cohesive flow. The use of linking phrases and words enhances the readability of your text and makes it easier for the reader to follow your line of reasoning.

Don’ts:

• Avoid biased language: Don’t use biased language or favor one perspective over another. Maintain an objective tone and present each viewpoint with equal consideration.
• Don’t oversimplify: Avoid oversimplifying complex issues. Acknowledge the nuances of the topic and provide a nuanced discussion that reflects a deep understanding of the subject matter.
• Steer clear of generalizations: Don’t make broad generalizations without supporting evidence. Ensure that relevant and credible sources back your arguments to strengthen your position.
• Don’t neglect counterarguments: Avoid neglecting counterarguments. Acknowledge opposing views and address them within your discursive essays. It adds credibility to your work and thoroughly examines the topic.
• Don’t be too personal : Avoid expressing your personal opinion too persistently, and don’t use examples from your individual experience. 
• Refrain from unsupported claims: Don’t make claims without supporting them with evidence. Substantiate your arguments with reliable sources and statistics with proper referencing to enhance the credibility of your document.

By adhering to these dos and don’ts, you’ll be better equipped to navigate the complexities of writing a discursive text and present a well-rounded and convincing discussion.

Final thoughts 

Mastering the art of writing a discursive essay is a valuable skill that equips students with critical thinking, research, and communication abilities. If your essay-writing journey is challenging, consider seeking assistance from EduBirdie, a trusted companion that guides students through the intricacies of these papers and helps them answer the question, “What is discursive writing?”. With our support, you can navigate the challenges of crafting a compelling and well-rounded discourse, ensuring success in your academic endeavors. Embrace the assistance of EduBirdie and elevate your writing experience to new heights.

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Written by Steven Robinson

Steven Robinson is an academic writing expert with a degree in English literature. His expertise, patient approach, and support empower students to express ideas clearly. On EduBirdie's blog, he provides valuable writing guides on essays, research papers, and other intriguing topics. Enjoys chess in free time.

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1b. Discourse Communities

Overview + objectives.

Image Attribution: Saying hello in different languages by 1940162 Hari chandana C is licenced under a CC BY 4.0 licence , via Wikimedia Commons

The first major concept we discuss that will be the foundation of your reading and writing in Writing 121 is discourse community . Considering your discourse community can give your writing its audience, context, and purpose, which are crucial for motivating your writing. In this chapter, we will:

• Define discourse community
• Identify the various discourse communities of which you are a part
• Understand how a discourse community shapes your writing
• Consider ways to craft a unique voice within a discourse community
• Reflect on how knowledge of discourse community can improve your writing

What is a discourse community?

To define this concept, let’s break it down into its separate parts:  discourse  and  community . We’ll start with the simpler word,  community . A community is simply a group of people who are joined together by something they have in common. It could be a shared interest, such as a gaming community, a set of beliefs, such as a religious community, a similar geographical location, such as a local community, or a profession, such as the academic community. A family is a type of community. Your friends also form a community. Take a moment and think of the various communities to which you belong. What binds individuals together in these communities? Do members of these communities engage with each other virtually or in real life?

Next let’s look at the other word in this term,  discourse . The word in its original usage meant reasoned argument or thought. However, in contemporary usage we sometimes think of it generally as any written or spoken communication, a conversation. We more often use it to refer to written or spoken communication related to a particular intellectual or social activity, such as scientific discourse or political discourse. In this sense, a synonym for discourse might be  language . A discourse is defined by its unique language, vocabulary, themes, ideas, values, and beliefs. Think about your major. What are the unique characteristics of the discourse in your disciplinary or professional field?

Now let’s put our two words together,  discourse community . Any guesses on what it means? If you are thinking that it is a group of people—real, imaginary, virtual, or otherwise—with shared interests, goals, language, and ways of communicating, then, yes, you’ve got it!

Image Attribution: Your WR 121 discourse community Discussion icons created by Freepik – Flaticon .

What does a discourse community look like?

Let’s work through a few examples. The following are five lists of words. Do you recognize any of the groups of words and what they have in common?

• CPA, general ledger, liabilities, return on investment, owner’s equity, net income, expenses (fixed, variable, accrued, operation)
• ISO, aperture, depth of field, autofocus, exposure, shutter speed
• gracias, de nada, salud, buen provecho, estadounidense, te quiero
• iron throne, direwolf, Khaleesi, the Wall, Valyrian steel, Night Walkers
• once a Duck always a Duck, show your “O,” Carson, EMU, it never rains in Autzen Stadium, Arts and Letters, Social Science, and Science groups

If you are a business major and have taken an accounting class, you’ve likely learned about the set of words in #1. If you are a photographer, you probably know the terminology in #2. If you speak Spanish, then you understand the words in #3. If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, then you recognize the words in #4. And if you are a UO student, then the words in #5 should seem familiar to you. Sco Ducks!

So you can see that discourse, or language, is one way that a community is bound together. It shapes it, strengthens it, and even defines it. The members of the community generally agree on what the terms mean; however, that is not always the case, as we will explore later in the course.

But what if you didn’t know a group of words? Let’s say you are in a conversation with a group of people using the technical terms in #2, but your only camera is your iPhone. Or perhaps you are reading an article that is in Spanish, but you don’t know that language. How would you feel? You would probably feel confused, frustrated, and excluded.

Because language and modes of communication differ among various groups, a discourse community can exclude others as much as it brings people together. Think about one of the communities to which you belong. What is the discourse of that group? What is the shared language and terminology? What are the primary ways of communicating between members of the community? How do members communicate their ideas or activities with those outside of the community?

What is a discourse community to which you belong and. . .

• What are the unique characteristics of communicating within this community?
• How has it shaped the way you think and write?
• Is it possible to assert your unique voice within that community? How so or why not?

Images (above, from left to right):

• Balance sheet:  RODNAE Productions from  Pexels  
• Photography:  Pxhere  
• Dany: Creative Commons
• Puddles the Duck by Brian licensed under a CC BY SA 4.0 license via  Wikimedia Commons

How does the discourse community shape your writing?

Image Attribution: Workshop by fauxels via Pexe l.

In his book on academic writing,  The Shape of Reason , John Gage defines a  discourse community  as “any kind of community in which the members attempt to achieve cooperation and assert their individuality through the use of language. We are all members of discourse communities, each of which uses language in different ways” (2).

What keywords can you pull out of this definition? I identify the following keywords:  cooperation ,  individuality , and  language . A community generally assumes members who  cooperate  with each other. The group has a common goal or set of goals and its members want to work or live together to achieve those goals. They use  a common language and mode of communication  to maintain and strengthen the community. For an individual to thrive within this community, understanding and being able to use that common language and mode of communication are essential. When we as individuals have thoughts, ideas, or actions we would like to share with others in the community, we want to convey those thoughts, ideas, or actions in a way that others can understand and engage with them. No one likes to feel misunderstood. In this way, a discourse community influences how we communicate our  individuality  to the group.

We can illustrate how discourse community shapes your writing with a few examples. It is probably easy and fun for you to write and send texts to your friends. What kind of language do you use when texting? If your friend’s primary language is English, then you’ll probably use English in your texts. You’ll probably also use textspeak abbreviations like “lol” and “idk.” You might even use some visual language, such as emoji or gifs. If your friend does not speak English, does not know what the abbreviations stand for, or is unfamiliar with emoji, then they will not understand your message. Now, let’s say you are sending an email to your professor. Would you use the same discourse that you use when texting your friend? Probably not. In other words: an awareness of discourse community probably already shapes how you communicate your ideas.

This is all well and good when you feel confident about your membership in a community. But what about when you are new to a community? How do you learn that community’s discourse? Or what if you struggle to feel like you truly belong in a community? How do these things affect how you communicate and interact with the group? As you become more familiar with a community’s discourse, your written communication with the group will also improve. However, do you think it is possible to assert  your unique voice and identity  within the limits of a community’s discourse?

Let’s consider the university as a discourse community. The university comprises intellectuals (including you!) in various academic disciplines. Each academic discipline has its own discourse, but for the most part all academic disciplines communicate and share knowledge, as well as debate theories and ideas, through discussion and writing. What characterizes  academic discourse ? What is  academic writing ? Who gets to speak and write in this community?

Once you have read the sections on discourse community and thought about the various communities of which you are a part and the discourses used in these communities, you’re ready to get to know your WR 121 discourse community. What can you learn about your peers and instructor? What languages do they speak? What common goals do you all share? Do you agree on what effective writing looks like? What support will you offer each other as you work on your writing this term?

Acknowledgment:

Gage, John.  The Shape of Reason , 4th Edition. New York: Pearson, 2006: 2.

Writing as Inquiry Copyright © 2021 by Kara Clevinger and Stephen Rust is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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How to Write a Discursive Essay: Awesome Guide and Template

The term "discursive" comes from the Latin word "discursus," meaning to move around or traverse. A discursive essay reflects this by exploring multiple viewpoints and offering a thorough discussion on a specific topic.

In this article, our term paper writing service will define what a discursive essay is, distinguish it from an argumentative essay, provide practical tips on how to write one effectively, and examine essay examples to illustrate its structure and approach.

What Is a Discursive Essay

A discursive essay is a type of essay where you discuss a topic from various viewpoints. The goal is to provide a balanced analysis by exploring different perspectives. Your essay should present arguments on the topic, showing both sides to give a comprehensive view.

Features of discursive essays typically include:

• Thesis Statement: Clearly states your position or argument on the topic.
• Discussion of Perspectives: Examines different viewpoints or aspects of the issue.
• Evidence and Examples: Supports arguments with relevant evidence and examples.
• Counterarguments: Addresses opposing viewpoints to strengthen your position.
• Logical Organization: Structured to present arguments coherently and persuasively.

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How to Write a Discursive Essay

Writing a discursive essay involves examining a topic from different angles and presenting balanced viewpoints. Whether you're tackling a controversial issue or analyzing a complex subject, following these steps will help you craft a well-structured discursive essay.

1. Understand the Topic

Before you start writing, make sure you grasp the topic thoroughly. Identify key terms and concepts to clarify what you need to discuss. Consider the different aspects and perspectives related to the topic that you will explore in your essay.

2. Research and Gather Evidence

Research is crucial for a discursive essay. Gather information from reliable sources such as books, academic journals, and reputable websites. Collect evidence that supports various viewpoints on the topic. Note down quotes, statistics, and examples that you can use to strengthen your arguments.

3. Plan Your Structure

Organize your essay effectively to ensure clarity and coherence. Start with an introduction that states your thesis or main argument. Outline the main points or perspectives you will discuss in the body paragraphs. Each paragraph should focus on a different aspect or viewpoint, supported by evidence. Consider including a paragraph that addresses counterarguments to strengthen your position.

4. Write the Introduction

Begin your essay with a compelling introduction that grabs the reader's attention. Start with a hook or an intriguing fact related to the topic. Clearly state your thesis statement, which outlines your position on the issue and previews the main points you will discuss. The introduction sets the tone for your essay and provides a roadmap for what follows.

5. Develop the Body Paragraphs

The body of your essay should present a balanced discussion of the topic. Each paragraph should focus on a different perspective or argument. Start each paragraph with a clear topic sentence that introduces the main idea. Support your points with evidence, examples, and quotes from your research. Ensure smooth transitions between paragraphs to maintain the flow of your argument.

6. Conclude Effectively

Wrap up your essay with a strong conclusion that summarizes the main points and reinforces your thesis statement. Avoid introducing new information in the conclusion. Instead, reflect on the significance of your arguments and how they contribute to the broader understanding of the topic. End with a thought-provoking statement or a call to action, encouraging readers to consider the complexities of the issue.

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Discursive Guide Checklist

Discursive Essay Examples

Here, let’s take a look at our samples and see how different topics are discussed from different viewpoints in real discursive essays.

If you found these examples helpful, you can order custom essay now and receive one on any topic you choose.

Discursive Essay Topics

Here are a range of topics that encourage exploration of different perspectives and critical analysis. Choose a topic that interests you and allows for a balanced analysis of arguments and evidence.

• Should governments impose higher taxes on sugary drinks to combat obesity?
• Is homeschooling beneficial for children's education?
• Should the use of drones for military purposes be restricted?
• Should the legal drinking age be lowered or raised?
• Is online education as effective as traditional classroom learning?
• Should parents be held legally responsible for their children's actions?
• Is artificial intelligence a threat to human employment?
• Are video games a positive or negative influence on young people?
• Should the voting age be lowered to 16?
• Should schools teach mindfulness and meditation techniques?
• Is cultural diversity in the workplace beneficial for companies?
• Should prisoners have the right to vote?
• Is social media addiction a real problem?
• Should plastic packaging be replaced with eco-friendly alternatives?
• Is it ethical to clone animals for agricultural purposes?
• Should the government provide subsidies for electric vehicles?
• Is privacy more important than national security?
• Should school uniforms be mandatory?
• Is renewable energy the future of our planet?
• Should parents have access to their children's social media accounts?

By the way, we also have a great collection of narrative essay topics to inspire your creativity.

What is the Difference Between a Discursive and Argumentative Essay

Discursive essays and argumentative essays share similarities but have distinct differences in their approach and purpose. While both essay types involve critical thinking and analysis, the main difference lies in the writer's approach to the topic and the overall goal of the essay—whether it aims to explore and discuss multiple perspectives (discursive) or to argue for a specific viewpoint (argumentative). Here’s a more detailed look at how they differ:

Types of Discursive Essay

Before writing a discursive essay, keep in mind that they can be categorized into different types based on their specific purposes and structures. Here are some common types of discursive essays:

Opinion Essays:

• Purpose: Expressing and supporting personal opinions on a given topic.
• Structure: The essay presents the writer's viewpoint and provides supporting evidence, examples, and arguments. It may also address counterarguments to strengthen the overall discussion.

Problem-Solution Essays:

• Purpose: Identifying a specific problem and proposing effective solutions.
• Structure: The essay introduces the problem, discusses its causes and effects, and presents possible solutions. It often concludes with a recommendation or call to action.

Compare and Contrast Essays:

• Purpose: Analyzing similarities and differences between two or more perspectives, ideas, or approaches.
• Structure: The essay outlines the key points of each perspective, highlighting similarities and differences. A balanced analysis is provided to give the reader a comprehensive understanding.

Cause and Effect Essays:

• Purpose: Exploring the causes and effects of a particular phenomenon or issue.
• Structure: The essay identifies the primary causes and examines their effects or vice versa. It may delve into the chain of events and their implications.

Argumentative Essays:

• Purpose: Presenting a strong argument in favor of a specific viewpoint.
• Structure: The essay establishes a clear thesis statement, provides evidence and reasoning to support the argument, and addresses opposing views. It aims to persuade the reader to adopt the writer's perspective.

Pro-Con Essays:

• Purpose: Evaluating the pros and cons of a given issue.
• Structure: The essay presents the positive aspects (pros) and negative aspects (cons) of the topic. It aims to provide a balanced assessment and may conclude with a recommendation or a summary of the most compelling points.

Exploratory Essays:

• Purpose: Investigating and discussing a topic without necessarily advocating for a specific position.
• Structure: The essay explores various aspects of the topic, presenting different perspectives and allowing the reader to form their own conclusions. It often reflects a process of inquiry and discovery.

These types of discursive essays offer different approaches to presenting information, and the choice of type depends on the specific goals of the essay and the preferences of the writer.

Discursive Essay Format

Writing a discursive essay needs careful planning to make sure it’s clear and flows well while presenting different viewpoints on a topic. Here’s how to structure your discursive essay:

Introduction

• Start with an interesting opening sentence to catch the reader's attention. Give some background information on the topic to show why it’s important.
• Clearly state your main argument or position on the topic, and mention that you’ll be discussing different viewpoints.

"Should genetically modified foods be more strictly regulated for consumer safety? This question sparks debates among scientists, policymakers, and consumers alike. This essay explores the different perspectives on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to give a complete view of the issues."

Body Paragraphs

• Begin each paragraph with a sentence that introduces a key point or perspective about GMOs.
• Present arguments, evidence, and examples to support each perspective. Consider the benefits, risks, and ethical issues around GMOs.
• Address possible objections or opposing viewpoints to show a balanced analysis.

"Supporters of GMOs argue that genetically engineered crops can help solve global food shortages by increasing crop yields and resistance to pests. For example, studies have shown that GMOs like insect-resistant corn have reduced the need for chemical pesticides, which benefits both farmers and the environment."

Counterarguments

• Recognize the counterarguments or concerns raised by opponents of GMOs.
• Provide reasoned responses or rebuttals to these counterarguments, acknowledging the complexity of the issue.

"However, critics of GMOs worry about potential long-term health effects and environmental impacts. They argue that there isn’t enough research to ensure the safety of eating genetically modified foods over long periods."

• Summarize the main points discussed in the essay about GMOs.
• Reinforce your thesis statement while considering the different arguments presented.
• Finish with a thought-provoking statement or suggest what should be considered for future research or policy decisions related to GMOs.

"In conclusion, the debate over genetically modified foods highlights the need to balance scientific innovation with public health and environmental concerns. While GMOs offer potential benefits for global food security, ongoing research and transparent regulation are essential to address uncertainties and ensure consumer safety."

Formatting Tips

• Use clear and straightforward language throughout the essay.
• Ensure smooth transitions between paragraphs to maintain the flow of ideas.
• Use headings and subheadings if they help organize different perspectives.
• Properly cite sources when referencing research findings, quotes, or statistics.

Remember, besides writing compositions, you’ll also need to do math homework , something we can assist you with right away.

Yays and Nays of Writing Discourse Essays

In learning how to write a discursive essay, certain do's and don'ts serve as guiding principles throughout the writing process. By adhering to these guidelines, writers can navigate the complexities of presenting arguments, counterarguments, and nuanced analyses, ensuring the essay resonates with clarity and persuasiveness.

Wrapping Up

Throughout this guide, you have acquired valuable insights into the art of crafting compelling arguments and presenting diverse perspectives. By delving into the nuances of topic selection, structuring, and incorporating evidence, you could hone your critical thinking skills and sharpen your ability to engage in informed discourse. 

This guide serves as a roadmap, offering not just a set of rules but a toolkit to empower students in their academic journey. As you embark on future writing endeavors, armed with the knowledge gained here, you can confidently navigate the challenges of constructing well-reasoned, balanced discursive essays that contribute meaningfully to academic discourse and foster a deeper understanding of complex issues. If you want to continue your academic learning journey right now, we suggest that you read about the IEEE format next.

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What is a Discursive Example?

What is the difference between a discursive and argumentative essay, what are the 2 types of discursive writing.

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is a seasoned educational writer focusing on scholarship guidance, research papers, and various forms of academic essays including reflective and narrative essays. His expertise also extends to detailed case studies. A scholar with a background in English Literature and Education, Daniel’s work on EssayPro blog aims to support students in achieving academic excellence and securing scholarships. His hobbies include reading classic literature and participating in academic forums.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

• Updated old sections including definition, outline, writing guide.
• Added new topics, examples, checklist, FAQs.
• Discursive writing - Discursive Writing - Higher English Revision. (n.d.). BBC Bitesize. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zpdwwmn/revision/1  
• Prepare for Exam Success: C1 Advanced self-access learning Writing Part 1 -the discursive essay Lesson summary. (n.d.). Retrieved June 28, 2024, from https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/Images/583526-c1-advanced-self-access-learning-writing-part-1-discursive-essay.pdf  
• Tomeu. (n.d.). Advanced C1.1: How to write a DISCURSIVE ESSAY. Advanced C1.1. Retrieved June 28, 2024, from https://englishadvanced2.blogspot.com/2013/10/speakout-advanced-p-25-examples-of.html  

English Studies

This website is dedicated to English Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, English Language and its teaching and learning.

Discourse: Writing and Critiquing It

Discourse, as a rhetorical or literary device, refers to the structured and purposeful use of language to convey ideas, persuade, or engage an audience.

Introduction Discourse Writing

Table of Contents

Discourse, as a rhetorical or literary device , refers to the structured and purposeful use of language to convey ideas, persuade, or engage an audience. It involves the artful arrangement of words and sentences to create a coherent and persuasive narrative. It is a fundamental element of rhetoric, literature, and communication, allowing authors and speakers to shape meaning and influence their audience’s perception and understanding of a given topic or theme.

Literary Examples of Discourse

These examples showcase how different styles contribute to the unique storytelling and themes in each of these classic novels.

Creating Effective Discourse

• Identify Your Audience : Tailor it to your audience’s background, beliefs, interests, and knowledge level.
• Choose Your Type : Select from descriptive, narrative, expository, argumentative, or persuasive discourse based on your purpose and audience.
• Use Clear and Concise Language : Ensure your language is clear, simple, and easily understood, avoiding complex jargon and convoluted phrasing.
• Support Your Arguments with Evidence : Back up your claims with evidence such as statistics, examples, personal experiences, or expert quotes.
• Consider Your Tone : Align your tone with your goals and emotional impact, choosing the appropriate tone for your intended message.
• Engage with Your Audience : Encourage dialogue and exchange of ideas by asking questions, seeking feedback, and valuing your audience’s perspectives.

Benefits of Discourse

Discourse can have a wide range of benefits, including:

• Facilitating Communication : It serves as the foundational mechanism for interpersonal communication, enabling the articulation of ideas, expression of emotions, and the exchange of information in a coherent and efficacious manner.
• Building Interpersonal Relationships : Discourse contributes to relationship-building by nurturing empathy, understanding, and mutual respect among individuals and within groups.
• Enhancing Critical Thinking Skills : Engagement in discourse cultivates critical thinking abilities, prompting individuals to systematically and logically evaluate and analyze information, ideas, and arguments.
• Promoting Educational Endeavors : It functions as a potent tool for learning, as it facilitates the exchange of information and ideas, the sharing of knowledge and insights, and the receipt of constructive feedback and support.
• Fostering Creativity : It also fosters creativity by encouraging individuals to explore novel ideas, think innovatively, and engage in inventive problem-solving.
• Reinforcing Community Bonds : It contributes to community cohesion through the promotion of open and respectful dialogues, the facilitation of collaboration and cooperation, and the encouragement of collective efforts toward shared objectives.

Discourse and Literary Theory

These literary theories incorporate its analysis to provide deeper insights into the construction of meaning and interpretation within literary texts.

Suggested Readings

• Fairclough, Norman. Language and Power. Routledge, 2015.
• Gee, James Paul. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. Routledge, 2014.
• Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Sage Publications, 2013.
• Jaworski, Adam, and Nikolas Coupland. The Discourse Reader. Routledge, 2006.
• Van Dijk, Teun A. Discourse and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
• Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Sage Publications, 2009.
• Widdowson, Henry G. Discourse Analysis. Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Yule, George. The Study of Language. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Related posts:

• Onomatopoeia: A Literary Device

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26 Planning a Discursive Essay

Discursive essay – description.

A discursive essay is a form of critical essay that attempts to provide the reader with a balanced argument on a topic, supported by evidence. It requires critical thinking, as well as sound and valid arguments (see Chapter 25) that acknowledge and analyse arguments both for and against any given topic, plus discursive essay writing appeals to reason, not emotions or opinions. While it may draw some tentative conclusions, based on evidence, the main aim of a discursive essay is to inform the reader of the key arguments and allow them to arrive at their own conclusion.

The writer needs to research the topic thoroughly to present more than one perspective and should check their own biases and assumptions through critical reflection (see Chapter 30).

Unlike persuasive writing, the writer does not need to have knowledge of the audience, though should write using academic tone and language (see Chapter 20).

Choose Your Topic Carefully

A basic guide to choosing an assignment topic is available in Chapter 23, however choosing a topic for a discursive essay means considering more than one perspective. Not only do you need to find information about the topic via academic sources, you need to be able to construct a worthwhile discussion, moving from idea to idea. Therefore, more forward planning is required. The following are decisions that need to be considered when choosing a discursive essay topic:

• These will become the controlling ideas for your three body paragraphs (some essays may require more). Each controlling idea will need arguments both for and against.
• For example, if my topic is “renewable energy” and my three main (controlling) ideas are “cost”, “storage”, “environmental impact”, then I will need to consider arguments both for and against each of these three concepts. I will also need to have good academic sources with examples or evidence to support my claim and counter claim for each controlling idea (More about this in Chapter 27).
• Am I able to write a thesis statement about this topic based on the available research? In other words, do my own ideas align with the available research, or am I going to be struggling to support my own ideas due to a lack of academic sources or research? You need to be smart about your topic choice. Do not make it harder than it has to be. Writing a discursive essay is challenging enough without struggling to find appropriate sources.
• For example, perhaps I find a great academic journal article about the uptake of solar panel installation in suburban Australia and how this household decision is cost-effective long-term, locally stored, and has minimal, even beneficial environmental impact due to the lowering of carbon emissions. Seems too good to be true, yet it is perfect for my assignment. I would have to then find arguments AGAINST everything in the article that supports transitioning suburbs to solar power. I would have to challenge the cost-effectiveness, the storage, and the environmental impact study. Now, all of a sudden my task just became much more challenging.
• There may be vast numbers of journal articles written about your topic, but consider how relevant they may be to your tentative thesis statement. It takes a great deal of time to search for appropriate academic sources. Do you have a good internet connection at home or will you need to spend some quality time at the library? Setting time aside to complete your essay research is crucial for success.

It is only through complete forward planning about the shape and content of your essay that you may be able to choose the topic that best suits your interests, academic ability and time management. Consider how you will approach the overall project, not only the next step.

Research Your Topic

When completing a library search for online peer reviewed journal articles, do not forget to use Boolean Operators to refine or narrow your search field. Standard Boolean Operators are (capitalized) AND, OR and NOT. While using OR will expand your search, AND and NOT will reduce the scope of your search. For example, if I want information on ageism and care giving, but I only want it to relate to the elderly, I might use the following to search a database: ageism AND care NOT children. Remember to keep track of your search strings (like the one just used) and then you’ll know what worked and what didn’t as you come and go from your academic research.

The UQ Library provides an excellent step-by-step guide to searching databases:

Searching in databases – Library – University of Queensland (uq.edu.au)

Did you know that you can also link the UQ Library to Google Scholar? This link tells you how:

Google Scholar – Library – University of Queensland (uq.edu.au)

Write the Thesis Statement

The concept of a thesis statement was introduced in Chapter 21. The information below relates specifically to a discursive essay thesis statement.

As noted in the introduction to this chapter, the discursive essay should not take a stance and therefore the thesis statement must also impartially indicate more than one perspective. The goal is to present both sides of an argument equally and allow the reader to make an informed and well-reasoned choice after providing supporting evidence for each side of the argument.

Sample thesis statements: Solar energy is a cost -effective solution to burning fossil fuels for electricity , however lower income families cannot afford the installation costs .

Some studies indicate that teacher comments written in red may have no effect on students’ emotions , however other studies suggest that seeing red ink on papers could cause some students unnecessary stress. [1]

According to social justice principles, education should be available to all , yet historically, the intellectually and physically impaired may have been exempt from participation due to their supposed inability to learn. [2]

This is where your pros and cons list comes into play. For each pro, or positive statement you make, about your topic, create an equivalent con, or negative statement and this will enable you to arrive at two opposing assertions – the claim and counter claim.

While there may be multiple arguments or perspectives related to your essay topic, it is important that you match each claim with a counter-claim. This applies to the thesis statement and each supporting argument within the body paragraphs of the essay.

It is not just a matter of agreeing or disagreeing. A neutral tone is crucial. Do not include positive or negative leading statements, such as “It is undeniable that…” or “One should not accept the view that…”. You are NOT attempting to persuade the reader to choose one viewpoint over another.

Leading statements / language will be discussed further, in class, within term three of the Academic English course.

Thesis Structure:

• Note the two sides (indicated in green and orange)
• Note the use of tentative language: “Some studies”, “may have”, “could cause”, “some students”
• As the thesis is yet to be discussed in-depth, and you are not an expert in the field, do not use definitive language
• The statement is also one sentence, with a “pivot point” in the middle, with a comma and signposting to indicate a contradictory perspective (in black). Other examples include, nevertheless, though, although, regardless, yet, albeit. DO NOT use the word “but” as it lacks academic tone. Some signposts (e.g., although, though, while) may be placed at the start of the two clauses rather than in the middle – just remember the comma, for example, “While some studies suggest solar energy is cost-effective, other critical research questions its affordability.”
• Also note that it is based on preliminary research and not opinion: “some studies”, “other studies”, “according to social justice principles”, “critical research”.

Claims and Counter Claims

NOTE: Please do not confuse the words ‘claim’ and ‘counter-claim’ with moral or value judgements about right/wrong, good/bad, successful/unsuccessful, or the like. The term ‘claim’ simply refers to the first position or argument you put forward (whether for or against), and ‘counter-claim’ is the alternate position or argument.

In a discursive essay the goal is to present both sides equally and then draw some tentative conclusions based on the evidence presented.

• To formulate your claims and counter claims, write a list of pros and cons.
• For each pro there should be a corresponding con.
• Three sets of pros and cons will be required for your discursive essay. One set for each body paragraph. These become your claims and counter claims.
• For a longer essay, you would need further claims and counter claims.
• Some instructors prefer students to keep the pros and cons in the same order across the body paragraphs. Each paragraph would then have a pro followed by a con or else a con followed by a pro. The order should align with your thesis; if the thesis gives a pro view of the topic followed by a negative view (con) then the paragraphs should also start with the pro and follow with the con, or else vice versa. If not aligned and consistent, the reader may easily become confused as the argument proceeds. Ask your teacher if this is a requirement for your assessment.

Use previous chapters to explore your chosen topic through concept mapping (Chapter 18) and essay outlining (Chapter 19), with one variance; you must include your proposed claims and counter claims in your proposed paragraph structures. What follows is a generic model for a discursive essay. The following Chapter 27 will examine this in further details.

Sample Discursive Essay Outline 

The paragraphs are continuous; the dot-points are only meant to indicate content.

Introduction

• Thesis statement
• Essay outline (including 3 controlling ideas)

Body Paragraphs X 3 (Elaboration and evidence will be more than one sentence, though the topic, claim and counter claim should be succinct)

• T opic sentence, including 1/3 controlling ideas (the topic remains the same throughout the entire essay; it is the controlling idea that changes)
• A claim/assertion about the controlling idea
• E laboration – more information about the claim
• E vidence -academic research (Don’t forget to tell the reader how / why the evidence supports the claim. Be explicit in your E valuation rather than assuming the connection is obvious to the reader)
• A counter claim (remember it must be COUNTER to the claim you made, not about something different)
• E laboration – more information about the counter claim
• E vidence – academic research (Don’t forget to tell the reader how / why the evidence supports the claim. Be explicit in your E valuation rather than assuming the connection is obvious to the reader)
• Concluding sentence – L inks back to the topic and/or the next controlling idea in the following paragraph

Mirror the introduction. The essay outline should have stated the plan for the essay – “This essay will discuss…”, therefore the conclusion should identify that this has been fulfilled, “This essay has discussed…”, plus summarise the controlling ideas and key arguments. ONLY draw tentative conclusions BOTH for and against, allowing the reader to make up their own mind about the topic. Also remember to re-state the thesis in the conclusion. If it is part of the marking criteria, you should also include a recommendation or prediction about the future use or cost/benefit of the chosen topic/concept.

A word of warning, many students fall into the generic realm of stating that there should be further research on their topic or in the field of study. This is a gross statement of the obvious as all academia is ongoing. Try to be more practical with your recommendations and also think about who would instigate them and where the funding might come from.

This chapter gives an overview of what a discursive essay is and a few things to consider when choosing your topic. It also provides a generic outline for a discursive essay structure. The following chapter examines the structure in further detail.

• Inez, S. M. (2018, September 10). What is a discursive essay, and how do you write a good one? Kibin. ↵
• Hale, A., & Basides, H. (2013). The keys to academic English. Palgrave ↵

researched, reliable, written by academics and published by reputable publishers; often, but not always peer reviewed

assertion, maintain as fact

The term ‘claim’ simply refers to the first position or argument you put forward (whether for or against), and ‘counter-claim’ is the alternate position or argument.

Academic Writing Skills Copyright © 2021 by Patricia Williamson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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What (Exactly) Is Discourse Analysis? A Plain-Language Explanation & Definition (With Examples)

By: Jenna Crosley (PhD). Expert Reviewed By: Dr Eunice Rautenbach | June 2021

Discourse analysis is one of the most popular qualitative analysis techniques we encounter at Grad Coach. If you’ve landed on this post, you’re probably interested in discourse analysis, but you’re not sure whether it’s the right fit for your project, or you don’t know where to start. If so, you’ve come to the right place.

Overview: Discourse Analysis Basics

In this post, we’ll explain in plain, straightforward language :

• What discourse analysis is
• When to use discourse analysis
• The main approaches to discourse analysis
• How to conduct discourse analysis

What is discourse analysis?

Let’s start with the word “discourse”.

In its simplest form, discourse is verbal or written communication between people that goes beyond a single sentence . Importantly, discourse is more than just language. The term “language” can include all forms of linguistic and symbolic units (even things such as road signs), and language studies can focus on the individual meanings of words. Discourse goes beyond this and looks at the overall meanings conveyed by language in context .  “Context” here refers to the social, cultural, political, and historical background of the discourse, and it is important to take this into account to understand underlying meanings expressed through language.

A popular way of viewing discourse is as language used in specific social contexts, and as such language serves as a means of prompting some form of social change or meeting some form of goal.

Now that we’ve defined discourse, let’s look at discourse analysis .

Discourse analysis uses the language presented in a corpus or body of data to draw meaning . This body of data could include a set of interviews or focus group discussion transcripts. While some forms of discourse analysis center in on the specifics of language (such as sounds or grammar), other forms focus on how this language is used to achieve its aims. We’ll dig deeper into these two above-mentioned approaches later.

As Wodak and Krzyżanowski (2008) put it: “discourse analysis provides a general framework to problem-oriented social research”. Basically, discourse analysis is used to conduct research on the use of language in context in a wide variety of social problems (i.e., issues in society that affect individuals negatively).

For example, discourse analysis could be used to assess how language is used to express differing viewpoints on financial inequality and would look at how the topic should or shouldn’t be addressed or resolved, and whether this so-called inequality is perceived as such by participants.

What makes discourse analysis unique is that it posits that social reality is socially constructed , or that our experience of the world is understood from a subjective standpoint. Discourse analysis goes beyond the literal meaning of words and languages

For example, people in countries that make use of a lot of censorship will likely have their knowledge, and thus views, limited by this, and will thus have a different subjective reality to those within countries with more lax laws on censorship.

When should you use discourse analysis?

There are many ways to analyze qualitative data (such as content analysis , narrative analysis , and thematic analysis ), so why should you choose discourse analysis? Well, as with all analysis methods, the nature of your research aims, objectives and research questions (i.e. the purpose of your research) will heavily influence the right choice of analysis method.

The purpose of discourse analysis is to investigate the functions of language (i.e., what language is used for) and how meaning is constructed in different contexts, which, to recap, include the social, cultural, political, and historical backgrounds of the discourse.

For example, if you were to study a politician’s speeches, you would need to situate these speeches in their context, which would involve looking at the politician’s background and views, the reasons for presenting the speech, the history or context of the audience, and the country’s social and political history (just to name a few – there are always multiple contextual factors).

Discourse analysis can also tell you a lot about power and power imbalances , including how this is developed and maintained, how this plays out in real life (for example, inequalities because of this power), and how language can be used to maintain it. For example, you could look at the way that someone with more power (for example, a CEO) speaks to someone with less power (for example, a lower-level employee).

Therefore, you may consider discourse analysis if you are researching:

• Some form of power or inequality (for example, how affluent individuals interact with those who are less wealthy
• How people communicate in a specific context (such as in a social situation with colleagues versus a board meeting)
• Ideology and how ideas (such as values and beliefs) are shared using language (like in political speeches)
• How communication is used to achieve social goals (such as maintaining a friendship or navigating conflict)

As you can see, discourse analysis can be a powerful tool for assessing social issues , as well as power and power imbalances . So, if your research aims and objectives are oriented around these types of issues, discourse analysis could be a good fit for you.

Discourse Analysis: The main approaches

There are two main approaches to discourse analysis. These are the language-in-use (also referred to as socially situated text and talk ) approaches and the socio-political approaches (most commonly Critical Discourse Analysis ). Let’s take a look at each of these.

Approach #1: Language-in-use

Language-in-use approaches focus on the finer details of language used within discourse, such as sentence structures (grammar) and phonology (sounds). This approach is very descriptive and is seldom seen outside of studies focusing on literature and/or linguistics.

Because of its formalist roots, language-in-use pays attention to different rules of communication, such as grammaticality (i.e., when something “sounds okay” to a native speaker of a language). Analyzing discourse through a language-in-use framework involves identifying key technicalities of language used in discourse and investigating how the features are used within a particular social context.

For example, English makes use of affixes (for example, “un” in “unbelievable”) and suffixes (“able” in “unbelievable”) but doesn’t typically make use of infixes (units that can be placed within other words to alter their meaning). However, an English speaker may say something along the lines of, “that’s un-flipping-believable”. From a language-in-use perspective, the infix “flipping” could be investigated by assessing how rare the phenomenon is in English, and then answering questions such as, “What role does the infix play?” or “What is the goal of using such an infix?”

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Approach #2: Socio-political

Socio-political approaches to discourse analysis look beyond the technicalities of language and instead focus on the influence that language has in social context , and vice versa. One of the main socio-political approaches is Critical Discourse Analysis , which focuses on power structures (for example, the power dynamic between a teacher and a student) and how discourse is influenced by society and culture. Critical Discourse Analysis is born out of Michel Foucault’s early work on power, which focuses on power structures through the analysis of normalized power .

Normalized power is ingrained and relatively allusive. It’s what makes us exist within society (and within the underlying norms of society, as accepted in a specific social context) and do the things that we need to do. Contrasted to this, a more obvious form of power is repressive power , which is power that is actively asserted.

Sounds a bit fluffy? Let’s look at an example.

Consider a situation where a teacher threatens a student with detention if they don’t stop speaking in class. This would be an example of repressive power (i.e. it was actively asserted).

Normalized power, on the other hand, is what makes us not want to talk in class . It’s the subtle clues we’re given from our environment that tell us how to behave, and this form of power is so normal to us that we don’t even realize that our beliefs, desires, and decisions are being shaped by it.

In the view of Critical Discourse Analysis, language is power and, if we want to understand power dynamics and structures in society, we must look to language for answers. In other words, analyzing the use of language can help us understand the social context, especially the power dynamics.

While the above-mentioned approaches are the two most popular approaches to discourse analysis, other forms of analysis exist. For example, ethnography-based discourse analysis and multimodal analysis. Ethnography-based discourse analysis aims to gain an insider understanding of culture , customs, and habits through participant observation (i.e. directly observing participants, rather than focusing on pre-existing texts).

On the other hand, multimodal analysis focuses on a variety of texts that are both verbal and nonverbal (such as a combination of political speeches and written press releases). So, if you’re considering using discourse analysis, familiarize yourself with the various approaches available so that you can make a well-informed decision.

How to “do” discourse analysis

As every study is different, it’s challenging to outline exactly what steps need to be taken to complete your research. However, the following steps can be used as a guideline if you choose to adopt discourse analysis for your research.

Step 1: Decide on your discourse analysis approach

The first step of the process is to decide on which approach you will take in terms. For example, the language in use approach or a socio-political approach such as critical discourse analysis. To do this, you need to consider your research aims, objectives and research questions . Of course, this means that you need to have these components clearly defined. If you’re still a bit uncertain about these, check out our video post covering topic development here.

While discourse analysis can be exploratory (as in, used to find out about a topic that hasn’t really been touched on yet), it is still vital to have a set of clearly defined research questions to guide your analysis. Without these, you may find that you lack direction when you get to your analysis. Since discourse analysis places such a focus on context, it is also vital that your research questions are linked to studying language within context.

Based on your research aims, objectives and research questions, you need to assess which discourse analysis would best suit your needs. Importantly, you  need to adopt an approach that aligns with your study’s purpose . So, think carefully about what you are investigating and what you want to achieve, and then consider the various options available within discourse analysis.

It’s vital to determine your discourse analysis approach from the get-go , so that you don’t waste time randomly analyzing your data without any specific plan.

Step 2: Design your collection method and gather your data

Once you’ve got determined your overarching approach, you can start looking at how to collect your data. Data in discourse analysis is drawn from different forms of “talk” and “text” , which means that it can consist of interviews , ethnographies, discussions, case studies, blog posts.  

The type of data you collect will largely depend on your research questions (and broader research aims and objectives). So, when you’re gathering your data, make sure that you keep in mind the “what”, “who” and “why” of your study, so that you don’t end up with a corpus full of irrelevant data. Discourse analysis can be very time-consuming, so you want to ensure that you’re not wasting time on information that doesn’t directly pertain to your research questions.

When considering potential collection methods, you should also consider the practicalities . What type of data can you access in reality? How many participants do you have access to and how much time do you have available to collect data and make sense of it? These are important factors, as you’ll run into problems if your chosen methods are impractical in light of your constraints.

Once you’ve determined your data collection method, you can get to work with the collection.

Step 3: Investigate the context

A key part of discourse analysis is context and understanding meaning in context. For this reason, it is vital that you thoroughly and systematically investigate the context of your discourse. Make sure that you can answer (at least the majority) of the following questions:

• What is the discourse?
• Why does the discourse exist? What is the purpose and what are the aims of the discourse?
• When did the discourse take place?
• Where did it happen?
• Who participated in the discourse? Who created it and who consumed it?
• What does the discourse say about society in general?
• How is meaning being conveyed in the context of the discourse?

Make sure that you include all aspects of the discourse context in your analysis to eliminate any confounding factors. For example, are there any social, political, or historical reasons as to why the discourse would exist as it does? What other factors could contribute to the existence of the discourse? Discourse can be influenced by many factors, so it is vital that you take as many of them into account as possible.

Once you’ve investigated the context of your data, you’ll have a much better idea of what you’re working with, and you’ll be far more familiar with your content. It’s then time to begin your analysis.

Step 4: Analyze your data

When performing a discourse analysis, you’ll need to look for themes and patterns .  To do this, you’ll start by looking at codes , which are specific topics within your data. You can find more information about the qualitative data coding process here.

Next, you’ll take these codes and identify themes. Themes are patterns of language (such as specific words or sentences) that pop up repeatedly in your data, and that can tell you something about the discourse. For example, if you’re wanting to know about women’s perspectives of living in a certain area, potential themes may be “safety” or “convenience”.

In discourse analysis, it is important to reach what is called data saturation . This refers to when you’ve investigated your topic and analyzed your data to the point where no new information can be found. To achieve this, you need to work your way through your data set multiple times, developing greater depth and insight each time. This can be quite time consuming and even a bit boring at times, but it’s essential.

Once you’ve reached the point of saturation, you should have an almost-complete analysis and you’re ready to move onto the next step – final review.

Step 5: Review your work

Hey, you’re nearly there. Good job! Now it’s time to review your work.

This final step requires you to return to your research questions and compile your answers to them, based on the analysis. Make sure that you can answer your research questions thoroughly, and also substantiate your responses with evidence from your data.

Usually, discourse analysis studies make use of appendices, which are referenced within your thesis or dissertation. This makes it easier for reviewers or markers to jump between your analysis (and findings) and your corpus (your evidence) so that it’s easier for them to assess your work.

When answering your research questions, make you should also revisit your research aims and objectives , and assess your answers against these. This process will help you zoom out a little and give you a bigger picture view. With your newfound insights from the analysis, you may find, for example, that it makes sense to expand the research question set a little to achieve a more comprehensive view of the topic.

Let’s recap…

In this article, we’ve covered quite a bit of ground. The key takeaways are:

• Discourse analysis is a qualitative analysis method used to draw meaning from language in context.
• You should consider using discourse analysis when you wish to analyze the functions and underlying meanings of language in context.
• The two overarching approaches to discourse analysis are language-in-use and socio-political approaches .
• The main steps involved in undertaking discourse analysis are deciding on your analysis approach (based on your research questions), choosing a data collection method, collecting your data, investigating the context of your data, analyzing your data, and reviewing your work.

If you have any questions about discourse analysis, feel free to leave a comment below. If you’d like 1-on-1 help with your analysis, book an initial consultation with a friendly Grad Coach to see how we can help.

Psst... there’s more!

This post was based on one of our popular Research Bootcamps . If you're working on a research project, you'll definitely want to check this out ...

34 Comments

This was really helpful to me

I would like to know the importance of discourse analysis analysis to academic writing

In academic writing coherence and cohesion are very important. DA will assist us to decide cohesiveness of the continuum of discourse that are used in it. We can judge it well.

Thank you so much for this piece, can you please direct how I can use Discourse Analysis to investigate politics of ethnicity in a particular society

I would like to get more practical examples, also to know how can the discourse analysis help us in our academic studies.

Fantastically helpful! Could you write on how discourse analysis can be done using computer aided technique? Many thanks

I would like to know if I can use discourse analysis to research on electoral integrity deviation and when election are considered free & fair

I also to know the importance of discourse analysis and it’s purpose and characteristics

This is helpful. It is highly informative. Thank you. Is it possible to use more one analysis technique? I would to book for personal assistance. I am doing my Methodology chapter for a PhD Thesis.

Thanks, we are doing discourse analysis as a subject this year and this helped a lot!

Please can you help explain and answer this question? With illustrations,Hymes’ Acronym SPEAKING, as a feature of Discourse Analysis.

What are the three objectives of discourse analysis especially on the topic how people communicate between doctor and patient

Very useful Thank you for your work and information

thank you so much , I wanna know more about discourse analysis tools , such as , latent analysis , active powers analysis, proof paths analysis, image analysis, rhetorical analysis, propositions analysis, and so on, I wish I can get references about it , thanks in advance

Its beyond my expectations. It made me clear everything which I was struggling since last 4 months. 👏 👏 👏 👏

Thank you so much … It is clear and helpful

Thanks for sharing this material. My question is related to the online newspaper articles on COVID -19 pandemic the way this new normal is constructed as a social reality. How discourse analysis is an appropriate approach to examine theese articles?

This very helpful and interesting information

This was incredible! And massively helpful.

I’m seeking further assistance if you don’t mind.

Found it worth consuming!

What are the four types of discourse analysis?

very helpful. And I’d like to know more about Ethnography-based discourse analysis as I’m studying arts and humanities, I’d like to know how can I use it in my study.

Amazing info. Very happy to read this helpful piece of documentation. Thank you.

is discourse analysis can take data from medias like TV, Radio…?

I need to know what is general discourse analysis

Direct to the point, simple and deep explanation. this is helpful indeed.

Thank you so much was really helpful

really impressive

Thank you very much, for the clear explanations and examples.

It is really awesome. Anybody within just in 5 minutes understand this critical topic so easily. Thank you so much.

Thank you for enriching my knowledge on Discourse Analysis . Very helpful thanks again

This was extremely helpful. I feel less anxious now. Thank you so much.

Extremely helpful, I am going to be working on CDA about animal rights, particularly stray dogs using social media content, and I was so lost, thank you for clearly illustrating how the research should go forward, thank you

This is helpful. It is highly informative. Thank you. Is it possible to use more than one analysis technique in a single study? I would like to book for personal assistance. I am doing my Methodology chapter for a PhD Thesis.

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Introduction

Course Overview

Rationale for the Course

Goals for the Course

Portfolios - Overview

Unit 1: Personal and Academic Writing

Unit 2: Using Sources

Unit 3: Reflecting on Writing

Suggested Grading Breakdown

Suggested Weekly Outline

Suggested Text: "Frame Work"

Alternative Texts

Working with International Students

Writing Assignments

Portfolio 1

Unit 2 - Discourse Analysis

Unit 2 - Source Evaluation

Unit 2 - Position Paper

Teaching Materials

Detailed Syllabi

Daily Prompts

Supplemental Readings

Portfolio Considerations

Discourse Analysis

The key question you'll answer is "How does this essay respond to its intended audience?" In other words, how does the writer organize and develop his/her ideas? How is the voice a response to the imagined/intended readers (its "discourse community")?

You're answering the key question for your group members, who are working with you to find a pool of sources that might be useful in the next essay for this class. They'll be counting on you for an accurate report on your source.

Your goals: Think of this assignment as preparation for the longer essay you'll be asked to write next (comparing and contrasting two essays on your topic written for two different audiences). As a group, you'll want to find as many different sources, targeted toward as many different audiences, as you can, so that when you sit down to write your essay you'll have plenty of essays to choose from. Individually, then, your goal is to "do your part" for the group by finding an interesting possible essay and offering a detailed analysis of it for your group to use.

Strategies for completing the essay include these:

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How to Do a Critical Discourse Analysis

Last Updated: April 7, 2023 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Christopher Taylor, PhD . Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. There are 8 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 95,795 times.

The field of critical discourse analysis (CDA) involves taking a deeper, qualitative look at different types of texts, whether in advertising, literature, or journalism. Analysts try to understand ways in which language connects to social, cultural, and political power structures. As understood by CDA, all forms of language and types of writing or imagery can convey and shape cultural norms and social traditions. While there is no single method that covers all types of critical discourse analyses, there are some grounding steps that you can take to ensure that your CDA is well done. [1] X Research source

Working with a Text

• Texts could include things like Moby Dick , Citizen Kane , a cologne advertisement, a conversation between a doctor and their patient, or a piece of journalism describing an election.

• As a first step, circle all of the adverbs and adjectives in the text. Then, consider what they might suggest about the tone of the piece.
• Look for tone words to help you figure out what the author is trying to convey.
• For example, say you're looking at a piece of political journalism about the president. If the text describes the president as “the goofball in the Oval Office,” the attitude is sarcastic and critical.
• However, if the president is described as “the leader of the free world,” the attitude is respectful and even reverential.
• If the article simply refers to the president as “the president,” its attitude is deliberately neutral, as if the text refuses to “take sides.”

• For example, think about a news report about international immigrants coming to a country. The newscaster can create different types of community by referring to the immigrants as “strangers,” “refugees,” or “aliens.”
• The word “refugees” will prompt sympathy among listeners and will help build a community between citizens and immigrants, while “alien” will help create hostile feelings and will exclude the immigrants from the nation's community.

• For example, an 18th century short story that begins, “The savages attacked the unarmed settlers at dawn,” contains implicit interpretations and biases about indigenous populations.
• Another story that begins, “The natives and settlers made a peaceful arrangement,” has a comparatively benign interpretation of historical events.

Analyzing the Text's Form and Production

• For example, think about the difference between an author who writes a novel for money and one who writes for their own pleasure.
• The first author would want to tap into popular trends ends of the day in order to profit, while the second author would be less concerned with pleasing the public.

• For example, consider the case of a CEO delivering a speech in person to their company. The fact that they're delivering a speech and not sending an open letter shows that openness and transparency are important to the CEO and the company culture.
• If the CEO did not deliver a speech, but only sent an email to board members and top executives, the formal change would imply that the text had a very different audience. The email would make the CEO seem less personal, unconcerned about their own workers, and elitist in who they chose to address.

• For example, say that a contemporary writer opens a poem or story with: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Quoting Charles Dickens at once shows that the author is well-read and also grounds their writing in the English Victorian literary tradition.

Tracing Power in Social Practices

• For example, if a political speakers says, “our forefathers smile upon us today,” they are using patriarchal language.
• The term “culture” should be taken very broadly. Businesses can have cultures, as can communities of all sizes, countries, language groups, racial groups, and even hobbyists can have specific cultures.

• For example, consider 2 different magazine ads for trucks. In the first, a rugged-looking man sits in a truck below the words “The vehicle for men.” In the second, a family sits in a truck and the ad copy reads, “A truck to hold everybody.”
• The first ad seems to rely on stereotypical ideas of masculinity, while the second seems more inclusive.

• For example, imagine a politician whose slogan is “All energy should come from coal!” Because of the extremity of the stance, you may suspect that the candidate represents a fringe party that doesn't share many of the mainstream party's views.
• You could confirm this suspicion by looking at other candidates' speeches to see how they address the fringe candidate. If other candidates critique the fringe candidate, the latter is likely part of a sub-group whose views aren't shared by the main political culture.

• For example, companies like Ikea, Emirate Airlines, and McDonald's have strong cultures and norms that exist internationally.

Expert Q&A

• In an academic setting, CDA isn't tied to 1 single field or discipline. Instead, CDA helps students in a variety of fields understand ways in which the production of texts carries cultural meaning. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0
• As with any other theoretical field, there are many different ways to perform critical discourse analyses. However, they're largely the same at the core: the models all examine ways in which texts at the smallest (word-based) and the largest (social and cultural) levels have an impact on how communities are formed and what readers believe about the world. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://www.history.ac.uk/1807commemorated/media/methods/critical.html
• ↑ https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/ed270/Luke/SAHA6.html#4
• ↑ https://study.com/academy/lesson/interpreting-literary-meaning-how-to-use-text-to-guide-your-interpretation.html
• ↑ https://www.scribbr.com/methodology/discourse-analysis/
• ↑ https://youtu.be/3w_5riFCMGA?t=378
• ↑ https://youtu.be/3w_5riFCMGA?t=669
• ↑ https://www.uv.es/gimenez/Recursos/criticaldiscourse.pdf
• ↑ https://youtu.be/3w_5riFCMGA?t=358

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7 Understanding Discourse Communities

This chapter uses John Swales’ definition of discourse community to explain to students why this concept is important for college writing and beyond. The chapter explains how genres operate within discourse communities, why different discourse communities have different expectations for writing, and how to understand what qualifies as a discourse community. The article relates the concept of discourse community to a personal example from the author (an acoustic guitar jam group) and an example of the academic discipline of history. The article takes a critical stance regarding the concept of discourse community, discussing both the benefits and constraints of communicating within discourse communities. The article concludes with writerly questions students can ask themselves as they enter new discourse communities in order to be more effective communicators.

Last year, I decided that if I was ever going to achieve my lifelong fantasy of being the first college writing teacher to transform into an international rock star, I should probably graduate from playing the video game Guitar Hero to actually learning to play guitar. [1] I bought an acoustic guitar and started watching every beginning guitar instructional video on YouTube. At first, the vocabulary the online guitar teachers used was like a foreign language to me—terms like major and minor chords, open G tuning, and circle of fifths. I was overwhelmed by how complicated it all was, and the fingertips on my left hand felt like they were going to fall off from pressing on the steel strings on the neck of my guitar to form chords. I felt like I was making incredibly slow progress, and at the rate I was going, I wouldn’t be a guitar god until I was 87. I was also getting tired of playing alone in my living room. I wanted to find a community of people who shared my goal of learning songs and playing guitar together for fun.

I needed a way to find other beginning and intermediate guitar players, and I decided to try a social media website called “Meetup.com.” It only took a few clicks to find the right community for me—an “acoustic jam” group that welcomed beginners and met once a month at a music store near my city of Sacramento, California. On the Meetup.com site, it said that everyone who showed up for the jam should bring a few songs to share, but I wasn’t sure what kind of music they played, so I just showed up at the next meet-up with my guitar and the basic look you need to become a guitar legend: two days of facial hair stubble, black t-shirt, ripped jeans, and a gravelly voice (luckily my throat was sore from shouting the lyrics to the Twenty One Pilots song “Heathens” while playing guitar in my living room the night before).

The first time I played with the group, I felt more like a junior high school band camp dropout then the next Jimi Hendrix. I had trouble keeping up with the chord changes, and I didn’t know any scales (groups of related notes in the same key that work well together) to solo on lead guitar when it was my turn. I had trouble figuring out the patterns for my strumming hand since no one took the time to explain them before we started playing a new song. The group had some beginners, but I was the least experienced player.

perienced player. It took a few more meet-ups, but pretty soon I figured out how to fit into the group. I learned that they played all kinds of songs, from country to blues to folk to rock music. I learned that they chose songs with simple chords so beginners like me could play along. I learned that they brought print copies of the chords and lyrics of songs to share, and if there were any difficult chords in a song, they included a visual of the chord shape in the handout of chords and lyrics. I started to learn the musician’s vocabulary I needed to be familiar with to function in the group, like beats per measure and octaves and the minor pentatonic scale . I learned that if I was having trouble figuring out the chord changes, I could watch the better guitarists and copy what they were doing. I also got good advice from experienced players, like soaking your fingers in rubbing alcohol every day for ninety seconds to toughen them up so the steel strings wouldn’t hurt as much. I even realized that although I was an inexperienced player, I could contribute to the community by bringing in new songs they hadn’t played before.

Okay, at this point you may be saying to yourself that all of this will make a great biographical movie someday when I become a rock icon (or maybe not), but what does it have to do with becoming a better writer?

You can write in a journal alone in your room, just like you can play guitar just for yourself alone in your room. But most writers, like most musicians, learn their craft from studying experts and becoming part of a community. And most writers, like most musicians, want to be a part of community and communicate with other people who share their goals and interests. Writing teachers and scholars have come up with the concept of “discourse community” to describe a community of people who share the same goals, the same methods of communicating, the same genres, and the same lexis (specialized language).

What Exactly Is a Discourse Community?

John Swales, a scholar in linguistics, says that discourse communities have the following features (which I’m paraphrasing):

• A broadly agreed upon set of common public goals
• Mechanisms of intercommunication among members
• Use of these communication mechanisms to provide information and feedback
• One or more genres that help further the goals of the discourse community
• A specific lexis (specialized language)
• A threshold level of expert members (24-26)

I’ll use my example of the monthly guitar jam group I joined to explain these six aspects of a discourse community.

A Broadly Agreed Set of Common Public Goals

The guitar jam group had shared goals that we all agreed on. In the Meetup.com description of the site, the organizer of the group emphasized that these monthly gatherings were for having fun, enjoying the music, and learning new songs. “Guitar players” or “people who like music” or even “guitarists in Sacramento, California” are not discourse communities. They don’t share the same goals, and they don’t all interact with each other to meet the same goals.

Mechanisms of Intercommunication among Members

The guitar jam group communicated primarily through the Meetup.com site. This is how we recruited new members, shared information about when and where we were playing, and communicated with each other outside of the night of the guitar jam. “People who use Meetup.com” are not a discourse community, because even though they’re using the same method of communication, they don’t all share the same goals and they don’t all regularly interact with each other. But a Meetup.com group like the Sacramento acoustic guitar jam focused on a specific topic with shared goals and a community of members who frequently interact can be considered a discourse community based on Swales’ definition.

Use of These Communication Mechanisms to Provide Information and Feedback

Once I found the guitar jam group on Meetup.com, I wanted information about topics like what skill levels could participate, what kind of music they played, and where and when they met. Once I was at my first guitar jam, the primary information I needed was the chords and lyrics of each song, so the handouts with chords and lyrics were a key means of providing critical information to community members. Communication mechanisms in discourse communities can be emails, text messages, social media tools, print texts, memes, oral presentations, and so on. One reason that Swales uses the term “discourse” instead of “writing” is that the term “discourse” can mean any type of communication, from talking to writing to music to images to multimedia.

One or More Genres That Help Further the Goals of the Discourse Community

One of the most common ways discourse communities share information and meet their goals is through genres. To help explain the concept of genre, I’ll use music since I’ve been talking about playing guitar and music is probably an example you can relate to. Obviously there are many types of music, from rap to country to reggae to heavy metal. Each of these types of music is considered a genre, in part because the music has shared features, from the style of the music to the subject of the lyrics to the lexis. For example, most rap has a steady bass beat, most rappers use spoken word rather singing, and rap lyrics usually draw on a lexis associated with young people. But a genre is much more than a set of features. Genres arise out of social purposes, and they’re a form of social action within discourse communities. The rap battles of today have historical roots in African oral contests, and modern rap music can only be understood in the context of hip hop culture, which includes break dancing and street art. Rap also has social purposes, including resisting social oppression and telling the truth about social conditions that aren’t always reported on by news outlets. Like all genres, rap is not just a formula but a tool for social action.

The guitar jam group used two primary genres to meet the goals of the community. The Meetup.com site was one important genre that was critical in the formation of the group and to help it recruit new members. It was also the genre that delivered information to the members about what the community was about and where and when the community would be meeting. The other important genre to the guitar jam group were the handouts with song chords and lyrics. I’m sharing an example of a song I brought to the group to show you what this genre looks like.

This genre of the chord and lyrics sheet was needed to make sure everyone could play along and follow the singer. The conventions of this genre—the “norms”—weren’t just arbitrary rules or formulas. As with all genres, the conventions developed because of the social action of the genre. The sheets included lyrics so that we could all sing along and make sure we knew when to change chords. The sheets included visuals of unusual chords, like the Em7 chord (E minor seventh) in my example, because there were some beginner guitarists who were a part of the community. If the community members were all expert guitarists, then the inclusion of chord shapes would never have become a convention. A great resource to learn more about the concept of genre is the essay “Navigating Genres” by Kerry Dirk in volume 1 of Writing Spaces .

A Specific Lexis (Specialized Language)

To anyone who wasn’t a musician, our guitar meet-ups might have sounded like we were communicating in a foreign language. We talked about the root note of scale, a 1/4/5 chord progression, putting a capo on different frets, whether to play solos in a major or minor scale, double drop D tuning, and so on. If someone couldn’t quickly identify what key their song was in or how many beats per measure the strumming pattern required, they wouldn’t be able to communicate effectively with the community members. We didn’t use this language to show off or to try to discourage outsiders from joining our group. We needed these specialized terms—this musician’s lexis—to make sure we were all playing together effectively.

A Threshold Level of Expert Members 

If everyone in the guitar jam was at my beginner level when I first joined the group, we wouldn’t have been very successful. I relied on more experienced players to figure out strumming patterns and chord changes, and I learned to improve my solos by watching other players use various techniques in their soloing. The most experienced players also helped educate everyone on the conventions of the group (the “norms” of how the group interacted). These conventions included everyone playing in the same key, everyone taking turns playing solo lead guitar, and everyone bringing songs to play. But discourse community conventions aren’t always just about maintaining group harmony. In most discourse communities, new members can also expand the knowledge and genres of the community. For example, I shared songs that no one had brought before, and that expanded the community’s base of knowledge.

Why the Concept of Discourse Communities Matters for College Writing

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, I didn’t understand that each academic discipline I took courses in to complete the requirements of my degree (history, philosophy, biology, math, political science, sociology, English) was a different discourse community. Each of these academic fields had their own goals, their own genres, their own writing conventions, their own formats for citing sources, and their own expectations for writing style. I thought each of the teachers I encountered in my undergraduate career just had their own personal preferences that all felt pretty random to me. I didn’t understand that each teacher was trying to act as a representative of the discourse community of their field. I was a new member of their discourse communities, and they were introducing me to the genres and conventions of their disciplines. Unfortunately, teachers are so used to the conventions of their discourse communities that they sometimes don’t explain to students the reasons behind the writing conventions of their discourse communities.

It wasn’t until I studied research about college writing while I was in graduate school that I learned about genres and discourse communities, and by the time I was doing my dissertation for my PhD, I got so interested in studying college writing that I did a national study of college teachers’ writing assignments and syllabi. Believe it or not, I analyzed the genres and discourse communities of over 2,000 college writing assignments in my book Assignments Across the Curriculum . To show you why the idea of discourse community is so important to college writing, I’m going to share with you some information from one of the academic disciplines I studied: history. First I want to share with you an excerpt from a history course writing assignment from my study. As you read it over, think about what it tells you about the conventions of the discourse community of history.

Documentary Analysis

This assignment requires you to play the detective, combing textual sources for clues and evidence to form a reconstruction of past events. If you took A.P. history courses in high school, you may recall doing similar document-based questions (DBQs).

In a tight, well-argued essay of two to four pages, identify and assess the historical significance of the documents in ONE of the four sets I have given you.

You bring to this assignment a limited body of outside knowledge gained from our readings, class discussions, and videos. Make the most of this contextual knowledge when interpreting your sources: you may, for example, refer to one of the document from another set if it sheds light on the items in your own.

Questions to Consider When Planning Your Essay

• What do the documents reveal about the author and his audience?
• Why were they written?
• What can you discern about the author’s motivation and tone? Is the tone revealing?
• Does the genre make a difference in your interpretation?
• How do the documents fit into both their immediate and their greater historical contexts?
• Do your documents support or contradict what other sources (video, readings) have told you?
• Do the documents reveal a change that occurred over a period of time?
• Is there a contrast between documents within your set? If so, how do you account for it?
• Do they shed light on a historical event, problem, or period? How do they fit into the “big picture”?
• What incidental information can you glean from them by reading carefully? Such information is important for constructing a narrative of the past; our medieval authors almost always tell us more than they intended to.
• What is not said, but implied?
• What is left out? (As a historian, you should always look for what is not said, and ask yourself what the omission signifies.)
• Taken together, do the documents reveal anything significant about the period in question? (Melzer 3-4)

This assignment doesn’t just represent the specific preferences of one random teacher. It’s a common history genre (the documentary analysis) that helps introduce students to the ways of thinking and the communication conventions of the discourse community of historians. This genre reveals that historians look for textual clues to reconstruct past events and that historians bring their own knowledge to bear when they analyze texts and interpret history (historians are not entirely “objective” or “neutral”). In this documentary analysis genre, the instructor emphasizes that historians are always looking for what is not said but instead is implied. This instructor is using an important genre of history to introduce students to the ways of analyzing and thinking in the discourse community of historians.

Let’s look at another history course in my research. I’m sharing with you an excerpt from the syllabus of a history of the American West course. This part of the syllabus gives students an overview of the purpose of the writing projects in the class. As you read this overview, think about the ways this instructor is portraying the discourse community of historians.

A300: History of the American West

A300 is designed to allow students to explore the history of the American West on a personal level with an eye toward expanding their knowledge of various western themes, from exploration to the Indian Wars, to the impact of global capitalism and the emergence of the environmental movement. But students will also learn about the craft of history, including the tools used by practitioners, how to weigh competing evidence , and how to build a convincing argument about the past.

At the end of this course students should understand that history is socially interpreted, and that the past has always been used as an important means for understanding the present. Old family photos, a grandparent’s memories, even family reunions allow people to understand their lives through an appreciation of the past. These events and artifacts remind us that history is a dynamic and interpretive field of study that requires far more than rote memorization. Historians balance their knowledge of primary sources (diaries, letters, artifacts, and other documents from the period under study) with later interpretations of these people, places, and events (in the form of scholarly monographs and articles) known as secondary sources . Through the evaluation and discussion of these different interpretations historians come to a socially negotiated understanding of historical figures and events.

Individual Projects

More generally, your papers should:

• Empathize with the person, place, or event you are writing about. The goal here is to use your understanding of the primary and secondary sources you have read to “become” that person–i.e. to appreciate their perspectives on the time or event under study. In essence, students should demonstrate an appreciation of that time within its context.
• Second, students should be able to present the past in terms of its relevance to contemporary issues. What do their individual projects tell us about the present? For example, what does the treatment of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans in the West tell us about the problem of race in the United States today?
• Third, in developing their individual and group projects, students should demonstrate that they have researched and located primary and secondary sources. Through this process they will develop the skills of a historian, and present an interpretation of the past that is credible to their peers and instructors.

Just like the history instructor who gave students the documentary analysis assignment, this history of the American West instructor emphasizes that the discourse community of historians doesn’t focus on just memorizing facts, but on analyzing and interpreting competing evidence. Both the documentary analysis assignment and the information from the history of the American West syllabus show that an important shared goal of the discourse community of historians is socially constructing the past using evidence from different types of artifacts, from texts to photos to interviews with people who have lived through important historical events. The discourse community goals and conventions of the different academic disciplines you encounter as an undergraduate shape everything about writing: which genres are most important, what counts as evidence, how arguments are constructed, and what style is most appropriate and effective.

The history of the American West course is a good example of the ways that discourse community goals and values can change over time. It wasn’t that long ago that American historians who wrote about the West operated on the philosophy of “manifest destiny.” Most early historians of the American West assumed that the American colonizers had the right to take land from indigenous tribes—that it was the white European’s “destiny” to colonize the American West. The evidence early historians used in their writing and the ways they interpreted that evidence relied on the perspectives of the “settlers,” and the perspectives of the indigenous people were ignored by historians. The concept of manifest destiny has been strongly critiqued by modern historians, and one of the primary goals of most modern historians who write about the American West is to recover the perspectives and stories of the indigenous peoples as well as to continue to work for social justice for Native Americans by showing how historical injustices continue in different forms to the present day. Native American historians are now retelling history from the perspective of indigenous people, using indigenous research methods that are often much different than the traditional research methods of historians of the American West. Discourse community norms can silence and marginalize people, but discourse communities can also be transformed by new members who challenge the goals and assumptions and research methods and genre conventions of the community.

Discourse Communities from School to Work and Beyond

Understanding what a discourse community is and the ways that genres perform social actions in discourse communities can help you better understand where your college teachers are coming from in their writing assignments and also help you understand why there are different writing expectations and genres for different classes in different fields. Researchers who study college writing have discovered that most students struggle with writing when they first enter the discourse community of their chosen major, just like I struggled when I first joined the acoustic guitar jam group. When you graduate college and start your first job, you will probably also find yourself struggling a bit with trying to learn the writing conventions of the discourse community of your workplace. Knowing how discourse communities work will not only help you as you navigate the writing assigned in different general education courses and the specialized writing of your chosen major, but it will also help you in your life after college. Whether you work as a scientist in a lab or a lawyer for a firm or a nurse in a hospital, you will need to become a member of a discourse community. You’ll need to learn to communicate effectively using the genres of the discourse community of your workplace, and this might mean asking questions of more experienced discourse community members, analyzing models of the types of genres you’re expected to use to communicate, and thinking about the most effective style, tone, format, and structure for your audience and purpose. Some workplaces have guidelines for how to write in the genres of the discourse community, and some workplaces will initiate you to their genres by trial and error. But hopefully now that you’ve read this essay, you’ll have a better idea of what kinds of questions to ask to help you become an effective communicator in a new discourse community. I’ll end this essay with a list of questions you can ask yourself whenever you’re entering a new discourse community and learning the genres of the community:

• What are the goals of the discourse community?
• What are the most important genres community members use to achieve these goals?
• Who are the most experienced communicators in the discourse community?
• Where can I find models of the kinds of genres used by the discourse community?
• Who are the different audiences the discourse community communicates with, and how can I adjust my writing for these different audiences?
• What conventions of format, organization, and style does the discourse community value?
• What specialized vocabulary (lexis) do I need to know to communicate effectively with discourse community insiders?
• How does the discourse community make arguments, and what types of evidence are valued?
• Do the conventions of the discourse community silence any members or force any members to conform to the community in ways that make them uncomfortable?
• What can I add to the discourse community?

Works Cited

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” Writing Spaces , vol. 1, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press, 2010, pp. 249–262.

Guitar Hero . Harmonics, 2005.

Meetup.com . WeWork Companies Inc., 2019. www.meetup.com.

Melzer, Daniel. Assignments Across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing . Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2014.

Swales, John. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings . Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Twenty One Pilots. “Heathens.” Suicide Squad: The Album , Atlantic Records, 2016.

Young, Neil. “Heart of Gold.” Harvest , Reprise Records, 1972.

Teacher Resources for Understanding Discourse Communities by Dan Melzer

Overview and teaching strategies.

This essay can be taught in conjunction with teaching students about the concept of genre and could be paired with Kerry Dirk’s essay “Navigating Genres” in Writing Spaces , volume 1. I find that it works best to scaffold the concept of discourse community by moving students from reflecting on the formulaic writing they have learned in the past, like the five-paragraph theme or the Shaffer method, to introducing them to the concept of genre and how genres are not formulas or formats but forms of social action, and then to helping students understand that genres usually operate within discourse communities. Most of my students are unfamiliar with the concept of discourse community, and I find that it is helpful to relate this concept to discourse communities students are already members of, like online gaming groups, college clubs, or jobs students are working or have worked. I sometimes teach the concept of discourse community as part of a research project where students investigate the genres and communication conventions of a discourse community they want to join or are already a member of. In this project students conduct primary and secondary research and rhetorically analyze examples of the primary genres of the discourse community. The primary research might involve doing an interview or interviews with discourse community members, conducting a survey of discourse community members, or reflecting on participant-observer research.

Inevitably, some students have trouble differentiating between a discourse community and a group of people who share similar characteristics. Students may assert that “college students” or “Facebook users” or “teenage women” are a discourse community. It is useful to apply Swales’ criteria to broader groups that students imagine are discourse communities and then try to narrow down these groups until students have hit upon an actual discourse community (for example, narrowing from “Facebook users” to the Black Lives Matter Sacramento Facebook group). In the essay, I tried to address this issue with specific examples of groups that Swales would not classify as a discourse community.

Teaching students about academic discourse communities is a challenging task. Researchers have found that there are broad expectations for writing that seem to hold true across academic discourse communities, such as the ability to make logical arguments and support those arguments with credible evidence, the ability to use academic vocabulary and write in a formal style, and the ability to carefully edit for grammar, syntax, and citation format. But research has also shown that not only do different academic fields have vastly different definitions of how arguments are made, what counts as evidence, and what genres, styles, and formats are valued, but even similar types of courses within the same discipline may have very different discourse community expectations depending on the instructor, department, and institution. In teaching students about the concept of discourse community, I want students to leave my class understanding that: a) there is no such thing as a formula or set of rules for “academic discourse”; b) each course in each field of study they take in college will require them to write in the context of a different set of discourse community expectations; and c) discourse communities can both pass down community knowledge to new members and sometimes marginalize or silence members. What I hope students take away from reading this essay is a more rhetorically sophisticated and flexible sense of the community contexts of the writing they do both in and outside of school.

• The author begins the essay discussing a discourse community he has recently become a member of. Think of a discourse community that you recently joined and describe how it meets Swales’ criteria for a discourse community.
• Choose a college class you’ve taken or are taking and describe the goals and expectations for writing of the discourse community the class represents. In small groups, compare the class discourse community you described with two of your peers’ courses. What are some of the differences in the goals and expectations for writing?
• Using Swales’ criteria for a discourse community, consider whether the following are discourse communities and why or why not: a) students at your college; b) a fraternity or sorority; c) fans of soccer; d) a high school debate team.
• The author of this essay argues that discourse communities use genres for social actions. Consider your major or a field you would like to work in after you graduate. What are some of the most important genres of that discourse community? In what ways do these genres perform social actions for members of the discourse community?

The following are activities that can provide scaffolding for a discourse community analysis project. To view example student discourse community analysis projects from the first-year composition program that I direct at the University of California, Davis, see our online student writing journal at fycjournal.ucdavis.edu .

Introducing the Concept of Discourse Community

To introduce students to the concept of discourse community, I like to start with discourse communities they can relate to or that they themselves are members of. A favorite example for my students is the This American Life podcast episode that explores the Instagram habits of teenage girls, which can be found at https://www.thisamericanlife.org/573/status-update . Other examples students can personally connect to include Facebook groups, groups on the popular social media site Reddit, fan clubs of musical artists or sports teams, and campus student special interest groups. Once we’ve discussed a few examples of discourse communities they can relate to on a personal level, I ask them to list some of the discourse communities they belong to and we apply Swales’ criteria to a few of these examples as a class.

Genre Analysis

One goal of my discourse community analysis project is to help students see the relationships between genres and the broader community contexts that genres operate in. However, thinking of writing in terms of genre and discourse community is a new approach for most of my students, and I provide them with heuristic questions they can use to analyze the primary genres of the discourse community they are focusing on in their projects. These questions include:

• Who is the audience(s) for the genre, and how does audience shape the genre?
• What social actions does the genre achieve for the discourse community?
• What are the conventions of the genre?
• How much flexibility do authors have to vary the conventions of the genre?
• Have the conventions of the genre changed over time? In what ways and why?
• To what extent does the genre empower members of the discourse community to speak, and to what extent does the genre marginalize or silence members of the discourse community?
• Where can a new discourse community member find models of the genre?

Research Questions about the Discourse Community

You could choose to have the focus of students’ discourse community projects be as simple as arguing that the discourse community they chose meets Swales’ criteria and explaining why. If you want students to dig a little deeper, you can ask them to come up with research questions about the discourse community they are analyzing. For example, students can ask questions about how the genres of the discourse community achieve the goals of the community, or how the writing conventions of the discourse community have changed over time and why they have changed, or how new members are initiated to the discourse community and the extent to which that initiation is effective. Some of my students are used to being assigned research papers in school that ask them to take a side on a pro/ con issue and develop a simplistic thesis statement that argues for that position. In the discourse community analysis project, I push them to think of research as more sophisticated than just taking a position and forming a simplistic thesis statement. I want them to use primary and secondary research to explore complex research questions and decide which aspects of their data and their analysis are the most interesting and useful to report on in their projects.

• This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and are subject to the Writing Spaces Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ , email [email protected] , or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. To view the Writing Spaces Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.org/terms-of-use . ↵

Understanding Discourse Communities Copyright © 2020 by Dan Melzer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Discourse Analysis – Methods, Types and Examples

Table of Contents

Discourse Analysis

Definition:

Discourse Analysis is a method of studying how people use language in different situations to understand what they really mean and what messages they are sending. It helps us understand how language is used to create social relationships and cultural norms.

It examines language use in various forms of communication such as spoken, written, visual or multi-modal texts, and focuses on how language is used to construct social meaning and relationships, and how it reflects and reinforces power dynamics, ideologies, and cultural norms.

Types of Discourse Analysis

Some of the most common types of discourse analysis are:

Conversation Analysis

This type of discourse analysis focuses on analyzing the structure of talk and how participants in a conversation make meaning through their interaction. It is often used to study face-to-face interactions, such as interviews or everyday conversations.

Critical discourse Analysis

This approach focuses on the ways in which language use reflects and reinforces power relations, social hierarchies, and ideologies. It is often used to analyze media texts or political speeches, with the aim of uncovering the hidden meanings and assumptions that are embedded in these texts.

Discursive Psychology

This type of discourse analysis focuses on the ways in which language use is related to psychological processes such as identity construction and attribution of motives. It is often used to study narratives or personal accounts, with the aim of understanding how individuals make sense of their experiences.

Multimodal Discourse Analysis

This approach focuses on analyzing not only language use, but also other modes of communication, such as images, gestures, and layout. It is often used to study digital or visual media, with the aim of understanding how different modes of communication work together to create meaning.

Corpus-based Discourse Analysis

This type of discourse analysis uses large collections of texts, or corpora, to analyze patterns of language use across different genres or contexts. It is often used to study language use in specific domains, such as academic writing or legal discourse.

Descriptive Discourse

This type of discourse analysis aims to describe the features and characteristics of language use, without making any value judgments or interpretations. It is often used in linguistic studies to describe grammatical structures or phonetic features of language.

Narrative Discourse

This approach focuses on analyzing the structure and content of stories or narratives, with the aim of understanding how they are constructed and how they shape our understanding of the world. It is often used to study personal narratives or cultural myths.

Expository Discourse

This type of discourse analysis is used to study texts that explain or describe a concept, process, or idea. It aims to understand how information is organized and presented in such texts and how it influences the reader’s understanding of the topic.

Argumentative Discourse

This approach focuses on analyzing texts that present an argument or attempt to persuade the reader or listener. It aims to understand how the argument is constructed, what strategies are used to persuade, and how the audience is likely to respond to the argument.

Discourse Analysis Conducting Guide

Here is a step-by-step guide for conducting discourse analysis:

• What are you trying to understand about the language use in a particular context?
• What are the key concepts or themes that you want to explore?
• Select the data: Decide on the type of data that you will analyze, such as written texts, spoken conversations, or media content. Consider the source of the data, such as news articles, interviews, or social media posts, and how this might affect your analysis.
• Transcribe or collect the data: If you are analyzing spoken language, you will need to transcribe the data into written form. If you are using written texts, make sure that you have access to the full text and that it is in a format that can be easily analyzed.
• Read and re-read the data: Read through the data carefully, paying attention to key themes, patterns, and discursive features. Take notes on what stands out to you and make preliminary observations about the language use.
• Develop a coding scheme : Develop a coding scheme that will allow you to categorize and organize different types of language use. This might include categories such as metaphors, narratives, or persuasive strategies, depending on your research question.
• Code the data: Use your coding scheme to analyze the data, coding different sections of text or spoken language according to the categories that you have developed. This can be a time-consuming process, so consider using software tools to assist with coding and analysis.
• Analyze the data: Once you have coded the data, analyze it to identify patterns and themes that emerge. Look for similarities and differences across different parts of the data, and consider how different categories of language use are related to your research question.
• Interpret the findings: Draw conclusions from your analysis and interpret the findings in relation to your research question. Consider how the language use in your data sheds light on broader cultural or social issues, and what implications it might have for understanding language use in other contexts.
• Write up the results: Write up your findings in a clear and concise way, using examples from the data to support your arguments. Consider how your research contributes to the broader field of discourse analysis and what implications it might have for future research.

Applications of Discourse Analysis

Here are some of the key areas where discourse analysis is commonly used:

• Political discourse: Discourse analysis can be used to analyze political speeches, debates, and media coverage of political events. By examining the language used in these contexts, researchers can gain insight into the political ideologies, values, and agendas that underpin different political positions.
• Media analysis: Discourse analysis is frequently used to analyze media content, including news reports, television shows, and social media posts. By examining the language used in media content, researchers can understand how media narratives are constructed and how they influence public opinion.
• Education : Discourse analysis can be used to examine classroom discourse, student-teacher interactions, and educational policies. By analyzing the language used in these contexts, researchers can gain insight into the social and cultural factors that shape educational outcomes.
• Healthcare : Discourse analysis is used in healthcare to examine the language used by healthcare professionals and patients in medical consultations. This can help to identify communication barriers, cultural differences, and other factors that may impact the quality of healthcare.
• Marketing and advertising: Discourse analysis can be used to analyze marketing and advertising messages, including the language used in product descriptions, slogans, and commercials. By examining these messages, researchers can gain insight into the cultural values and beliefs that underpin consumer behavior.

When to use Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis is a valuable research methodology that can be used in a variety of contexts. Here are some situations where discourse analysis may be particularly useful:

• When studying language use in a particular context: Discourse analysis can be used to examine how language is used in a specific context, such as political speeches, media coverage, or healthcare interactions. By analyzing language use in these contexts, researchers can gain insight into the social and cultural factors that shape communication.
• When exploring the meaning of language: Discourse analysis can be used to examine how language is used to construct meaning and shape social reality. This can be particularly useful in fields such as sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies.
• When examining power relations: Discourse analysis can be used to examine how language is used to reinforce or challenge power relations in society. By analyzing language use in contexts such as political discourse, media coverage, or workplace interactions, researchers can gain insight into how power is negotiated and maintained.
• When conducting qualitative research: Discourse analysis can be used as a qualitative research method, allowing researchers to explore complex social phenomena in depth. By analyzing language use in a particular context, researchers can gain rich and nuanced insights into the social and cultural factors that shape communication.

Examples of Discourse Analysis

Here are some examples of discourse analysis in action:

• A study of media coverage of climate change: This study analyzed media coverage of climate change to examine how language was used to construct the issue. The researchers found that media coverage tended to frame climate change as a matter of scientific debate rather than a pressing environmental issue, thereby undermining public support for action on climate change.
• A study of political speeches: This study analyzed political speeches to examine how language was used to construct political identity. The researchers found that politicians used language strategically to construct themselves as trustworthy and competent leaders, while painting their opponents as untrustworthy and incompetent.
• A study of medical consultations: This study analyzed medical consultations to examine how language was used to negotiate power and authority between doctors and patients. The researchers found that doctors used language to assert their authority and control over medical decisions, while patients used language to negotiate their own preferences and concerns.
• A study of workplace interactions: This study analyzed workplace interactions to examine how language was used to construct social identity and maintain power relations. The researchers found that language was used to construct a hierarchy of power and status within the workplace, with those in positions of authority using language to assert their dominance over subordinates.

Purpose of Discourse Analysis

The purpose of discourse analysis is to examine the ways in which language is used to construct social meaning, relationships, and power relations. By analyzing language use in a systematic and rigorous way, discourse analysis can provide valuable insights into the social and cultural factors that shape communication and interaction.

The specific purposes of discourse analysis may vary depending on the research context, but some common goals include:

• To understand how language constructs social reality: Discourse analysis can help researchers understand how language is used to construct meaning and shape social reality. By analyzing language use in a particular context, researchers can gain insight into the cultural and social factors that shape communication.
• To identify power relations: Discourse analysis can be used to examine how language use reinforces or challenges power relations in society. By analyzing language use in contexts such as political discourse, media coverage, or workplace interactions, researchers can gain insight into how power is negotiated and maintained.
• To explore social and cultural norms: Discourse analysis can help researchers understand how social and cultural norms are constructed and maintained through language use. By analyzing language use in different contexts, researchers can gain insight into how social and cultural norms are reproduced and challenged.
• To provide insights for social change: Discourse analysis can provide insights that can be used to promote social change. By identifying problematic language use or power imbalances, researchers can provide insights that can be used to challenge social norms and promote more equitable and inclusive communication.

Characteristics of Discourse Analysis

Here are some key characteristics of discourse analysis:

• Focus on language use: Discourse analysis is centered on language use and how it constructs social meaning, relationships, and power relations.
• Multidisciplinary approach: Discourse analysis draws on theories and methodologies from a range of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology.
• Systematic and rigorous methodology: Discourse analysis employs a systematic and rigorous methodology, often involving transcription and coding of language data, in order to identify patterns and themes in language use.
• Contextual analysis : Discourse analysis emphasizes the importance of context in shaping language use, and takes into account the social and cultural factors that shape communication.
• Focus on power relations: Discourse analysis often examines power relations and how language use reinforces or challenges power imbalances in society.
• Interpretive approach: Discourse analysis is an interpretive approach, meaning that it seeks to understand the meaning and significance of language use from the perspective of the participants in a particular discourse.
• Emphasis on reflexivity: Discourse analysis emphasizes the importance of reflexivity, or self-awareness, in the research process. Researchers are encouraged to reflect on their own positionality and how it may shape their interpretation of language use.

Advantages of Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis has several advantages as a methodological approach. Here are some of the main advantages:

• Provides a detailed understanding of language use: Discourse analysis allows for a detailed and nuanced understanding of language use in specific social contexts. It enables researchers to identify patterns and themes in language use, and to understand how language constructs social reality.
• Emphasizes the importance of context : Discourse analysis emphasizes the importance of context in shaping language use. By taking into account the social and cultural factors that shape communication, discourse analysis provides a more complete understanding of language use than other approaches.
• Allows for an examination of power relations: Discourse analysis enables researchers to examine power relations and how language use reinforces or challenges power imbalances in society. By identifying problematic language use, discourse analysis can contribute to efforts to promote social justice and equality.
• Provides insights for social change: Discourse analysis can provide insights that can be used to promote social change. By identifying problematic language use or power imbalances, researchers can provide insights that can be used to challenge social norms and promote more equitable and inclusive communication.
• Multidisciplinary approach: Discourse analysis draws on theories and methodologies from a range of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology. This multidisciplinary approach allows for a more holistic understanding of language use in social contexts.

Limitations of Discourse Analysis

Some Limitations of Discourse Analysis are as follows:

• Time-consuming and resource-intensive: Discourse analysis can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. Collecting and transcribing language data can be a time-consuming task, and analyzing the data requires careful attention to detail and a significant investment of time and resources.
• Limited generalizability: Discourse analysis is often focused on a particular social context or community, and therefore the findings may not be easily generalized to other contexts or populations. This means that the insights gained from discourse analysis may have limited applicability beyond the specific context being studied.
• Interpretive nature: Discourse analysis is an interpretive approach, meaning that it relies on the interpretation of the researcher to identify patterns and themes in language use. This subjectivity can be a limitation, as different researchers may interpret language data differently.
• Limited quantitative analysis: Discourse analysis tends to focus on qualitative analysis of language data, which can limit the ability to draw statistical conclusions or make quantitative comparisons across different language uses or contexts.
• Ethical considerations: Discourse analysis may involve the collection and analysis of sensitive language data, such as language related to trauma or marginalization. Researchers must carefully consider the ethical implications of collecting and analyzing this type of data, and ensure that the privacy and confidentiality of participants is protected.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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English Composition 2089: Researching Discourse

• Get Help Here!

What Is Discourse?

Discourse analysis, discourse communities, examples of discourse communities, tips on choosing a discourse community to analyze.

• Discourse Community Analysis/Ethnography
• Analyzing Multiple Discourses
• Research Refresher--Finding articles, books, and more!
• How Do I Find Different Genres?
• How Do I Find Images and Media?
• Popular Music Criticism
• Citing Your Sources
• Recast Content in a Different Genre

Essentially, discourse is an act of communication between a composer and audience for a particular purpose.  This communication can take a variety of forms. 

Here are some common forms of discourse:

• newspaper article
• scholarly journal article
• radio or TV broadcast
• published report

However, also think beyond textual discourses, for example:

• advertisement
• emojis or memes
• architecture or design, e.g. 9/11 Memorial
• clothing styles

You are encouraged to think expansively about what counts as a discourse so that your work in English 2089 reflects the diversity and richness of 21st century discourses and communication practices.

When considering any form of discourse, in addition to understanding WHAT is being said, also focus on WHO is creating the text, WHY they are doing so, and HOW the resulting discourse impacts or has impacted the issue.

Ask yourself the following questions to ANALYZE discourse:

• Who is the intended audience?
• What is the purpose of the information presented? (inform, persuade, entertain)
• What types of evidence are used to support the claims of the information?
• How is information shaped by a particular genre? (Consider the audience, layout, space, style, conventions, etc).
• How literate, biased, and/or credible are those producing this discourse?
• To what degree is the discourse mainstream (understood by the broad audience) or considered non-traditional or even avant-garde?

Analyzing the discourse on an issue is different from arguing a position on an issue.  See the chart below for an example of these differences:

A discourse community is a "social group that communicates at least in part via written texts and shares common goals, values, and writing standards, a specialized vocabulary, and specialized genres." Anne Beaufort, College Writing and Beyond .

Different discourse communities will often discuss the same topic in very different ways. The concept map below shows some discourse communities involved in conversations related to AI technologies.  

Professional:

• emergency room nurses
• prison guards
• political aides

Be careful to sufficiently narrow your focus so you are not trying to analyze a community with millions of members who have vastly different discourse practices (i.e. “scientists” or “business people”)

• activist organizations (PETA, NRA, Sierra Club)
• a specific ethnic group (Amish, Native Americans living on reservations, Cajun)
• a campus club or organization
• charity organizations

Be sensitive to stereotypes if you analyze a community associated with race, religion, etc.

• the PTA or similar school groups
• political action groups
• fan groups (Trekkies, the BeyHive)
• Civil War re-enactors
• game clubs (Dungeons & Dragons, Magic Cards, etc.)
• Choose communities that are in conversation on a particular topic or problem.
• Select key communities that represent various perspectives on a topic.
• Choose an organized or connected community that has a common purpose; for example, the animal rights group PETA.
• Be specific: instead of Cincinnati Reds fans, choose members of the RedsZone or the Rosie Reds.
• Focus on the discourse of an entire community, not on a specific person.
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Methodology

• Critical Discourse Analysis | Definition, Guide & Examples

Critical Discourse Analysis | Definition, Guide & Examples

Published on August 23, 2019 by Amy Luo . Revised on June 22, 2023.

Critical discourse analysis (or discourse analysis) is a research method for studying written or spoken language in relation to its social context. It aims to understand how language is used in real life situations.

When you conduct discourse analysis, you might focus on:

• The purposes and effects of different types of language
• Cultural rules and conventions in communication
• How values, beliefs and assumptions are communicated
• How language use relates to its social, political and historical context

Discourse analysis is a common qualitative research method in many humanities and social science disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, psychology and cultural studies.  

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What is discourse analysis used for, how is discourse analysis different from other methods, how to conduct discourse analysis, other interesting articles.

Conducting discourse analysis means examining how language functions and how meaning is created in different social contexts. It can be applied to any instance of written or oral language, as well as non-verbal aspects of communication such as tone and gestures.

Materials that are suitable for discourse analysis include:

• Books, newspapers and periodicals
• Marketing material, such as brochures and advertisements
• Business and government documents
• Websites, forums, social media posts and comments
• Interviews and conversations

By analyzing these types of discourse, researchers aim to gain an understanding of social groups and how they communicate.

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Unlike linguistic approaches that focus only on the rules of language use, discourse analysis emphasizes the contextual meaning of language.

It focuses on the social aspects of communication and the ways people use language to achieve specific effects (e.g. to build trust, to create doubt, to evoke emotions, or to manage conflict).

Instead of focusing on smaller units of language, such as sounds, words or phrases, discourse analysis is used to study larger chunks of language, such as entire conversations, texts, or collections of texts. The selected sources can be analyzed on multiple levels.

Discourse analysis is a qualitative and interpretive method of analyzing texts (in contrast to more systematic methods like content analysis ). You make interpretations based on both the details of the material itself and on contextual knowledge.

There are many different approaches and techniques you can use to conduct discourse analysis, but the steps below outline the basic structure you need to follow. Following these steps can help you avoid pitfalls of confirmation bias that can cloud your analysis.

Step 1: Define the research question and select the content of analysis

To do discourse analysis, you begin with a clearly defined research question . Once you have developed your question, select a range of material that is appropriate to answer it.

Discourse analysis is a method that can be applied both to large volumes of material and to smaller samples, depending on the aims and timescale of your research.

Step 2: Gather information and theory on the context

Next, you must establish the social and historical context in which the material was produced and intended to be received. Gather factual details of when and where the content was created, who the author is, who published it, and whom it was disseminated to.

As well as understanding the real-life context of the discourse, you can also conduct a literature review on the topic and construct a theoretical framework to guide your analysis.

Step 3: Analyze the content for themes and patterns

This step involves closely examining various elements of the material – such as words, sentences, paragraphs, and overall structure – and relating them to attributes, themes, and patterns relevant to your research question.

Step 4: Review your results and draw conclusions

Once you have assigned particular attributes to elements of the material, reflect on your results to examine the function and meaning of the language used. Here, you will consider your analysis in relation to the broader context that you established earlier to draw conclusions that answer your research question.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Normal distribution
• Measures of central tendency
• Chi square tests
• Confidence interval
• Quartiles & Quantiles
• Cluster sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Thematic analysis
• Cohort study
• Peer review
• Ethnography

Research bias

• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Conformity bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Availability heuristic
• Attrition bias
• Social desirability bias

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15 Discourse and Discourse Community

Christian J. Pulver

The term discourse community combines two key concepts— community and discourse .

Generally speaking, community refers to the local groups we live and work with, our neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. While living in proximity with other people is an important aspect of community, other aspects beyond location play an important role. Those aspects have to do with our shared ways of using language and the common values and beliefs that emerge from how we communicate with each other. Such shared language practices are called discourse , and people who share similar ways of talking and thinking, and do it frequently together, are part of a discourse community .

Conventionally, we can think of discourse as the exchange of words and ideas among those who share a common purpose for continually interacting. We discourse about the weather, last night’s game, politics, and art. Discourse is like conversation, but conversation is just one way that discourse is exchanged within the larger language and communication patterns that we engage in, from our local discourse communities to the larger public. Discourse is also shared through written texts, videos, podcasts, and other discursive genres. So, not only does our proximity to each other shape the communities we are a part of, discourse communities also share particular genres, styles, and accepted ways of communicating with each other, and they tend to gravitate around particular problems that are of shared concern.

Though the word community is often thought of as people who get along well, not all discourse communities get along, and members don’t always like each other. That is to say, discourse communities come in all shapes in sizes, and the language practices that occur within them can vary widely as a result. Some discourse communities can be confrontational or argumentative (legal discourse, for example), and others might be more intimate and caring (parent-child discourse, for example). And discourse communities don’t exist in a bubble—they are embedded in the larger public and cultural discourses that include entertainment, national politics, and public debates that circulate broadly via mass and social media. The discourse communities we are part of at work or in college, with family and friends, are always embedded in these larger discourses.

Understanding the shape of a discourse and the problems that matter to a discourse community are vital to understanding the nature of the particular problem you are considering and how to solve it. To achieve this kind of understanding, it is always useful to map out the basic contours of the discourse by looking at the where, when, what, who, how, and, why of that discourse.

Mapping the Discourse of a Problem or Controversy

Mapping a discourse in these ways is an ongoing activity that will help you develop a richer, broader understanding of the problem you are exploring. Not only will it help you understand the nature and nuances of the problem, it will help you understand how to enter the conversation and contribute towards its solution (what is known as discourse competence) .

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• DiscourseCommunityTable © Christian Pulver is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike) license

Thinking Rhetorically: Writing for Professional and Public Audiences Copyright © 2020 by Christian J. Pulver is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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How to Do a Discourse Analysis

A toolbox for analysing political texts.

Discourse analysis is a useful tool for studying the political meanings that inform written and spoken text. In other posts, I have provided a quick video introduction to the topic, and have discussed the ideas behind discourse theory , the main questions that students and researchers will likely ask as they set up their discourse analysis project , and the things that are worth keeping in mind when working with East Asian language sources . In this post, I offer a handy set of tools for doing a text-based, qualitative discourse analysis. The idea of a discourse toolbox comes from Siegfried Jäger, but I have expanded his approach based on my own experience and the works of other discourse analysts such as Paul Chilton (2004) and Norman Fairclough (1994).

You can go through the whole list of work-steps and tick each item off in turn, which is a good way to practice these methods. However, if you are conducting a specific research project, I would recommend adapting this toolbox to your own needs and tailoring it to fit your concerns. At the end of this post, you will also find a few comments on the limitations of this toolbox plus a list of literature that you can turn to if you want to learn more.

Getting technical: discourse analysis in ten steps

So you have formulated a research question, have collected source material, and are now ready to roll up your sleeves and dig into your sources. But how do you make sure that you have covered all your bases and that you will later be able to make a good case for yourself and your work? Here are ten work steps that will help you conduct a systematic and professional discourse analysis.

1) Establish the context

Before you start chiselling away at your source material, jot down where the material comes from and how it fits into the big picture . You should ask yourself what the social and historical context is in which each of your sources was produced. Write down what language your source is written in, what country and place it is from, who wrote it (and when), and who published it (and when). Also try to have a record of when and how you got your hands on your sources, and to explain where others might find copies. Finally, find out whether your sources are responses to any major event , whether they tie into broader debates , and how they were received at the time of publication.

2) Explore the production process

You have already recorded who wrote and published your sources, but you still need to do a more thorough background check . Try to find additional information on the producer of your source material, as well as their institutional and personal background. For example, if you are analysing news articles, take a look at the kind of newspaper that the articles are from (Jäger 2004: 175): Who are the author and the editorial staff, what is the general political position of the paper, and what is its affiliation with other organizations? Are any of the people who are involved in the production process known for their journalistic style or their political views? Is there any information on the production expenditures and general finances of the paper? Do you know who the general target audience of the paper is? In many cases, media outlets themselves provide some of this information online, for instance in the “about” sections of their websites. In other cases, you will find such information in the secondary academic literature. Don’t hesitate to write the editors an email or call them up: personal interviews can be a great way to explore production backgrounds.

Once you have established the institutional background, take notes on the medium and the genre you are working with. Some scholars go as far to argue that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan 1964/2001), or in other words that the medium in which information is presented is the crucial element that shapes meaning. While I am skeptical of such extreme technological determinism, I do agree that the medium matters : reading an article online is not the same as reading it in a printed newspaper, or in a hardcover collection of essays. Make sure to identify the different media types in which your source appeared, and to also be clear about the version that you yourself are analysing.

For instance, the layout of a newspaper article and its position on the page will be different in a print edition than in an online edition. The latter will also offer comments, links, multi-media content, etc. All of these factors frame the meaning of the actual text and should be considered in an analysis. This may also mean that you should think about the technical quality and readability of your source, for instance by looking at paper quality (or resolution for online sources), type set, etc. You should also take notes on the length of your source (number of pages and/or words) and any additional features of the medium that might contribute to or shape meaning (such as images).

Finally, ask yourself what genre your source belongs to. Are you analysing an editorial comment, and op-ed, a reader’s letter, a commentary, a news item, a report, an interview, or something else? Establishing this background information will later help you assess what genre-specific mechanism your source deploys (or ignores) to get its message across.

3) Prepare your material for analysis

In order to analyse the actual text, it is wise to prepare it in a way that will allow you to work with the source, home in on specific details, and make precise references later. If you are working with a hard copy I would recommend making a number of additional copies of your source material, so that you can write on these versions and mark important features . If you haven’t already, try to digitize your source or get a digital copy. Then add references that others can use to follow your work later: add numbers for lines, headers, paragraphs, figures, or any other features that will help you keep your bearings.

4) Code your material

When you code data, it means that you are assigning attributes to specific units of analysis, such as paragraphs, sentences, or individual words. Think of how many of us tag online information like pictures, links, or articles. Coding is simply an academic version of this tagging process.

For instance, you might be analysing a presidential speech to see what globalization discourse it draws from. It makes sense to mark all statements in the speech that deal with globalization and its related themes (or discourse strands ). Before you start with this process, you need to come up with your coding categories . The first step is to outline a few such categories theoretically: based on the kind of question you are asking, and your knowledge of the subject matter, you will already have a few key themes in mind that you expect to find, for instance “trade”, “migration”, “transportation”, “communication”, and so on. A thorough review of the secondary literature on your topic will likely offer inspiration. Write down your first considerations, and also write down topics that you think might be related to these key themes. These are your starting categories.

You then go over the text to see if it contains any of these themes. Take notes on the ones that are not included, since you may have to delete these categories later. Other categories might be too broad, so try breaking them down into sub-categories. Also, the text may include interesting themes that you did not expect to find, so jot down any such additional discourse strands. At the end of this first review, revise your list of coding categories to reflect your findings. If you are working with several documents, repeat the process for each of them, until you have your final list of coding categories. This is what Mayring (2002: 120) calls  evolutionary coding , since your categories evolve from theoretical considerations into a full-fledged operational list based on empirical data .

How the actual coding process works will depend on the tools you use. You can code paper-based sources by highlighting text sections in different colours, or by jotting down specific symbols. If you are working with a computer, you can similarly highlight text sections in a word processor. In either case, the risk is that you will not be able to represent multiple categories adequately, for instance when a statement ties into three or four discourse strands at once. You could mark individual words, but this might not be ideal if you want to see how the discourse works within the larger sentence structure, and how discourse strands overlap.

A real alternative is using other types of software. If you have access to professional research programmes like NVivo , then the software already has built-in coding mechanisms that you can customize and use. There is also open-source software available, for instance the Mac programme TAMS , but I have not tested their functionality. However, even if you only have regular office tools at your disposal, such as Microsoft’s Office or a Mac equivalent, there are at least two ways in which you can code material.

The first is to copy your text into an Excel table. Place the text in one column and use the next column to add the coding categories. You’ll of course have to decide where the line-breaks should be. A sensible approach is to place each sentence of your original text on a new line, but you could also choose smaller units of text.

Another tool that provides coding assistance is Microsoft OneNote 2010, or the Mac equivalent Growly Notes . In OneNote , you can right click anywhere in the text and select “tag” to assign a category to any sentence. You can also customize your tags, create new ones, and easily search and monitor your coding categories and activities. The downside is that you can only tag full sentences, not single words or phrases, but depending on your intentions, this may not be a crucial drawback.

5) Examine the structure of the text

Now that you have prepared your materials and have coded the discourse strands, it is time to look at the structural features of the texts. Are there sections that overwhelmingly deal with one discourse? Are there ways in which different discourse strands overlap in the text? See if you can identify how the argument is structured: does the text go through several issues one by one? Does it first make a counter-factual case, only to then refute that case and make the main argument? You should at this point also consider how the headers and other layout features guide the argument, and what role the introduction and conclusion play in the overall scheme of things.

6) Collect and examine discursive statements

Once you have a good idea of the macro-features of your text, you can zoom in on the individual statements, or discourse fragments . A good way to do this is to collect all statements with a specific code, and to examine what they have to say on the respective discourse strand. This collection of statements will allow you to map out what “truths” the text establishes on each major topic.

7) Identify cultural references

You have already established what the context of your source material is. Now think about how the context informs the argument . Does your material contain references to other sources, or imply knowledge of another subject matter? What meaning does the text attribute to such other sources? Exploring these questions will help you figure out what function  intertextuality serves in light of the overall argument.

8) Identify linguistic and rhetorical mechanisms

The next step in your analysis is likely going to be the most laborious, but also the most enlightening when it comes to exploring how a discourse works in detail. You will need to identify how the various statements function at the level of language . In order to do this, you may have to use additional copies of your text for each work-step, or you may need to create separate coding categories for your digital files. Here are some of the things you should be on the lookout for:

• Word groups: does the text deploy words that have a common contextual background? For instance, the vocabulary may be drawn directly from military language, or business language, or highly colloquial youth language. Take a closer look at nouns, verbs, and adjectives in your text and see if you find any common features. Such regularities can shed light on the sort of logic that the text implies. For example, talking about a natural disaster in the language of war creates a very different reasoning than talking about the same event in religious terms.
• Grammar features: check who or what the subjects and objects in the various statements are. Are there any regularities, for instance frequently used pronouns like “we” and “they”? If so, can you identify who the protagonists and antagonists are? A look at adjectives and adverbs might tell you more about judgements that the text passes on these groups. Also, take a closer look at the main and auxiliary verbs that the text uses, and check what tense they appear in. Particularly interesting are active versus passive phrases – does the text delete actors from its arguments by using passive phrases? A statement like “we are under economic pressure” is very different from “X puts us under economic pressure”… particularly if “X” is self-inflicted. Passive phrases and impersonal chains of nouns are a common way to obscure relationships behind the text and shirk responsibility. Make such strategies visible through your analysis.
• Rhetorical and literary figures: see if you can identify and mark any of the following five elements in your text: allegories, metaphors, similes, idioms, and proverbs. Take a look at how they are deployed in the service of the overall argument. Inviting the reader to entertain certain associations, for instance in the form of an allegory, helps construct certain kinds of categories and relations, which in turn shape the argument. For instance, if I use a simile that equates the state with a parent, and the citizens with children, then I am not only significantly simplifying what is actually a very complex relationship, I am also conjuring up categories and relationships that legitimize certain kinds of politics, for instance strict government intervention in the social sphere. Once you have checked for the five elements listed above, follow up by examining additional rhetorical figures to see how these frame the meaning of specific statements. Things to look for include parallelisms, hyperboles, tri-colons, synecdoches, rhetorical questions, and anaphora, to name only the most common.
• Direct and indirect speech: does the text include quotes? If so, are they paraphrased or are they cited as direct speech? In either case, you should track down the original phrases to see what their context was, and what function they now play in your source material.
• Modalities: see if the text includes any statements on what “should” or “could” be. Such phrases may create a sense of urgency, serve as a call to action, or imply hypothetical scenarios.
• Evidentialities: lastly, are there any phrases in the text that suggest factuality? Sample phrases might include “of course”, “obviously”, or “as everyone knows”. A related question then is what kinds of “facts” the text actually presents in support of its argument. Does the text report factuality, actively demonstrate it, or merely suggested it as self-evident? One of the strongest features of discourse is how it “naturalizes” certain statements as “common sense” or “fact”, even if the statements are actually controversial (and in discourse theory, all statements are controversial). Be on the look-out for such discursive moves.

9) Interpret the data

You now have all the elements of your analysis together, but the most important question still remains: what does it all mean? In your interpretation, you need to tie all of your results together in order to explain that the discourse is about, and how it works. This means combing your knowledge of structural features and individual statements, and then placing those findings into the broader context that you established at the beginning. Throughout this process, keep the following questions in mind: who created the material you are analysing? What is their position on the topic you examined? How do their arguments draw from and in turn contribute to commonly accepted knowledge of the topic at the time and in the place that this argument was made? And maybe most importantly: who might benefit from the discourse that your sources construct?

10) Present your findings

Once you have the answer to your original question, it is time to get your results across to your target audience. If you have conducted a good analysis, then you now have a huge amount of notes from which you can build your presentation, paper, or thesis. Make sure to stress the relevance , and to move through your analysis based on the issues that you want to present. Always ask yourself: what is interesting about my findings, and why should anyone care? A talk or a paper that simply lists one discourse feature after another is tedious to follow, so try to focus on making a compelling case . You can then add evidence from your work as needed, for instance by adding original and translated examples to illustrate your point. For some academic papers, particularly graduation theses, you may want to compile the full account of your data analysis in an appendix or some other separate file so that your assessors can check your work.

Mind the limitations:

Discourse analysis offers a powerful toolbox for analysing political communication, but it also has its pitfalls . Aside from being very work-intensive , the idea that you only need to follow a certain number of steps to get your results can be misleading. A methodology is always only as good as your question . If your question does not lend itself to this sort of analysis, or if many of the steps I list above do not apply to you, then come up with an approach that suits your project. Don’t be a methodologist : someone who jumps at a set of methods and applies them to everything in a blind fit of activism. Always remain critical of your own work.

This means being mindful of the shortcomings in your approach, so that you do not end up making claims that your material does not support. A common mistake is to claim that a discourse analysis shows what people think or believe (or worse: what entire societies think or believe). Discourse analysis is a form of content analysis. It is not a tool to analyse the impact of media on audience members. No amount of discourse analysis can provide adequate evidence on what goes on in people’s heads .

What we can learn from a discourse analysis is how specific actors construct an argument , and how this argument fits into wider social practices . More importantly, we can demonstrate with confidence what kind of statements actors try to establish as self-evident and true . We can show with precision what rhetorical methods they picked to communicate those truths in ways they thought would be effective , plausible , or even natural . And we can reveal how their statements and the frameworks of meaning they draw from proliferate through communication practices.

References:

Chilton, Paul (2004). Analyzing Political Discourse – Theory and Practice. London: Arnold.

Fairclough, Norman (1995). Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.

Jäger, Siegfried (2004). Kritische Diskursanalyse. Eine Einführung. (Discourse Analysis. An Introduction). 4th ed., Münster: UNRAST-Verlag.

Mayring, Philipp (2002). Einführung in die Qualitative Sozialforschung – Eine Anleitung zu qualitativem Denken (Introduction to Qualitative Social Science Research – Instruction Manual to Qualitative Thinking). 5th ed., Basel: Beltz Verlag.

McLuhan, Marshall (1964/2001). Understanding Media. New York: Routledge Classics.

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About the author: florian schneider.

452 Comments

[…] and may want to take a look at my practical tips on how to set up a discourse analysis and at the ten work-steps I recommend for analyzing political […]

[…] contribute to and shape commonly-accepted truths in a society. Such a framework is useful for exploring truth claims and knowledge construction, particularly when the focus lies on who has the power to make certain statements, but it does not […]

[…] particularly in an age of mass-media: the visual. That is why, in this post, I expand the toolbox for discourse analysis that I have introduced in a previous post by adding methods and work-steps that will hopefully not […]

Thank you!! :)

No worries at all. Glad if it helped.

Hi Florian, I’m Danil, from Indonesia, currently working on research related to political discourse. I would really appreciate if you could provide me any information related to political discourse using Vandijk’s apporach’s Sociocognitive. Thanks for your kindness. All the best for u. Lookingforwards to hearing from u soon.

regards, DANIL

Hi Danil, If I understand you correctly, you are looking for authors who discuss Van Dijk’s work, right? I am not sure whether there is one single article that covers his work in general, but you might be interested in the various papers that have cited him or reviewed specific books of his. Here’s a short selection you might find helpful: http://connection.ebscohost.com/tag/VAN%2BDijk%252C%2BTeun . There might be others that you can get to via a targeted web search for articles with the tag “Teun Van Dijk”. Best Florian

Many thanks indeed Florian, So sorry, It has been very longtime since I’ve never looked over your reply. I’v searched for Van Dijk’s analysis model and got several books. One more thing, I’m and some friends have planned to organize a conference on Critical Discourse, we would really appreciate if you could be one of the key note speakers. We’ll inform you the exact time of the program. Cheers. All the best

Thanks Danil, glad I could be of help. Best Florian

HelloFlorian, I’v made contact with u several times and found your comments and suggestion were very helpful for me. I would really appreciate if you could help me with definitions and short examples of some terms used in Critical Discourse particularly which are introduced by van Dijk: Context models, mental models, experience models, event models. I got confused with their differences. Looking forward to hearing from u . Many thanks indeed Florian.

Best, DANIL

Hi Danil, I’m afraid I’m not familiar with van Dijk’s writings on these concepts. You’ll have to check his work and see what definitions he himself provides. Sorry to not be of more help. Let me know what you find out. Best Florian

Thanks any way Florian. You have been so helpful. I’ll try to find out the meanings of these stuff.

Hi Danil! Hope you must be fine. Well could you please share some of the work of Van Dijk that you have searched and also the research proposals and Research Articles/papers that you have in his domain. Because your area of research and my area of research are similar so we may help and support each other. Thanks in Advance

Hi Florian, I am a student of political science at stockholm university in Sweden. I have not had a clear answer from this question “Discuss what material could be included in the study when using discourse analysis (apart from the attached document). Motivate why the material you suggest should be included. I answered this question two years ago but need some clarification.

Hi Joshua, I’m not sure I can answer your question. This seems like a course assignment, so I assume your instructor had specific things in mind, based on what you’ve been doing in class. It’s hard for me to know what these were. Have you taken a look at my other blog post on setting up a discourse analysis? It includes the kind of questions one should ask while getting ready for such a project. I imagine some of these might connect with what you are expected to write: http://www.politicseastasia.com/studying/setting-up-a-discourse-analysis-of-political-texts-from-east-asia/ . Good luck with the assignment.

Hi Florian, Thank you for your summation of critical discourse analysis. I was struggling to get my head around this concept until I found your blog. Thanks to you I received a very high mark for my masters paper and I am referencing your work for my final masters dissertation.

I appreciate educators who use their vast knowledge to simplify important concepts. This truly is basics of all teaching.

Thanks again Cheers Mary

Hi Mary, Thanks for your kind words. This really means a lot. I’m very glad to hear that you found these materials useful for your graduate studies. Good luck with the write-up of your MA thesis! Florian

[…] my favourite:  ten work-steps on how to do a discourse […]

This is gold! I didn’t know how on Earth to start my discourse analysis assignment until I came across this. It has been a life saver. Wish my tutor had taken the time to break it down like you have. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

Thanks Lauren, it’s good to know that this was useful in your studies. Good luck with the assignment!

Dear Lauren, I am international students in the UK and I also have assignment about discourse analysis excuse me can I have a look to your assignment, please

Best wishes, Nada

Wonderful, cogent, concise description of methodology. My students are thanking you!!

Thanks for the kind words, Patricia. I really appreciate it.

whoa!!! thank yuh i av learnt alot not jus the discourse analysis. ur such a life saver

That’s very kind of you Khadijah. Glad I could help.

This is the most clear and helpful post about discourse analysis I’ve ever read! Thanks a lot for sharing.

Yes, excellent. Many thanks. Reading all the Fairclough and Foucault in the world doesn’t resolve practical issues like how to cite the analyzed content. Does it belong in works cited? Footnotes? Appendix? I can’t seem to find a natural fit for my research.

This is a good question, Katie. The answer depends on how detailed your analysis of the materials is. I have seen undergraduate studies that cite longer sections in the main body and then list the source in the bibliography like any other materials. In some cases, particularly if the project analyses several texts, it may be good to have two sections in the list of references: one for “primary sources”, one for “secondary sources”. Personally, I like to see the materials that were analysed in an appendix (and then listed in the bibliography alongside the secondary sources). For graduate or post-graduate work, it might even be worthwhile expanding such an appendix to include practical work steps, visualisation of the data, or different rounds of coding on the same document. That way the reader (or examiner) can check the thought process behind the research. Just an idea. Hope this helps!

hi sir i am a master student from algeria , first thank you for the article it was realy helpful , second, i am working on female stereotypes in proverbs , since i have a collection of proverbs to analyse my teacher adviced me to ask you how to do so;would you please give me some pieces of advice analyse them .

How to do a discourse analysis by finding the cohesions and the coherences in the article?

Dear Putri, I am not sure I have understood your question correctly – do you mean: how can we study the structure of a text? If that is the case, I would try to identify what each paragraph or section does (e.g. does it functions as an introduction, an argument, a counter-argument, an example, a conclusion?) and would try to establish how the author transitions from one section to the next. You could also go into more detail and check what conjunctions or rhetorical tools the text deploys to provide a sense of flow (for instance, if I write: “Discourse influence language. So it also influences politics”, I have linked two separate claims in a way that is by no means self-evident). Some of the literature that I’ve provided in the list of references includes more sophisticated examples than I can provide here, but I hope these brief notes already help.

Many thanks from Latvia! I have struggled with discourse analysis for about month now and no one could actually tell me what’s it about and how exactly to do the analysis. This really was a lifesaver for my bachelors degree research. Thank You a lot!

Thanks Ilze, I’m glad you found this useful. Good luck with the BA!

Well done, Florian. This is very professional and very helpful. I am teaching discourse analysis to undergraduate business students and now I don’t have to create my own video.

Hi Tina, thanks for the encouraging words. Hope your students enjoy the introduction and video.

Thank you so much. This is so clear and useful for unpicking political text to illuminate power structures and motivations.

[…] widely as their subjects. For scholars interested in digital media content, methods might include discourse analysis, visual communication analysis, iconography, and various tools adopted from the study of […]

Hi, this article is so useful! I am currently conducting discourse analysis of a television travel documentary and was wondering how the stages can be adapted to fit this? Obviously I cannot transcribe and code the hour long programme, so do I therefore transcribe sections which I feel to be most significant and code these? Thanks!

Hi Heidi, This is a good question, and depends a bit on the length of the material and what you are trying to achieve. For cases where you are not interested in a shot-by-shot analysis, I would recommend creating a sequence protocol, and then coding those sequences. I recently did this with a colleague of mine to analyse a lengthy Chinese documentary, and it’s a good way to keep track of the content at a macro-level. You can then “zoom in” on specific sequences and examine them in more detail where it’s useful and necessary, for instance shot-by-shot, or transcribing what was said. I’ve written a bit more about this here: http://www.politicseastasia.com/studying/an-introduction-to-visual-communication-analysis/ The section on “working with moving images” in particular might be of interest to you. Best – FS

Hi Heidi! Hope you must be fine. Well could you please share some of the work that you have researched with reference to Television discourse and also the research proposals and Research Articles/papers that you have in his domain. Because your area of research and my area of research are similar so we may help and support each other. Thanks in Advance

[…] You may want to also take a look at my own discussions of methodology, for instance my blog post on how to do a discourse analysis (which is about methods) or how to set up such an analysis (which includes epistemological […]

Thanks a lot for the great work. I am doing a research on how Twitter was used in Zimbabwe during the 2013 elections. I have collected more than 80 000 tweets over 51 days. My question now is: With such a huge dataset, is it possible to do a proper CDA?

Hi Leonard,

This sounds like a fascinating data set, and I do think it is possible to do a discourse analysis on large amounts of text. However, I would only rely on quantitative tools to highlight keyword distribution and check the general thematic structure of the text corpus. I’d always then follow up by looking at representative (or outlying!) examples in more detail for the qualitative part of the analysis.

By the way, it might also be interesting to see how the people who post these tweets are connected on Twitter, and what kind of networks consequently provide the foundation for the discourse you’re looking at. I can recommend the work by Richard Rogers over at the University of Amsterdam on how to get a handle on such digital methods questions. Oh, and then there’s the very tricky question of reproducing your results without singling out the various posters – if you haven’t read it yet, I can recommend Zimmer’s article on this issue ( http://bit.ly/1hqf1T5 ). Just FYI. :)

Good luck with this fascinating project! Do let me know what you find.

Best – F

Hi. i found this article very helpful. Thanks a lot! I’ve got an assignment on media political discourse. Please, i want to know if making use of critical discourse analysis will be an excellent way of analysing a newspaper article.

Hi Nassy, This all depends on the kind of questions you have regarding the newspaper article. If you are trying to find out what it’s position on a specific issue is, and how the author uses language to establish that position, then a discourse analysis might be worth a try. If you are only looking at a single article, though, I’d be careful not to overstate how that piece contributes to broader discourses. That would require either a wider study, or more information on how relevant this particular article is. As with any other subject area, the success of a paper very much hinges on the research question. The selection of methods (for instance: discourse analysis) should follow from that. All the best Florian

Hi, thanks a lot for this article :) I am actually doing my dissertation on the role of media in environmental protection- using renewable energies…i’m using discourse analysis to analyse newspaper..but i’m a little bit confused..should I separate the analysis of my themes from the grammar part or I mixed both? :s Thnks in advance

Hi Mau, thanks for the question. I think it depends on the kind of dissertation you are writing, and the level of linguistic detail you plan to go into. If you are working on a research MA or PhD, and have a lot of data, then it might indeed be a good idea to write a chapter that collects and discusses recurring grammatical features in the texts, and to then follow this up with a chapter that discusses what discursive positions are constructed through the language (with examples, of course). To be honest, I myself like it when a thesis tells a story, so I would be tempted to combine these two things: you could structure your thesis according to the different themes you are analysing, and then use the grammar parts as evidence and illustration. In a case like that, you could also provide the more technical details and any primary sources in an appendix, so you can readily reference your analytic work without having to reproduce every minute bit in the main text. So as you see, it’s a matter of preference. I would check with your supervisor to see what makes most sense for your case, and whether your examiners have a preference in this regard. You are, after all, writing for a specific audience… Hope this helps! Best- F

Hi Florian,

Your material is very clear and helpful. Are these methods okay to use for interviews that have been written up at masters level. Many Thanks Josh.

Hi Josh, Discourse analysis is definitely a great way to process interviews – provided you are looking for the (often subconscious) communication choices your interviewees make to get their point across, and if you want to know what kind background knowledge and assumptions informs their views. It’s often quite revealing to see how interviewees tie their arguments together with wider social discourses and the argumentation patterns you’d find there (e.g. the news, academia, work conversations, etc.). What I normally do is create a protocol of the interviews (using either my own paraphrasing or rough transcripts), and after coding the meaningful segments I look at specific parts in detail. This can then also include transcribing those parts in a way that marks hesitations, intonations, and other such qualities of the spoken word (Paul Chilton has provided some useful annotation advice for this). As you might imagine, this can be a lot of work. So if you are mainly on a “fact finding” mission and are trying to figure out how the topic “works” that your interviewees discuss, then I probably wouldn’t recommend a full discourse analysis based on transcripts: simple protocols might be the better way forward. I hope this helps you decide how to approach those materials – good luck with the MA! Best – Florian

Thanks for the replay and advice, this sounds really good. I think I’m going to use some other material as well such as a short film. So mix the discourse analysis with the visual analysis that you have also clearly presented. Could I call this a multimodal discourse analysis? I think the wider context filters through in the interviews and the short films quite well, I also think this is physically impacting on society and possibly playing into Foucault’s ideas about Govenrmentality. Would you recommend analysing some of the physical impacts as well?

In relation to Paul Chilton is there a link to an example of how to transcribe in a way that marks hesitations, intonations, and other such qualities of the spoken word?

Many thanks in advance Josh.

I am always in favor of including other types of media, and seeing how a discourse works in different “modes”, so this sounds promising. I would be careful to call something a “multimodal” analysis, though: I think the word fits best when you systematically look at how the medium contributes to the discourse. So if you are analysing camera angles, mise-en-scene, editing, etc. in combination with what is said in the film, then the term applies. If you are mainly commenting on the content of the film in relation to your interviews, then I might try to find another word (or point out in a footnote that you are not conducting a full-fledged “multimodal” analysis, and then suggest further reading on that kind of research approach).

As for “physical” impacts, I find it fascinating to see how discourses crystallize into institutions and then inform such things as buildings, urban planning, use of physical violence, etc. Is that what you have in mind with “physical” impact? That would be the sort of question Foucault indeed looked at. My advice here would be to include such issues if you have good data, and to otherwise note such impacts in the intro/conclusion of your thesis. A risk here is that you might end up doing too many things at once, so be careful that you still narrow down your main analysis enough. This, of course, depends entirely on the kind of thesis you are writing.

As for the transcription advice, I couldn’t find Chilton’s notations online, but I have reproduced some of them in the figure in this blogpost: http://www.politicseastasia.com/studying/discourse-analysis-and-foreign-languages/ . As you’ll see, the full list of notations is on page 206 of his book “Analyzing Political Discourse”.

Let me know how your analysis proceeds!

Best – Florian

Hi Danil! Hope you must be fine. Well could you please share some of the work that you have researched with reference to television discourse and also the research proposals and Research Articles/papers that you have in his domain. Because your area of research and my area of research are similar so we may help and support each other. Thanks in Advance

Hi Florian, Firstly, this post on discourse analysis is incredibly helpful so cheers for that! I’m embarking on my MA dissertation and am doing a critical discourse analysis. I’ve focused on one online newspaper and its coverage of immigration, but am feeling overwhelmed by the amount of data generated. I was wondering if you could recommend how many articles to study, as CDA is so intense, would 2 or 3 be ok? Thanks Michele

Hi Michele, I agree that a full discourse analysis of a large number of texts is almost impossible for anything smaller than a research MA or PhD thesis. There are three ways you can still make a contribution in an MA thesis, but without overwhelming yourself. The first is to consciously phase out certain analytic aspects, for instance by choosing to not explore all linguistic features of the texts in detail. In that case, you’ll have to find a good justification for your choices, and should probably point out at the end what follow-up research would now be necessary as a next step. The second option is to chose materials that are particularly representative. If you have evidence that a particular newspaper article kicked off a huge debate, or that a specific policy document is of paramount importance (e.g. a state-of-the-union address, etc.), then you may not need more materials – you should, however, then point out what limitations this particular “window” into the discourse has. Thirdly, you could take a classic hermeneutical approach by starting with one text, qualitatively mapping out the discourse and its features there, and then moving on to a second text, a third text, and so on, until you are no longer finding any major new discursive features. I believe Jäger recommends such an approach. If you narrow your topic down well enough at the outset, you may indeed be in a position to justify using only a handful of texts rather than a large corpus.

Thanks Florian, this is really helpful. I’ve decided to do a general analysis of headlines from one month of the newspaper I’m using, focusing on elements of structural feminism and critical discourse analysis, and then shall do a more detailed breakdown of 3 of the most relevant articles. Do you think that would be okay, as long as my limitations are explicit? Thanks Michele

This sounds very cool – I personally like approaches that take a bird’s-eye view first (through headlines in newspapers, structure of TV series seasons, etc.) and then pick a representative sample for detailed analysis, based on that initial work. This could work nicely. Let me know how it shapes up! Best – F

It’s a good article to teach people how to conduct one discourse analysis. I learn much from it when I designed my research. I just have one question, is it suit for analysing the official documents like rules, laws, regulations etc.? I think it is good for assessing news, but I’m not sure if it can be applied to some official papers.

Discourse analysis can definitely be used on policy documents. It is indeed easier to analyse news articles, since they are often rather explicit about their “discursive position”, but legal texts also appeal to certain categories, draw from assumptions, and establish self-evident truths. The important thing to keep in mind is that a legal document is a specific genre, and that different genre conventions consequently apply. I know Fairclough has looked at official documents, and you’re likely to also find such studies in the established journals as well (e.g. Discourse & Society), so I’d recommend taking a look at such examples for inspiration.

Hi, Florian, Thank you for your suggestion. I have read Media Discourse written by Fairclough. His ‘three-dimensional method of discourse analysis’ is more suitable for my dissertation. I find it’s difficult to apply the theory without any comparison. In addition, due to the translation, I find it’s hard to conduct it to Chinese documents. Could you mind to tell me how you deal with this situation? Thanks a lot!

Translation into different contexts is of course an issue, particularly with the more theoretical aspects of discourse analysis (Fairclough is a good example here). You could check what Chinese authors are writing on the subject. Shi Xu from Hangzhou’s Zhejiang Daxue is a pretty big name in that regard, and he’s been criticizing discourse analysis for being a “Western” method that needs to be revised for use in China. I don’t particularly agree (see my discussion here: http://www.politicseastasia.com/research/fourth-international-conference-on-multicultural-discourse/ ), but as you can see a straight-forward application of Fairclough to a foreign context deserves critical reflection. Maybe Shi’s work, or that of his students, can provide the comparison you are looking for? In addition, I’ve written a bit about how to do a discourse analysis in practice when using foreign scripts, but I’m not sure this answers your question: http://www.politicseastasia.com/studying/discourse-analysis-and-foreign-languages/ .

Sorry for replying late. Thank you so much for providing so many useful resources for my research. I selected English texts as my resources to apply CDA (because I don’t need to translate it).

Many thanks for your suggestions.

Hi Florian, this is a great article, and is one of the first I read that really explains the process clearly. I’m looking for some advice, however, as I’m writing about improving the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and I’ve decided to conduct a discourse analysis on the Treaty, the IAEA statute and political speechs made by America as well as non-Western orgs such as the NAM or the Arab League on the subject, to compare discourse between the two sides and how to bridge the gap. Is this too ambitious? How many documents do you recommend for a decent analysis, and of such variety in genre? Thanks

Dear Louise, This does indeed sound quite ambitious – I assume you are writing an MA thesis? You may want to take a look at my comment above, on Michelle’s project. She had similar concerns about narrowing down her material, and I suggested three different options to her on how to handle that challenge. In your case, you may have to make a choice: you could use one of the two sets of texts (official IAEA documents vs. speeches) as background and the other to do a detailed analysis. For instance, I think doing a discourse analysis on the actual Treaty and the IAEA statutes makes good sense, and should be doable at the MA level. On the other hand, if you want to cover speeches, I would probably recommend taking a quantitative approach first, for instance using WordSmith ( http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/ ) or some similar tool. You could then “zoom in” on specific features of the discourse and discuss those in more detail. Otherwise you might end up with a lot of speeches, particularly on a topic such as this one, that you may not be able to assess in detail at a qualitative level. Unless of course you are doing a PhD, in which case this sounds like the kind of work that would make a good doctoral thesis. I hope this helps! Best Florian

Thanks Florian, I’m looking into WordSmith now. After reading your response for Michele as suggested, would you recommend Fairclough over, say, Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, for such a project? What would you say are the benefits of CDA?

Hi Louise. I’m afraid it’s not all that easy to draw a clear line between different approaches to discourse, such as Foucauldian analysis, CDA (e.g. Fairclough), political discourse analysis (e.g. Chilton), or discourse-historical analysis (e.g. Wodak). They often overlap and draw from each other, and many of the distinctions are subtle theoretical differences (for instance how “constructivist” the respective author is) rather than completely different methodological approaches. For a good introduction of how Fairclough aligns himself with Foucault’s aims, I can recommend this short text: http://bit.ly/1t3Nii7 . To answer your question, I think you could make a distinction at the methodological level between studying 1) primarily and in great detail the linguistic features of a discourse, 2) the socio-historical context of the discourse (and its development over time), and 3) the strategic communication choices and social practices of different actors at a particular point in time (e.g. framing, self-other representations, etc). Most discourse analysts will look at all three, and if you want to read a good article that covers all of these angles for the Scottish case, I can recommend this piece by my colleague Johnny Unger for inspiration: http://bit.ly/1ksxj9v . For an MA thesis I think it would be fair to emphasise one of these levels of analysis, as long as you also acknowledge the others. You could, for instance, provide the socio-historical context in your introduction and could then explore how different actors frame the issue, building in examples from the language as you go along. Your limitations/future research section in the conclusion could then point out how more detailed linguistic analysis and historical tracing of the discourse can shed light on additional questions you have raised in your thesis. Just a thought.

Hi Florian. Thank you very much for putting this website up. I am currently writing a proposal for a PhD dissertation on energy policy formulation and have been wondering about a specific kind of discourse analysis — argumentative discourse analysis (M. Hajer). There seems to be a dearth of resources about it, especially as a method. I surmise that it emphasizes certain dimensions of discourse compared to the “conventional” discourse analysis which generally explores/examines text (linguistic), the rhetorical component, as well as context (socio/historical). I was wondering if you were kind enough to offer suggestions or tips (perhaps even some general “red flags”). Many thanks and more power to you.

Hi Jalton, Sorry for keeping you waiting – you caught me during the Easter break. Thanks for pointing out Hajer’s work, which I think has a lot in common with the issues I’ve discussed here. At the risk of doing his work injustice, it seems his argumentative discourse analysis (ADA) is very much interested in the structure of texts and conversations and in the rhetorical and argumentative strategies that people deploy. For instance, he’d be interested in classic argumentative fallacies such as appeals to authority or begging the question, which I agree are very useful when examining arguments. I particularly like the fact that he places a strong emphasis on how people perform their role in social interactions, which is something my colleagues and I are also interested in. In that sense, I don’t think ADA stands in opposition to other forms of discourse analysis – it simply draws attention to specific aspects of communication and would probably fit very nicely into the “toolbox” I’ve put together above. There are of course also differences, for instance in the way Hajer writes about “discourse coalitions” when talking about groups that share similar discursive positions – a context in which I would probably use a network approach – but these distinctions are rather subtle. I would have to talk to him and his colleagues to see where we potentially disagree. My guess would be that I place a tad more emphasis on agency whereas he might be a bit more interested in structures. At any rate, something I find highly valuable is his definition of “dominant” discourse, which you’ll find here: http://www.maartenhajer.nl/?page_id=14 (under “influence of discourse”). Not sure whether I’ve helped or muddied the waters further… let me know what your PhD research uncovers, and what sort of approach you ended up adopting. The project sounds fascinating. Best – F

Thank you for taking the time to respond. It is very much appreciated. I have taken the time to go through all the “nooks and crannies” of this website and what a rich source of ideas and methods it truly is! I hope that one day, I get to attend one of the conferences and workshops which your organization is organizing (since my other research interest also touches generally on the socio-political dynamics of the digital media, representation vis-a-vis Filipinos/Philippine culture and nationalism). Keep in touch :)

Thanks Jalton, I appreciate the feedback. Hope you’ll get to join us at one of our future events – sounds like your work would fit right in. Let’s do indeed stay in touch!

Dear Florian,

Thank you for the helpful breakdown of such a complex task! I’m also working on a PhD, dealing specifically with larger discourse concepts of nationalism, economic development and globalization in east Asian developmental states (SK, Taiwan, etc.).

I rely heavily on Jessop’s Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approach as well as Fairclough’s CDA, and I would like to investigate the shifting of discourse with concepts such as re-contextualization (such as competitiveness of economies to the concept of national identity, etc.) The problem I have is coding the samples. I have narrowed down my codes but the relation between larger concepts such as discourse of globalization/nationalism and smaller ones [branding as advancing in international division of labor] seem somewhat arbitrary. I know this totally depends on the research question, but how I can I work coherently without becoming muddled with the infinitely interconnection relations between these concepts?

I appreciate your reading this!

Sorry for the late reply, but only just got back from a trip. Getting the amount of work you put in right is indeed a big challenge. I think there’s three things you could do, but I’m not sure how much each option applies to your case. Nevertheless, maybe you’ll find some of these ideas useful: The first is to use “evolutionary” coding to come up with a long and comprehensive list of categories, which you then apply to your materials, but that you don’t necessarily all examine in the thesis. The work might be more arduous now, but if you plan to use the materials after the PhD as well, for follow-up work, then this might be a good option for you. It sounds to me like this is the direction you are already headed in. In the thesis, you can then look at specific discourse strands only, but note that they of course intersect with other issues as well (and point to the appendix for the comprehensive list). Making choices as to what is most important is part of a PhD project, so I doubt anyone would fault you for not covering every conceivable discursive connection. The second option would be to come up with a two-step coding process: the first part would work at the macro-level, and would use units of your materials that are fairly large (so: full texts, full pages, or at the very least full paragraphs). You can create a table and then list all the relevant units, followed by all the various codes you have decided to use for that section, and maybe also deploy quantitative tools to then help you get a grasp of that material. The second step would then be to select segments from that first “bird’s-eye-view” step that are particularly important to your project, and to go in and do the detailed coding and qualitative analysis there. The third option would be to state at the start that you are only interested in two or three main concepts, and to radically narrow down your set of categories. Whether or not this is feasible (and to what extent it is advisable) is something I can’t comment on, but a decision you would have to make together with your supervisor, based on your materials.

Sorry for not having better advice – this is a very difficult question. Let me know how you decided, and how the project worked out!

This brilliant! While many say there is no set of methods in DA, this gives us a great starting point to assess and use on our specific studies. Thanks a million, you have summed up hours of reading!!

Dear Florian, I found these information very very important.I’m doing a phd on disasrer communication. I’m looking at how communication channels,specially social media have been used to build community resilience to natural disasters. I wish to do a discourse analysis on interview data, with disaster managers and communication managers. This is a comparative study about Sri Lanka and New Zealand. I think this data analysis method fits with my objective, I need to see how the meaning of being resilient is build through the communication channels in these two countries. I appreciate your thought.

Dear Gayadini, sounds like a great project. I particularly like that you’ll be checking up on “resilience” discourses. I would keep my eyes open for concepts that your interviewees link to that idea, and for the argumentative strategies they use to make sense of disasters and (personal) responsibilities. To me, the whole “resilience” story is decidedly neo-liberal, since it transfers the burden of being prepared for risks and reacting to crises to local communities, households, or individuals. Would be fascinating to see whether this impression holds in the two cases, and what the nuanced variations might be.

Coincidentally, my colleague and I have just published an article on PRC disaster discourses in the Journal of Contemporary China (2014, vol.23/88). The study is not a linguistic discourse analysis, and does not examine resilience, but it looks at visual discourses in official and popular culture, which might nevertheless be interesting for you: http://bit.ly/1mO2gsi . All the best – F

Dear Florian, Thank you so much for your helpful article, if before I had only confusion in my head now is everything clear!Now I have a start point. I am dealing with my MA thesis on discourse analysis, more specifically discrimination in discourse about Romanian people in an Italian newspaper I’ve chosen. Till now I have 9 articles, I guess is too much; last Thursday I had a presentation with my two supervisors and they told me I’ve done too much linguistic analysis, and I shall focus more on microparts that I consider extremely important and proceed with the discouse analysis supported of course by the linguistical analysis. The problem is that there is no direct discrimination against Romanians expressed in the articles I’ve chosen and they told me I shall focus on the suggestions and inferences that come from the report, the ones I understand the journalist is reporting, or is in some way influenced by others/society/rules of the newspaper, somehow what shall I do is to read between the lines. Do you think I can apply your whole explanation from above to my case? I have difficulties dealing with this. They told me that even if I don’t prove at the end the Romanians are discriminated in that newspaper (it may be possible to prove or it may be not) it is sufficient for the requirements of the MA to know how to handle with discourse analysis. Do you have any suggestion to tell me how to deal with this? Do you think 3 or 4 articles would be enough for 100-120 pages?

Thank you and greetings from Denmark!

Dear Daniela,

I am not particularly familiar with the MA regulations in Denmark, but I would say that following a supervisor’s advice is always a good call. For an MA thesis, I can completely understand that they want you to contextualize your sources in wider social practices, and that providing a few key examples at the linguistic level is sufficient. Personally, I am satisfied when students demonstrate that they can pose a clever question, select materials that promise to address that question, and then try to use an academic method on those materials. If the results don’t cover the whole issue in all its complexity, that is usually quite alright, particularly if the thesis recognizes these shortcomings and can give suggestions for further study. You are, after all, not writing a PhD thesis…

Take a look at my discussion above with Louise and with Mihn – they had similar concerns about the scope that a discourse analysis at that level can realistically cover.

What I would probably do in your case is take all nine articles and go through them rather coarsely, noting the main themes that characterize that particular debate. I would then go back to particularly representative or simply very noteworthy examples to show how these features manifest themselves in the language and the argumentative strategies, but I would state clearly that your goal is not to conduct a full linguistic discourse analysis (…something that future research could explore in more detail). I would then focus on the image of Romanians that gets constructed in the articles, and the social/production context within which the articles make their case. If you end up finding that there is no stereotyping in your materials, that is in itself also a finding.

Hope this helps! Good luck with the thesis. Regards – F

Dear Florian! Sorry to disturb you again but its really important to share it with you. Please also guide me I want to present my Research paper on discourse analysis. S if you could find some platform like national or international conferences i would love to present there.

Thanks you very much in advance

Dear Florian, Thank you so much for your detailed answer! I will definitely follow your suggestion! I really appreciate the help you offer within this blog! Best regards, Daniela

I have to say your article is very enlightening. I am required to do genre and register analysis (Tenor, Field, Mode) as part of my MA (Linguistics and Translation). We call this source text (ST) analysis and we are required to carry it out before translating the ST. To be honest with you, I am only doing this analysis as it is an essential part of the end of the year project as translation theories and register analysis are completely useless when it comes to the actual act of translating. This is why I fail to see the point behind engaging in such an activity. However, after reading your article and watching the introduction, I am beginning to understand the idea behind DA. How does register analysis fit in DA? Is it possible to analyse register without doing the whole shebang (DA)?

You said in your article that ‘Passive phrases and impersonal chains of nouns are a common way to obscure relationships behind the text and shirk responsibility’. How is one supposed to know these analytical clichés? My analysis might lead me to find many passive phrases but I would never be able to make the connection you made. Why is it so difficult to find actual lengthy examples of discourse analysis?

Many thanks in advance Florian. Alex

Dear Alex, I think it makes good sense to consider register when analysing discourse, particularly where speakers (or writers) shift the level of formality they use in order to cater to different audiences. But it would very much depend on the case and the research question. If you are looking only for this particular element in a discourse, I could completely understand if you excluded many (or even all) of the steps I’ve outlined above. You would basically be looking specifically for contractions, elliptical phrases, etc. to draw your conclusions. As always with discourse analysis, I would only use the tools that help you do that, and would exclude the others. As for the conclusions that are worth drawing from language use, this is very much a matter of context. For instance, not every passive phrase obscures who the actors are in a sentence, but it isn’t far fetched to conclude that a text that painstakingly omits any reference to agents creates a certain impression of how the issue at hand works. I would always check what a particular linguistic choice achieves in a particular setting. As for good examples of discourse analysis, my personal favorite is the German book I reference above (by Siegfried Jäger), but there are plenty of good examples in English as well. Fairclough’s collection of essays is a classic, and it does include a few practical chapters. You could also check the journals Discourse & Society and Discourse & Communication – as with all academic journals, you’ll get a mixed batch of articles, but some of those analyses might serve as inspiration. The editor Teun van Dijk also has a website that includes additional resources: http://www.discourses.org/ . Hope this helps! All the best Florian

Its an amazing article in breaking down the complex process of DA into tangible doable steps. I came across it while trying to figure out how to do a CDA of news interviews televised during prime time on news channels, im recording from public and private channels in the Pakistani context. I had set out thinking initially when I developed my PhD proposal, that I would do an analysis of how the presenter/ anchor of the political talk show (I term it a talk show due to the infortainment aspect of these televised political interviews) frames the topic in the initial opening and check the closings to see if he maintained his original idea about the topic or the course of the debate or discussion. later one of the experts from the field suggested I need to see what patterns of control are exhibited in the intervening part as well.

Now that I’m recording the actual shows I’m confused and want to fine tune my focus, but there is just too much going on that i want to look into and at the proposal stage i made such wide ranging questions that I’m at sea with my analysis. where to begin? how to begin? Your suggestions seem so interesting. I was wondering what kind of suggestions you would give somebody who had thought at the proposal level that they had everything down and figures and now find that all aspects need to be re-thought.

Thanks for your article once again and thanks for any suggestions you might give to me.

Warm Regards Saira

Dear Saira, I think it is quite normal that a project changes between the early proposal stage and the actual analysis. In fact, that is a good sign: it shows that your analysis of the materials is defying many of the assumptions you and others previously had, and that this now necessitates difficult re-thinking of the topic. Personally, I would always try to start by structuring my materials at a “macro” level, for instance by looking at the different elements that a talk show uses. I would then try to figure out what features are particularly prominent in each element, and I would then build my methodology based on that. So, for instance, if recurring elements of the show are videos that introduce the guests, then I would think about doing shot-by-shot analyses of various such videos. If there are talk rounds in which a host moderates a discussion, I would take a look at how the host frames that discussion, and how he or she intervenes to guide the discourse in certain directions. These are just examples, of course, but maybe they already help a little bit. Again, I don’t think that re-working your research approach in light of the materials is a weakness – if you are open about that process (and, ideally, write a research protocol to keep track of how your choices evolved throughout the project), then it can very much be a strength. It shows that you are doing your job. All the best Florian

Hi Saira! Hope you must be fine. Well could you please share some of the work that you have researched with reference to television discourse and also the research proposals and Research Articles/papers that you have in his domain. Because your area of research and my area of research are similar so we may help and support each other. Thanks in Advance

I needed to thank you for this good read!! I definitely loved every bit of it. I have you saved as a favorite to look at new things you post…

loads of thanks :)

I have been reading the various links on Discourse Analysis that you have put together in your website, and they are awesomely helpful! I am in research of help and guidance because I intend to pursue a PhD on Linguistics, and I plan to focus on sociolinguistics, pariculary DA.

Right now in my country, the Philippines, there is much excitement, drama, action going on in our politics, with some of our Senators, who previously were showbiz actors, are being jailed and surrendering themselves due to plunder, and all sorts of corruption. I don’t know but I am appalled by all these political happenings in my country for the last few months and the recent years. ( I have been away since May 2012.)

I plan to use the online posts articles of the ABS-CBN, a major TV network, and the online version of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, a top national broadsheet, as a source for my discursive statements, and the “surrender” of Senator Bong Revilla last week as the discursive event. All these lead to the Napoles scam, which I think is an octopus of controversy besetting my beloved country.

In relation to work, another idea I have in mind is DA as applied to Tourism… Macau, as they say, is the Las Vegas of Asia, and there many interesting things going on here too in terms of tourism. That is the area I might be really see relevance, because in terms of Macau politics, I am not well-versed as I have just settled here during the Chinese New Year. I have an interest on this topic because I teach in a tertiary school offering solely tourism courses.

I would need your opinion about this and your advice on how to go about my Preliminary Proposal, as this is the requirement for admission to a graduate school I have chosen in Hong Kong (I teach here in Macau).

Do you think one of these will be interesting topic for a PhD study?

I hope this is not too much to ask, but your thoughts on my query are highly appreciated.

Thank you and keep up the good job you are doing! These are immensely valuable!

Best regards, Chloe

Dear Chloe,

Both of these topics sound doable, and I’m sure each would make for a good PhD thesis. I could imagine that the Philippine politics topic would be more timely, and you clearly already have thought about the methodology and your sources. It looks to me like this is a project you can easily write up in about 2000 words. The main challenge will be to stay as unbiased as possible. One of the reasons I don’t research German politics, for instance, is that I am not confident I would be able to keep my personal views out of my analysis. On the other hand, who would be more qualified to take apart the recent developments in the Philippines than someone who knows the country intimately but is now studying it from a distance? This could work very well. (…one other thought: have you considered looking into social media discourses on the subject? would be interesting to see how the discourse plays out beyond the official broadsheets and TV channels). As for the Macau topic, if you decided to go this way, you could interview officials from the tourism board as well as professionals in the industry to see how they market Macau as a brand. Those interviews, together with promotional materials (videos, web content, etc.), would make for a great set of sources that you could conduct a discourse analysis on. Hope this makes sense. Good luck with the project!

This is very nice. But is there any way I can ask for an example of this steps? :) Thank you.

You’re right, it would be nice to provide more examples. Sadly, I don’t have anything concise available at the moment. I’ll keep my eyes open. For now, my advice would be to look at some of the leading journals in the field and see what inspiration you might get from their articles. Discourse & Society and Discourse & Communication are two of the most famous outlets.

This is a great article. I don’t study linguistics myself but this was still helpful in getting an understanding of DA.

My wife is currently struggling with coming up with a topic for her term paper using Critical Discourse Analysis, she wanted to do an analysis on the strife in Palestine but doesn’t know where to start. I will have her read over this article and hopefully it will be helpful for her. My main issue is that I would like to be able to offer her some assistance so I’m doing research on how CDA works.

If at all possible, could you explain how one should go about analyzing online news articles which cover the war; and possibly where the best sources could be for this material.

Also any examples of work done by you or others on similar topics would be greatly appreciated.

I look forward to your response as soon as possible as her paper is due on the 29th of july, its only 12 pages so a couple days of works is all that’s necessary for the write up but the information gathering is where the real problem lies.

Thanks again

Thanks for your questions! I just saw your wife’s deadline is tomorrow – sorry for the late reply, but I’m abroad on research at the moment and don’t always see the notifications on time. I don’t have any good advice on where to find news articles on Palestine, since I myself am not working on issues in the Middle East, but I would always recommend also looking at the medium itself alongside the actual (often written) discourse. There’s an interesting paper on how to analyse websites that I would normally have recommended (I was thinking of John Knox’s 2009 paper “Punctuating the Home Page: Image as Language in an Online Newspaper”, which appeared in Discourse & Communication 3/2, 145-172), but it’s probably a bit late for that. I hope the paper goes well!

I am struggling with my Master thesis on the discrimination of Romanians in an Italian newspaper. I’ve found a very interesting article, but is mainly an interview, and the interesting discourses to analyze are expressed not by the journalist who asks the questions, but by the head of the police, in direct reported speech. How can I carry out the analysis on an interview if the journalist is not so present? thank a lot!

hello Florian, your article was so enriching. I am presently working on my MA dissertation and the topic is A discourse analysis of language use on social media. I actually want to concentrate on facebook, could you tell me on how exactly to go about it. Thanks as i anticipate your favourable response

Hi Esther, Studying Facebook is a difficult subject, since the functioning of social media brings with it all sorts of analytic and ethical questions. For instance, you’ll have to justify which FB pages you’ll be analysing and why. If you use the posts of people you have “friended”, then this raises ethical questions about their consent. If you use FB feeds from official institutions or enterprises, you can side-step that problem, but you’ll still have to justify your choices, of course. Then there’s the question whether you are focusing first and foremost on language use or whether you are willing to take into account the specifics of the medium. For instance, does your analysis look at “likes” and “shares”? Does it take into account what appears on someone’s wall and why? These may seem like trivial issues, but things gets complicated (and often quite technical) very quickly when you ask how the technical features of FB or the various social linkages of users or FB’s largely invisible algorithms end up shaping discussions. I don’t have good answers for how to deal with these issues, but you might want to take a closer look at the research that scholars are currently doing on FB and other social media. Good sources for this are the academic journals New Media & Society as well as Information, Communication & Society. I hope this helps! Good luck with the project.

Thanks for such a practical and helpful guide. But sir, are these linguistic and rhetoric mechanisms all that one needs in doing a Critical Discourse Analysis of texts also (say a religious or political text)? If no, please what are the linguistic and IDEOLOGICAL devices one needs to do a CDA analysis of political interviews in particular, especially using Fairclough’s approach?

Dear Amuuts, thanks for the kind words. As for your question, I wonder whether I understand you correctly: you are asking how to move beyond the linguistic and rhetorical features of texts and explore how they tie in with broader worldviews, right? The reason I ask is because the term “ideology” gets interpreted in vastly different ways. Fairclough is fairly Marxist about his use of the term (so he sees ideology as false knowledge), but other scholars at times use ideology either as a synonym with discourse or to signify a systematic framework of thought, carried by discourse (I would subscribe to that last definition). Either way, exploring the ideologies that communication practices relay is a core part of discourse analysis. So to explore the ideologies that get promoted through a text like a speech, you could isolate all statements on a specific subject, check whether they are part of a system of interlocking assumptions or beliefs, and then see whose interests these assumptions serve. It would also make sense to compare such statements to those in other sources, to see whether a speech perpetuates a particular ideological view (e.g. neo-liberalism or socialism). More generally, I would first recommend taking a look at the scholarship on ideology and to define what you mean by the term (and how you think ideology connects with discourse). Good sources for this are Terry Eagleton’s book ‘Ideology: An Introduction’ and Raymond Geuss’ ‘The Idea of a Critical Theory’, just FYI.

Thanks for your prompt response sir. But to be more specific, my research has to do with “Ideological Projection in media interviews with selected political party leaders” and I intend using Fairclough’s cda approach as my theoretical framework. My confusion now is that I’m not clear with Fairclough’s analytical tools (the ideological devices in the interviews) like the way van Dijk has listed his in several materials I have consulted. could you please help to itemise Fairclough’s analytical tools or would you advice I change my intended framework?

Dear Amuuts, I’m afraid I can’t help you itemize Fairclough’s analytical tools. You would have to get in touch with him. The reason I drew up the steps for this article was that I felt many CDA frameworks were not very explicit on what practical work steps they would recommend to study a text. This, to some extent, also goes for Fairclough, if you ask me. If going over Fairclough’s work does not answer your questions, then it might indeed be better drawing from someone else’s writings, or coming up with your own tools.

Hi Ammuts! Hope you must be fine. Well could you please share some of the work that you have researched with reference to television discourse and also the research proposals and Research Articles/papers that you have in this domain. Because your area of research and my area of research are similar so we may help and support each other. Thanks in Advance

It is really concise and useful. Thanks a lot!

dear,i find ur work fairly impressive and helpful.my research topic is ‘influence of cartoons on children’a critical discourse analysis from fairclough’s perspective.the main areas of investigation will be power relations,culture,violence,sexuality and other themes other than gender roles..kindly help me with useful tips

Hi, what’s the difference between this and a Critical Discourse Analysis?

Thanks, it’s been really useful, and thankyou for the advice for using Tagxedo,

Thank you for taking the time to do this and for sharing it publicly. As a distance MA student with no prior knowledge about CDA or guidance on my degree program, this is like discovering gold. It gives me a sense of direction that Fairclough’s texts do not offer, but can certainly be adapted to work around.

Great effort, really informative. I have been reading about DA for monthes. Books, papers, attending courses…etc. I understand the concept and the theoretical debates, but couldn’t find any sufficient guid to explictly declare a step by step approach! Thank you very much.

Thanks Florian. You are an angel. God bless!

[…] can move on to analyse your data in earnest. If you need tips on how to do this, take a look at the ten work steps I […]

Hi Florian, I am linguist used to analyze Classical Chinese Texts in terms of syntax and phonology, but I am now co-teaching a course on Critical Discourse Analysis at the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong and I would like to lead my students in conducting analyses of the media discourse about Occupy Central and related issues (opinions about police violence, disruption of public order etc). Op-eds in the South China Morning Posts are an easy start, but I would be interested to cover cantonese newspapers. My students told me that, for example, now most of the pro-occupy central talk in mainstream chinese-language newspapers (except for the pro-occupy Apple Daily) takes place in the sport sections. Would you have any practical suggestions, beyond the ones you gave in the main section, about features that might be different in analyzing Chinese rather than English texts? Many thanks for your very effective summary and best regards Marco

Great subject. Have you had a chance to look at this post on discourse analysis and foreign languages ( http://www.politicseastasia.com/studying/discourse-analysis-and-foreign-languages/ )? Aside from the more generic things I have tried to collect there, on this topic I would look at the structure of the text and the way papers employ vague phrases to remain ambiguous (the gritty opinions are usually packaged between intros and conclusions full of standardized phrases, and they are rarely concrete – lots of metaphors and analogies, in my experience). You could also let students look at word-groups and their connotations – particularly the nouns, considering how common noun-phrases are in Chinese. Just a few thoughts. Hope this helps – have fun with this topic! Very exciting.

Dear Florian, many thanks for the suggestions! Yes, I had a look at the post on discourse analysis and foreign languages, I just needed something more specific to get started. If enough students will be motivated to pursue this topic, we might present something at the Hong Kong Linguistics Forum this December, and have more questions in the process- I’ll keep you updated. Best Marco

Thanks for this! A great how-to guide for students! Well done!

Cheers, Todd

Thanks Todd, that’s very kind. :)

thanks for ur teachings,what if am doing a reseach on newspaper’s language?

Hi Andrew. Most of what I’ve included here can also be used on newspaper texts. If you want to read a book specifically about newspaper analysis, though, I’d check Richardson’s work: http://www.amazon.com/Analysing-Newspapers-Approach-Critical-Discourse/dp/1403935653 . Hope this helps!

Hi, can anyone help me or advise me how to answer this question please? is compute based analysis of texts and discourse a help or a hindrance? I very appreciate your time and effort. Thanks

I don’t think any methods is ever really a “hindrance”, but whether something is useful or not depends on what questions you want to answer. For qualitative issues, like the rhetorical strategies in a particular speech or publication, you probably won’t need computational approaches. But when you are examining large amounts of texts, and when you want to see how words or word categories play out quantitatively, computational methods can be a big help. I would always suggest considering a mix of methods that fits your project, for instance using computational corpus analysis to get a bird’s-eye view of your sources and then deploying qualitative methods to explore detailed examples.

can somebody tell me how can discourse analysis and sociolinguistics work together towards language power?

Hi Florian It is a great work by you, i regret i found it only now. i am working on CDA and violence against women. your post is very useful Thank you

Glad to hear it, thanks Radha.

Thnx for a very enlightening explanation. I’m thinking of analysing newspapers headlines in relation to a specific event to examine the ideology of the newspapers. I understood that CDA is in a way a must for that topic. Now I have 3 theories that I can’t make up my mind which is better: Fairclough, van Dijk and richardson. Can u advise me which one would be the best? I appreciate ur help.

Hi Dalia, thanks for the question. Do you think the three theories would have to be mutually exclusive? If you had to pick one author, I’d probably say focus on Richardson, considering your focus on newspapers. That said, Fairclough’s Marxist take, van Dijk’s strong empirical work, and Richardson’s concern about news media could potentially be connected. I would definitely mention all three in your write-up of the project, to be honest.

this will be so helpful with my course work and dissertation topic. I would need some advice on how to code my dissertation, I want to analyse UK and US newspaper to find out if their reports on Ebola in Africa were factual or was geared towards scaremongering. I would be grateful if you could contact me my email so I share with you the details and get your opinion on my work. Thank you

Beste heer,

Hartelijk bedankt voor uw artikel, ik had nooit beter kunnen vinden wat discoursanalyse betreft! U redt a.h.w een studente in nood.

Laat ik me even voorstellen: ik ben studente aan de Vrije Universiteit Brussel, departement Toegepaste Taalkunde. Dit academiejaar schrijf ik mijn bachelorproef over de openbare toespraken van Benito Mussolini. Ik beperk me tot vier toespraken, omdat ik daarvan ook en vertaling maak. Het is dan uiteraard de bedoeling dat ik hiervan ook en grondige analyse maak, die ik zonder dit artikel waarschijnlijk nooit tot een goed einde zou kunnen brengen.

Vriendelijke groeten, Tatiana

Dear Tatiana, Briefly in English: thanks for your comment. I’m very glad that these materials helped you. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that the BA thesis works out well! Sounds like a great topic. All the best Florian

Hi Dear Folrian, I would wonder if the feasibility-non-feasibility discourses of Eclectic CDA theories (frameworks/models)-blended from Fairclough, Chilton, Wodak, van Dijk, van Leeuwen, Foucault, etc. are applicable. I mean, is it applicable to use blended CDA in analysing hegemonic contestations and balance-equipoise for history texts? Alelign A.

Hi Alelign, If I understand you correctly, you are wondering whether it’s alright to mix different approaches to discourse analysis in order to figure out how domination and resistance work in history texts, right? If that’s the case, then I don’t see why not. I’m very much in favor of being eclectic. After all, what matters is the questions you have. Which specific approaches to draw from to get your answers should then always follow from those questions. Also, there is a lot that the authors you mention have in common, which means you have a rich set of sources to draw from if you want to get a handle on your topic. Best – Florian

Could you explain form me more about MEDIUM ? please.

Hi Lamia, I’m not sure I understand your question. Are you asking how to figure out whether a discourse is affected by the type of medium it is communicated in? When I use the word medium above, what I mean is the “container” or “conduit” through which a message gets communicated. Your television is a medium, as is a newspaper. One important question to keep in mind is how the things that are being communicated might rely on the specifics of the medium. If I broadcast a message on TV, I can use very different communication strategies than if I write the same message down. I’ll be able to combine sound, images, and spoken words, for example. If I use the medium of the newspaper, I can use different scripts, different headers, and the layout of the page to add meaning to the written word. So an important work step is to ask: how does a specific text use the affordances of its medium to get a point across? That’s what I have in mind above when I mention McLuhan. If you are interested in such debates about how the medium matters to the message (or how the medium might even be more important than the message), you might want to check out McLuhan’s work. I can also recommend Noel Carroll’s book “The Philosophy of Mass Art” or Friedrich Kittler’s “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter” (the latter is not easy to ready, though). I hope this answers your question. Best Florian

Dear Florian, Thank you so much for this material. It is very helpful. My background is not much of language but I plan to use Discourse to analyse my research work which is about the rhetoric of ‘Transformation Agenda’ used by my country’s party in government. The party uses it as a political programme for developing the country. Just like Obama would say ‘Change’ for instance. Just trying to figure out how my research question will sound like.

Hey Desmond, This sounds like a good starting point. In fact, the idea of change could potentially become the basis for your coding strategy: you could try to isolate the various statements that the government makes regarding change, and you could then examine in detail how the speakers/writers conceptualize “transformation”. I suspect it might be interesting to then ask how such a concept relates to views of “modernity”, particularly to ideas of “progress”, but you’ll of course have to decide what makes sense, based on your sources. All the best of success with this exciting project! Florian

dear sir, firstly I thank you so much for this fine material for students like us. secondly, i want to inquire about CDA on web newa. i want to do MA thesis on BBC website news articles about the particular case of War on terror, Women rights and politics in Pakistan. how many topics should I choose among the three?how many articles should I work? and how should i apply CDA on the selected news articles and their headlines? regards!

Hi David, This is a pretty big question. I’m not sure I can answer all of it, and I would definitely recommend you talk to your supervisor about what he or she thinks is sufficient for your specific degree requirements. I think that analyzing BBC web news would make for a good study, provided you are able to justify why you are picking the BBC (as apposed to any other major news service). Your study will, effectively, be a study of BBC reporting – which is interesting, but which won’t allow you to generalize too much (e.g. what UK news is generally like, or even what all English-language news on these subjects are like). As long as this is clear, you could potentially have a strong case here. I would, however, limit an MA thesis to one topic. Three different issues seems like a lot, and such an approach would probably be more appropriate for a PhD. I would narrow down what you are looking at and pick only one theme. I would also decide on a time frame, so that you are not swamped with articles. If you had to look at all BBC news articles on the “War on Terror”, for example, I imagine you would only be able to get a grip of the sources using quantitative methods like corpus analysis. Depending on what you want to look at, less could very well be more. At any rate, examining the headlines is surely a good start, but I would also look at the structure of the various texts, as well as detailed statements that get made on specific (sub)topics. Also, it might be good to check what images accompany the texts. Just a thought. I hope these comments are useful, even if they are admittedly rather cursory. Do make sure to check with your supervisor to clarify what makes sense for your specific project. Best Florian

Dear Florian, It is very lucky to meet you and your website when I considering to start the discourse analysis assignment. I am a Chinese student who is currently studying in UK, to be honest, I have studied and reviewed all kinds of article concerning the CDA for several days, but until now, I am still have no idea what is discourse analysis and the purpose of the analysis. I was trying to follow the steps you summaried for beginer, but I just could not decided what should I write and what contents should be included in my article. I do not know whether it is because Chinese and western mindset are different. Moreover, often I found myself could not follow and understand what the author trying to say in the English artile (even 8.0 in reading in my IELTS test). I guess it is the main reason for spending several days in reading but no determination yet. My assignment requires 3500 words, I do not worry too much if I get started, but I just do not know how to start. I guess it would be much helpful if I could read some short examples of this kinds of article. Forgive me if my wrtting cofused you, i hope you could understand my meaning. Writting in English and English thinking is really a headache for me…….Help me. Thank you. Merry Xmas and Happy New Year!

Cheers, Long

Hi Long, I sympathize with how difficult it is to get a hang of discourse analysis. It’s already hard for native speakers, but having to do all this in a foreign language is a daunting task. I don’t have a lot of good advice, other than to check what analysts have done in your own language. I can recommend the colleagues at Zhejiang University. Shi Xu, for example, has been doing some great work there, and some of the analyses he and his colleagues have published are in Chinese. Take a look at his website: http://www.shixu.com/# . I hope you’ll find what you are looking for there. In addition, you could also look at some of the journals in the CNKI database. There should be quite a lot on 话语研究. Also, on the more general side, Oxford University Press’ “Foucault – A Very Short Introduction” has been translated into Chinese. Might be worth checking out, if only to get a grasp of the basic premises. I hope this helps! All the best Florian

Dear Florian, thank you very much for all the help. I will read more articles to further deepen my understanding on discourse analysis. At the moment, I am thinking to analyze a recent XI Jinping’s speech during a national event, by using the rhetoric theory and analyze the use of ethos(do not clear about yet), pathos (use of certain “we” “Chinese people” pronouns, and words that emboies the aspiration and sympathy) and logos (argumentaiton, claims and historical data) in that speech. Is it a discourse analysis? One of the marking criteria is we should have clear theory framework and methodology, can I say the Aristotle’s rhetoric theory is my framework? I was get the idea from another english article who analyzed Obama and G. Bush’s speech, and i believe it will be safe for me to follow their method to analyze my own data. I will not copy the words, but the idea and the way of their analysis. I am not sure whether this is a cheating/plagiarism. Your help would be highly appreciated if you could give me any comments on my this tentative thoughts. thank you. Cheers.

I am also international student in the UK and I also have a discourse analysis assignment. I am really struggling with writing this essay please if you have found any good articles or advice help me please

Hi Long, A bit of a late reply, but I hope it’s still useful: what you describe sounds very doable, though you should probably justify why you think Aristotle’s rhetoric theory applies to a cultural context that has a different tradition of political communication (it should be possible to make your case, for instance if you can argue that a particular model of rhetoric has become ubiquitous as an outcome of globalization, or if you want to make the case that what Aristotle described somehow tapped into the universality of certain human communication patterns). As for using someone else’s methods, that is perfectly alright, but you need to point this out and reference the work. Once you do that (and as long as you mark all original text as proper quotes) you are in no danger of plagiarizing. As for your other comment on translation, you should of course provide your readers with translated fragments of the speech, particularly of the parts that you use to make your case, but it is important to analyse the original phrasing. Once you translate, the text becomes your work, not that of Xi Jinping. Hope this helps. Best Florian

Hi Florian, almost finished my assignment on CDA, just come to say thank you! All the best! Long

By the way, it seems there is no official English translation for this speech yet. Is it OK if I translate by myself and then analyze the English version?

Hello Florian, Thank you very much for this fruitful articles. I am now working on Micheal Foucault Archaeology of Knowledge, especially focus on theory of statements. I do want to ask you a question and learn your opinions. How do you think Foucault theory/concept of statements contribute to political discourse analysis. In what respect do you believe that it is useful in political discourse analysis. That would be very nice if you can shortly share your opinions with key points. Thank you in advance.

Sorry for only replying this late, but you’ve raised a very big question, and I had to re-read some of the Archaeology of Knowledge to see if I can answer it. I’ll try to do so briefly (at the risk of massive oversimplification – the “Archaeology” is, after all, quite a dense work). If I understand Foucault correctly, in its most simple definition, a “statement” is anything that someone says or writes, or as he puts it: “the atom of discourse” (so in a sense: what I’ve called “discourse fragment” above). More specifically, it is a preposition, composed of signs, that allows a subject to establish a position in a broader social context. And this focus on context is where Foucault’s view is interesting: a “statement” is always intertextual. It emerges from and relates to other statements. This interpretation, at least in my understanding, is also the argument that informs the idea of statements in CDA or in political discourse analysis (though Chilton adds a cognitive science angle that is not explicit in Foucault’s work). So, to be honest, I don’t see any contradiction between Foucault’s arguments and the premises of political discourse analysis. Did this answer your question? I should also point out that while the “Archaeology of Knowledge” is strongly about intertextuality, it is only in his later work that Foucault explicitly discusses intersubjectivity. In “Archaeology”, he is still flirting quite a bit with structuralism. Only later does his focus shift from 1) how subjects use the resources of discourse to make statements to 2) how statements also shape subjects. If you are interested in this shift, I can recommend the book by Dreyfus & Rabinow that I’ve referenced in this post: http://www.politicseastasia.com/studying/getting-the-hang-of-discourse-theory/ . Let me know how your work on the “Archaeology of Knowledge” turns out. All the best Florian

Hello Florian, First of all, thank you very much to spending time in answering my question. I really appreciate your effort. I have completed my article, and the answer to this question is that yes !! AK can be useful in analysis of political discourse, but !! it should never be taken as a free-standing approach. Therefore, it should be translated into an appropriate form to provide a theoretical and methodological tools. As he stated: “All my books . . . are little tool boxes . . . if people want to open them, to use this sentence or that idea as a screwdriver or spanner to short-circuit, discredit or smash systems of power, including eventually those from which my books have emerged . . . so much the better”(Cited in Mills, 1997, p.17). Therefore, Foucaultian discourse analysis is not a theoretically informed “attitude” or just another “perspective” in the area of qualitative social research (Diaz-Bone et al, 2007, p.28). Hence, Foucault’s archaeological tools all together constituted a new arsenal for the social scientist who can use these in line with research needs and objectives. Besides giving us a critical line, his project also make new proposals (MacDonnell, 1986, p.83). Therefore, despite some theoretical limitations, a closer look at his work, can lead to the formulation of first steps towards a productive approach of examining political discourses.

Therefore, the AK with its theory of statements and its contribution is perhaps less to be evaluated in terms of the answers that they offer but rather their potential to be a productive and rich `tool box` to find answers in political discourse. Accordingly, one of the important consequences of Foucault’s archaeology of discourse is to put forward a means of analyzing political discourse (Howarth, 2000, p.55, my emphasis). However, to understand this contribution, as you also mentioned, it is important to trace his shift from archaeology to genealogy to assess the effectiveness of this methodology in analyzing the political discourse. For example, the notion of Problematization, as Wolf postulates, in particular, maintains important insights from archaeology for the analysis of political discourse and formations (Wolf,2013,p.39). Therefore, the aim of his archaeology of ‘political knowledge’ is ‘to show whether the political behavior of a society, a group, or a class is not shot through with particular, describable discursive practice (Foucault, 1972, p.194, cited in Howarth, 2000, p.60). This according to Howarth, this necessitates exploring the way in which the objects, enunciative modalities, concepts, strategies of “political activity” are discursively constructed, and then articulated with specific forms of political ‘behaviour, conflicts, decisions, and tactics) (2000,p.60). Therefore, although AK itself is not enough to analyze the political discourse, when it is combined with other tools it does provide a good way of analyzing political discourses.

• Mills, S ( Michel Foucault. Routledge, London, UK and New York, NY, 2003. • Diaz-Bone, R., Bührmann, A.,D.; Gutiérrez R., E.; Schneider, W.; Kendall, G. and Tirado, F. (2007). The Field of Foucaultian Discourse Analysis: Structures, Developments and Perspectives [52 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 8(2), Art. 30, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0702305 • Howarth D. (2000) `Discourse`, Buckingham: Open University Press • Howarth D. (2002) ‘An Archaeology of Political Discourse? Michel Foucault and the Critique of Ideology’, Political Studies, (2002), Vol. 50, No. 1, pp. 117-35. • Macdonell, D. (1986) Theories of Discourse, Blackwell, Oxford. • Dreyfus, H., and Rabinow, P. (1983). Michel Foucault : beyond structuralism and hermeneutics with an afterword by and an interview with Michel Foucault (2nd edition). Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, and the resources you’ve been working with. I think we have a very similar view on how Foucault “plugs into” recent approaches to discourse analysis (…the “toolbox” idea probably gave me away…). Glad to see AK was a rewarding study for you. It really is a very rich and thought-provoking piece of literature.

Thank you Florian, your blog is really very helpful. Best wishes.

Hello Florian, hope you are OK. I was going to ask you a specific question regarding to discourse analysis. I was planing to study a specific ethnic conflict in a particular country by the help of official documents. And my theoretical framework was Foucault’s Archaeology. Basically, I was going to determine the rules of formation of discourses of this specific ethnic conflict and try to show how it has been problematized over the years. However, when I reviewed the literature, I realized that there is too much emphasize on official documents and official discourses. Then I asked myself, social media is full of unofficial discourses in which similar elements of the conflict have been articulated in different ways. After thinking for a while, I thought there might be several methodological difficulties in studying this conflict with the help of discourse analysis and using social media data. What is your opinion? and could you please help/direct me in finding some useful studies in which this way has been conducted? do you think is it feasible? can internal and external validity be achieved ?

Hi Marx. I see what you mean, regarding the bias towards “official” sources, and I sympathize with any attempt to bring in other “layers” of discourse. Social media is indeed a very promising avenue, but as you say exploring such online discourses poses certain methodological challenges. The first problem is that if you are looking at discussions in networks like Facebook, then you would need access and consent to study people’s posts – they are, after all, not necessarily public (there is a great paper on the ethical problems of this sort of research that I can recommend: http://bit.ly/1F2A8ID ). A way around this is to only examine Facebook data on the walls of organizations, e.g. companies, government departments, or NGOs, but you may still have to address questions about anonymity. Another alternative is to look at data in networks that are public, like for instance Twitter. In either case, though, the next problem then is how to collect that data and what to do with it. There are now more and more software solutions for “crawling” web data like this, but I haven’t yet found a tool that really does what I need it to do. Many researchers who do this sort of work have coding skills, so they write their own crawlers. A really good book on this sort of research is Richard Rogers’ “Digital Methods”, just FYI (there’s also great ideas in there on how to “map” social networks – with issues like this, the “relational” data is often just as interesting as the “content”). Finally, when it comes to then analysing content data once you have it, you’ll probably have to do some quantitative sorting before you can get into a qualitative analysis. I use NVivo for this, or Word Smith ( http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/ ). As for studies that examine social media data, I can recommend looking through the past few issues of journals like “New Media & Society” ( http://nms.sagepub.com/ ) or “Information, Communication, and Society” ( http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rics20/current ). These are the kind of academic venues where scholars try to come to grips with questions like these. Hope this helps!

I. LOVE. YOU!

That is all. :D

Hi, I am working on**The role of singing competitions in the (re)production of views about gender: the case of the Voice and I use discourse analysis as a tool but I am really so confused and I didn’t know how to start and what are the things that I should focus on to do my analysis. Please I am looking for your help Florian

Hi Asmaa, it sounds like your project is less about the kind of linguistic strategies that discourse analyses often examine and more about performance and visual communication. Since you are looking at a televised, staged “event”, I would recommend taking a cue from the sort of work that researchers have done on talk shows, media events, and the like (Katz and Dayan come to mind). In terms of the analysis, I would examine how these programmes are structured, and how aspects like mise-en-scene, camera action, and in particular the role of the moderators and judges shape the way gender is represented. If you need a quick introduction to visual analysis, I have written another blog post on that sort of approach: http://www.politicseastasia.com/studying/an-introduction-to-visual-communication-analysis/ . Also, take a look at what has been published on singing and talent competitions – I suspect that X-Factor, China’s Supergirl, and other similar shows have received quite a bit of scholarly attention. Best – F

Hi Asma! Hope you must be fine. Well could you please share some of the work that you have researched with reference to television discourse and also the research proposals and Research Articles/papers that you have in this domain. Because your area of research and my area of research are similar so we may help and support each other. Thanks in Advance

Hi florian I want to appreciate as you are responding to everyone and showing concern really I luv it so im also daring to ask qustion.now my thesis work has started, my interest to go for news analysis obout any burning issue but problem that I m facing is related to theory , whose theory I have to take for such analysis, loking for ur help

Hi Sumaira, When it comes to news analysis, I normally advise students to look at two theoretical concepts: agenda setting and framing. Agenda setting is about how media outlets generally shape what is considered relevant at any particular point in time, through their choices of what to report on (e.g. what to place on the front pages or what to cover in the main evening news on TV). Framing is more closely related to discourse analysis: it’s about how particular communication choices shape the discussion on a topic and guide it along specific lines. For instance, when news media talk about the “war on terror”, then the topic is placed into a framework of military analogies, which lead to very different arguments and conclusions than a frame that evokes problems of economic development, for instance. If you find these kind of distinctions useful, I’d recommend looking into the framing literature to give your discourse analysis a theoretical background that connects to news. Important authors in that field are Robert Entman, Paul D’Angelo, and Jim Kuypers. Does this make sense? Best – F

what wuld u suggest if my work is about tussle among political leaders on one particular issue and how different news papers portray that.what about fair clough 3D model in this regard……

Hi Sumaira! Hope you must be fine. Well could you please share some of the work that you have researched with reference to television discourse and also the research proposals and Research Articles/papers that you have in this domain. Because your area of research and my area of research are similar so we may help and support each other. Thanks in Advance

i am indeed happy to find this write up. i know it will be useful to me in my progect work but still confused on what to do abt my topic ” a discourse analysis on journalese: a case of waiting for an angel” by helon habila. pls wat can u say about it. thnks

I’m afraid I haven’t read the novel, so I’m probably of very little help here. If I understand your assignment correctly, it asks about how journalism is presented in the novel, right? or does it mean: how does the novel itself make use of journalistic tropes? Depending on what exactly the question is, you would be looking at different things. In the first case, I would go through the book and I would mark all instances in which the author discusses journalism, and specifically the way that journalists write. I would then examine the language carefully to see what position the author presents: what is presented as valuable? what is presented negatively? how do these presentations tie into the overall political thrust of the novel? In the second case, I would examine core passages of the normal and I would analyse how the language that the author uses works. Without having read the book, however, I’d be hard pressed to give any advice on what that analysis would look like. It might be good discussing this further with your supervisor.

Hi kindly help me understand this quote,’ what is crucial within the framework of critical discourse analysis is the realization that the positioning of discourse elements is not a value-free process. Analyzing this process can help us better understand the relationship between the society in which texts are created and in many ways create the society.’ what does ‘not value-free process.’ mean?

Thanks for sharing this quote, though without more information on who wrote it and in what context I can’t promise that I’m understanding this the way it was intended. I would assume the author is trying to point out that communication is never unbiased and objective. Each and every statement we make always caries with it certain assumptions and reflects certain values. Doing a discourse analysis is therefore also an analysis of what those values are, and from what position a statement is being made.

I would like to study discourse and disability. My aim is to examine how the disabled are represented in the media. Could you give me some advice?

Have you looked at the work that my colleague Sarah Dauncey has been doing? She’s worked on disability discourses in China. Even if your own work isn’t on China specifically, you might find her articles to be a good entry-point into discussions about disability, identity, and representation: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/chinese/people/sarah.dauncey

Thank you very much. I’ll contact with her

Hi, I find this article very useful n got inspired how you guide the researchers. I want to seek guidance about how to do critical discourse anlysis of beauty ads with respect to feminism. My question is that beauty is always represented by women, then what would be my the stand point for my work. I am confused about on which aspect should I focus. kindly recommend me key theorist for such research. Looking for your advice.

I think examining gender in advertising is always a good project – loads to explore! I suspect, though, that much like Asmaa above (see my comment) you’ll find it more rewarding to analyse the visuals than the text. The two of course go together, but particularly since you are interested in beauty ads, I would suggest a visual analysis of such adds. I would probably compile the various symbols and visual tropes you come across (including body language of the models, colour schemes, camera angles) and would try to figure out how these elements connect with the written words (e.g. advertising slogans). What ideals of femininity do different campaigns draw from? What feelings and ideas are they trying to sell? What psychological mechanisms do they deploy to draw potential customers in? You’ll have to of course explain why you picked certain brands and campaigns, but if you are able to link that sort of analysis to the work that has already been done on advertising and gender, you should have an intriguing project.

Hi Florian, I ve read your article on visual communication. It had cleared up my concepts about moving visuals. Can you help me which visual theory will work more appropriately? Kress n Van Leeuwen`s visual grammar will be good to analyse the representation of women in TV beauty ads.Kindly do guide me with your valuable advice. looking for your guidance. thanks

Hi Ghzala, Kress & Van Leeuwen are definitely a good way to get at both the “semantics” and the “lexicon” of visual communication. In fact, I use the same metaphor of visual “grammar” in my own teaching, though always with the note that visual materials are not necessarily the same as text. With that in mind: by all means, take a look at more of the two authors’ writings on semiotics. I can also recommend an edited volume by Van Leeuwen that presents a number of very good, short introductions to different visual analysis approaches. I suspect you’d also find good material for your own studies there. It’s called “The Handbook of Visual Analysis”: http://amzn.to/1FeFDR7 .

Hi Ghazala! Hope you must be fine. Well could you please share some of the work that you have researched with reference to television discourse and also the research proposals and Research Articles/papers that you have in this domain. Because your area of research and my area of research are similar so we may help and support each other. One of my Research friend had also done his research in the likable idea so we may help each other Thanks in Advance

Hey Florian, I hope you are doing well. Thank you so much for your help

Thanks for posting this. Clears up a lot of stuff. I’m trying to shove this topic into my brain so I can do something else. I really only need to know a little of what you’ve described here — in wonderfully clear terms. But coming into this area of research… I didn’t even know what to search for. The last three days I’ve gone from Concept to Grammar Tagging to ontologies linguistics semantics sentiment classification, Sentiment analysis, Polarity Shifting, and finally found Discourse analysis — which brings me here. *head hurts* .. so.. I’m really glad you decided to post this. :-)

Sounds like quite the journey. Thanks for the kind words.

Hello Florian and again thank you for this great guide. I am right now in the process of starting a project and would like to ask for your advice.

I am thinking of analysing the discourse of the Munich Security Conference 2015, taking place right now and hosting basically all big actors in Europe and the US. I have an idea of comparing the High Representative’s discourse to that of the Foreign ministers’ of France, Britain and Germany, to find common ground and differences on Russia and the Ukraine crisis.

An alternative would be to analyse one actor’s discourse over time on Russia. I am looking for the most basic of these two since time is scarce, so briefly put; which is the easiest discourse analysis to conduct, one analysing discours over time or, a comparison of discourse at a certain time of different actors?

Also, if you have any further (reading) tips on comparative discourse analysis or my specific issue, I am more than all ears.

Thanks in advance, and again big cheers for this amazing site.

Hey! Thanks for the question. I think both projects are doable, but I would probably find the comparison between different actors at one point in time more intriguing, and I suspect this would also be more manageable. If anything, I’d pick statements that appeared before and after the conference, but I would keep the time-frame relatively tight (e.g. one month overall, if that makes sense empirically). A long-term analysis of one actor is a bit more challenging, since you need to contextualize the sources based on what was happening at different times (for the Munich Security Conference topic, you only need to do this once). Also, you’d have to explain why you picked the time-frame you chose, and what makes a good longitudinal analysis (10 years? 20 years? 100?) I normally tell students to only do a historical analysis if they have a lot of time on their hands, and ideally only once they reach the level of PhD – after all, this is the sort of thing that Foucault looked at, and his books are not exactly short treatments of the subject… Hope this helps!

Hi again and thank you for your response, hope you get the website issue figured out. I just have a quick question regarding your advice to analyse the discourses before and after the security conference – I was more thinking to analyse the discourse during the three days (the audiovisual documentation is extensive). Do you think this would be possible and meaningful?

More specifically I am planning to analyse the construction of ‘the other’, that being Russia, during the conference. Framework concerning the construction of ‘the other’ given by Lene Hansen in “Security as practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War” – Just in case you’ve heard of it.

Thanks again!

Ah yes, that makes a lot of sense. This way you’ll have a classic ‘synchronous’ analysis – three days should work well (and wouldn’t really qualify as an analysis ‘over time’ anyways, unless you suddenly spot a particularly noteworthy ‘shift’ in the discourse you think you can map). I haven’t read Hansen’s article, but it sounds like that would indeed make a good backdrop for what you have in mind.

Hi Florian, thanks for this posting! From Ethiopia,now I will’ve planned to work my BA on discourse analysis of L.King’s speech text”I have seen the promised land”. Is it good title for BA? If it is good how to I can write references? Thank you!

This sounds like a very nice topic. You could simply look at the rhetorical strategies in the text (and arguably you wouldn’t need to call that a discourse analysis – a lot of political speeches have been analyzed that way), or you could place additional emphasis on intertextuality (who and what gets referenced or implied) and on the social context. The latter approach would make for a good discourse analysis, I would think. As for your question, do you mean what literature you should reference? Or do you mean how you should reference the speech throughout your thesis? If it’s the former, you could use any of the sources I’ve reference above as your starting point, plus the journals I’ve mentioned in the comment section – the back issues might include contributions that deal with speeches. I also tell my students to look at this book on the “Lost Art of the Great Speech” ( http://amzn.to/1KFpB5Q ). It’s not technically about how to analyze speeches, but it includes a lot of information you might nonetheless find useful. If your question is more about how to use the source material, I would take a digital copy of the speech and I would create different versions for my analysis, for example one in which I mark the different structural sections in different colours; one in which I mark up all the metaphors; etc. I would place these materials in an appendix, and I would copy particularly illustrative examples from the speech into the main text of the thesis, to underscore my argument. Is that roughly what you were wondering about?

Thank you very much! I’m happy for your advice & encourage.I apprieciate you,for you got my exact question. Now I understood all of what you adviced me & I’m on way to do my theses. LIFE SAVER MAN! Thanks once again!!!

You’re more than welcome. Good luck!

Hello, Can you kindly send me some kinds of different texts with discourse analysis examples on them ? I am actually confusing with analysis process ?

Please for your help

I’m afraid I don’t have any examples at hand that I could share to illustrate what such a mark-up looks like. You could check the back issues of journals like Discourse & Communication or handbooks that deal with discourse analysis to see what such analyses usually entail. Paul Chilton’s book ‘Analyzing Political Discourse’ definitely has some useful examples in it, and I recall that Norman Fairclough’s books do as well (though I don’t have one in front of me right now).

am writing the CDA of Media Awards using the Van Dijk model but i need clear interpretation of the model. please interpret for me so that i know what information is needed.

Hi Patrick, I’m not sure I can help you with this one. Interpreting a theoretical framework like van Dijk’s and applying it to your own research is part of the research process, so I can’t do this for you. It’s crucial that you figure this out yourself. What I would advise is to check what kind of questions van Dijk asks in his own analyses, and to then see if any of these questions apply to the kind of study you wish to do. You can then critically check whether the way in which van Dijk answers his questions make sense or not for your case. In that way you can also provide a critical assessment of van Dijk’s work and contribute an informed opinion of your own to the discussion.

Hi there! I’ve read your article and it really did clarify lots of doubts I’ve had about what discourse analysis is and what not. However, i’ve got a question. I’m working on my thesis and my topic is “Discourse analysis of how media portrays Islam as a religion” and I’ll take into consideration mayor news sources like Fox News (which would be at a regional level of audience) CCN (international) and BBC News (which is taken more seriously in comparison to the other two). Anyways, I’m planning on analyzing articles and interviews, now, the question is: how can I analyze both of them without making this such an exhausting and extremely broad work? I’d truly appreciate an advice, my tutor is not helping much, sadly.

Hi Paola, this is a good question. I responded to a similar problem above, in David’s post (see my response from 17 December). In short, you’ll probably have to narrow down your focus by picking a particular time frame. A specific event might provide a good catalyst for studying such discourses: that way you would be able to compare directly what the three news outlets reported on the topic during a short period of time (e.g. a week or two). I would then probably look at the broader discursive strategies that each outlet deploys – a full linguistic analysis of the data seems a bit much. If you need to conduct a more detailed analysis, you would have to select specific representative texts. You could do so by first conducting a quantitative analysis of your materials (e.g. what does word distribution tell you about the sources?) and then select particularly interesting texts for closer examination based on these initial findings. Another good way to select specific articles would be to first sort and categorize your sources, for instance based on the headlines. You could then pick the ones that are most readily comparable or that focus most directly on the theme you plan to study. Does this make sense? Overall, I would advise you to be careful not to pick too much material. I normally tell students to only compare different sources if they have a good strategy in place for limiting the amount of data. Without such a strategy, it might be easier to focus on one outlet only (e.g. the FOX discourse).

Hi Florian! As others, I think your articles are great! I would value your opinion on my thesis idea. I would like to write on how the late 19th century American Populist discourse on class, race and gender changed in relation to contemporary historical events (such as elections and economic depressions) by using CDA. Thank you very much!

Hi Max, This sounds like a great topic. What kind of thesis are we talking about? If this is a PhD project, it might be feasible. Anything smaller, like an MA, and I would advise you to narrow it down much more. Either way, you’d be looking at a lot of materials, not to mention three different themes/variables, so be careful that you don’t end up doing too much. I do like the idea of using historical events to see how they functioned as catalysts for these discourses. By the way, you may want to check a book by my colleague Peter Hays Gries, which deals with popular opinion in America – it is specifically about contemporary foreign policy, and it does not provide a discourse analysis as such, but he uses historical events as well to contextualize where certain views and arguments come from. Might be useful inspiration for your project. Here’s the link: http://amzn.to/1x4vRTV . Let me know how the project evolves!

Dear Florian, your article really sets a great framework for discourse analysis. Thank you!

I am a PhD student (1st year) in media and my project is about China’s soft power projection (the responsible economic stakeholder thesis) in its transnational media institutions during China’s media going-out period (2009-current). I am thinking to use two international programs hosted by China as my sampling background, the 2010 Shanghai Expo and the 2014 Beijing APEC, since they involve a series of economic events between China and foreign countries, and they can also help me to examine the evolution of media going-out strategy and China’s soft power projection. I would like to seek your advice if discourse analysis is a suitable method for my research because I now cannot decide to use discourse analysis or agenda-building theory, since they both seem to be closely related to my research. I am sincerely looking forward to hearing from you!

Best wishes! Linda

Dear Linda, This is an exciting topic. “Responsible stakeholder”… I assume you’re also looking into the English School of International Relations? I can see parallels to discussions of China as a norm-challenger or norm-entrepreneur in international society. Definitely a controversial issue. Methodologically, I would think that discourse analysis would serve you well here. I always thought of “agenda-setting” as something that’s connected to discourse, rather than as something that stands apart. Setting the agenda is, after all, about setting the parameters for discourse: which topics people talk about in a particular setting or context (e.g. mass media reporting on an event). So I don’t think these two things are mutually exclusive. What I would recommend for two events like this is to also draw from visual communication analysis and from work that examines exhibitions and events. Specifically on the Expo, you might find my own articles interesting (the list of references will give you a good take on who has written on the topic and in what ways). The first article is in an edited volume: “Discourse, Politics and Media in Contemporary China” (edited by Qing Cao, Hailong Tian and Paul Chilton; John Benjamins Publishing, 2014). My chapter is called “It’s a Small World after all? Simulating the future world order at the Shanghai Expo” (pp.97-120). The follow-up article is called: “The Futurities and Utopias of the Shanghai World Exposition” and is available as an Asiascape Ops paper: http://www.asiascape.org/resources/publications/asiascape_ops_7.pdf . I’ve also written a post on this website that goes with those articles: http://www.politicseastasia.com/research/shanghai-expo-research/ . I hope these resources are interesting for your project. Let me know how what you find out in your research! Best Florian

[…] I feel like I’m barely scratching the surface here, as this was my first text mining request. Anna* and I looked at discourse analysis as a textual research method, which requires close reading of a few articles (cf tutorial at Politics East Asia). […]

Hi Florian.I am Imene from Algeria. Your articles are great! It will be a pleasure for me to see your opinion on my topic of research .I would like to discover how are women portrayed in Algerian rai songs by male singers.As a research tool I designed a questionnaire searching for the most common songs listened to by people in Algeria and how women are depicted by male singers .I ll analyse the words or expressions singers use to refer to the concept woman. But the problem I m facing is that I do not know how to do that. I wish you can help me with your opinion.Thank you !

Dear Imene, Your topic sounds very intriguing. It seems to me that you should get in touch with your supervisor to decide on the exact procedures you’ll use in your study. What I would advise is to first explore the production background of these songs (who are the singers and writers, what kind of economic and social constraints do they work under, etc.) and to then subject the representative lyrics you’ve chosen to a detailed analysis. I suspect that work-steps 4, 7, and 8 above might be particularly helpful in this regard: try to identify recurring themes, then collect all statements on each theme and examine how the language works in each instance to make statements on gender. If you relate what you find back to the production background, and of course to the literature on Algerian music and on gender more generally, then you should have a very exciting study indeed.

Dear Florian , Thanks for the very simple yet helpful tutorial. I am writing my graduation project about Carl Schmitt.I read about Schmitt and weimar Germany and I read Schmitt’s legality and legitimacy I was amazed by how some scholars identify Schmitt as a thinker with a Nazi orientation ( the crown jurist of the third reich) while others seem to be more apologetic about his thought and life. One scholar even called Schmitt the Medusa of political philosophy because he sparked so much controversy amongst scholars so i thought I should compare his notion of legitimacy to the one proposed in the Nazi political philosophy. I think this would be very important in order to position Schmitt’s thought during the weimar republic and understand the affinities it has to the Nazi political philosophy. I am thinking of relying primarily on Schmitt’s Legality and Legitimacy and a secondary source about Nazi political philosophy. Do you think that Discourse analysis is the right approach to use for my question? my main hypothesis is that schmitt’s concept of legitimacy was practically the same concept introduced by Nazi jurists.

Dear Alaa, It sounds like your project indeed has some proximity to discourse analysis, though you could also call what you have planned a study in history of ideas. The two are arguably related. First and foremost, you’d be looking at how a particular idea or ideological construct has “traveled” from one source to another. Close reading of the primary source materials might already do the job in exploring that issue, and the field of history and intellectual history should provide ample methods and theories on how to proceed. This is not to say that you couldn’t also make use of discourse analysis, but usually approaches in discourse analysis are interested in either (or often both) of the following issues: a) how exactly does language work in the materials, and how do linguistic strategies get deployed to formulate and shape concepts? and b) what role do economic, political, and social institutions play in how a concept gets deployed, in other words: how do social relations and power influence how a discourse (e.g. on legitimacy) gets shaped? If you are interested in either of these dimensions, then adding discourse analysis to your toolbox for this study could be fruitful. Depending on how you phrase your question, however, it may not be essential.

Dear Florian, Thans a lot for you help I really appreciate what you re doing !!! thans again

Thanks for this highly-informative post, Florian!

I’ve encountered some peer-reviewed articles that discuss the possibility of using mathematical techniques to analyse discourses. Here’s one example: “Discourse Analysis of Public Debates Using Corpus Linguistic Methodologies”.

Although there is no larger attempt at formalizing discourse analysis as yet, I think this will soon follow, given the positivist tendencies of contemporary social research. Can you suggest any specific approach to discourse analysis for someone who is comfortable with a purely qualitative research?

I agree that quantitative methods will play an increasingly important role in the field – in a way, they already have been becoming more relevant the past decade, due to better technology. Personally, I mainly use quantitative methods as an entry point into large amounts of text. My analyses are largely qualitative – I still think that is where the real “meat” is to be found. In that sense, everything you see in the list of references should fit your bill. Take a look at Chilton, for example, if you want a comprehensive qualitative approach. Similarly Ruth Wodak’s work might also be for you (not referenced above, though). Aside from her own writing, she’s edited quite a number of useful books, like this one: http://amzn.to/1D6DQk9 (I imagine ch.1 and ch.2 will be interesting in this context, possibly also 5).

HI.Mr Florian I am writing my graduation project about net-speak and its impact on the academic English language, I plan to analyze a sample of massages taken from facebook, (interaction between friends using net-speak). I will analyze them from the linguistic perspective. My question is: am I doing discourse analysis??

Hi Malik, You may be putting the carriage before the horse, so to speak. The important issue is: do you have a question about discourse? If you do, then you can deploy the language analysis you are doing to try and answer it. If you are only interested in the linguistics of online net-speak, then that would not necessarily have to be a discourse analysis. In that sense, I’d have a similar response to the one I wrote to Alaa above: are you interested in finding out how social relations and power influence the use of English language (online and offline)? If that is part of your interest, then by all means: go ahead and give discourse analysis a try.

Hi,Mr FLORIAN thank you soo much.

Hello sir. my name is Mohamed and I seek your help, my teacher recommeded that I should ask guidance from you concerning my work which I intend to submit in fulfillment of a master degree. I have decided to work on critical discourse analysis, and I am in a bit of a situation here. I intend to analyse two newspaper articles using fairclough’s model of analysis which he introduced in his book language and power 1989. my problem is, I cannot make use of this model and I don’t know how to approach the articles. I would really appreciate it if you could help me with any suggestions.

Hello Mohamed, Fairclough’s seminal book can indeed be quite the challenge, particularly if you are looking for hands-on, practical advice on how to conduct a critical discourse analysis. That’s probably because so much of Language and Power is concerned with conceptual issues. Personally, I find chapters 5 (and to a lesser extent chapter 6) to be the most practical. Overall, what Fairclough is trying to show, I believe, is that we should understand our social world as in no small part constructed through the way people speak and write, which means we can use linguistic analysis to figure out how that construction process works (essentially what I have described in step 8 above). If you want another source on how to do CDA, I usually recommend this compendium by Wodak and Krzyzanowski: http://amzn.to/1D6DQk9 (see also my response to RJ above). It covers a great range of media types and strategies, each with practical examples. Maybe something of that sort would be of help? I hope this answers your question. Good luck with the MA!

hi again, Mr FLORIAN i have dificulties in designing the questions of my questionaire and i which that you can help me please knowing that i am working on the attitudes of young Algerian generation towards gender stereotypes in proverbs thankx

It looks like these are really two separate questions (if I understand you correctly): the first is how to analyze stereotypes in proverbs, and the second is how to construct a questionnaire for a survey. On that second question, I would recommend taking a look at chapter 10 in Neuman’s “Social Research Methods” ( http://amzn.to/1CEgptZ ). See if your library has a copy of the most recent edition, and if not: it’s usually quite possible to get earlier editions at a cheap price (e.g. used). As for your first question, I would try to figure out whether there are recurring patterns in the proverbs you have collected. I would then create categories of stereotypes and would divide the proverbs into these categories. You can then take a closer look at the language within each category to see how the proverbs “work” in each case, and whether there are things that they all have in common. I suspect that you’ll come across quite a few similes and metaphors. If you need help making sense of how metaphors work, there’s two great books on the subject: George Lakoff’s “Metaphor’s We Live By” ( http://amzn.to/1D71UCc ) and Fauconnier & Turner’s “The Way We Think” ( http://amzn.to/1CEi7LI ). Of course, if you are working on a smaller project, then it might be overkill to delve so deeply into theoretical issues. You’ll have to decide how much you want to read in that regard. At any rate, I hope the practical tips above help!

hi,i’ m working on female teacher interaction,i’m going to use observation and interview tools but i have problemm of how to analyse;i need your help.

Hi Alia, I think the answer to your question depends on what exactly you plan to analyse. For instance, if you are mainly interested in the statements that your interviewees make (for instance on a particular issue or topic like “gender differences in class” or “solving conflicts in class”, or some such), then it might suffice to simply compile all the statements on that topic and then check who says what. You may not need a lot of detailed linguistics to do that. On the other hand, if you want to figure out how the interviews themselves played out, then you’d probably be looking into how your interviewees said what they said, and how their communication strategies legitimated what they had to say. You’d have to come up with categories of recurring patterns that you’ve observed (coding – point 4 above), then collect the text fragments that belong to each category, and finally examine in detail how the linguistic elements and rhetorical components contribute to the discussion and its dynamics (point 8 above). Hope this helps.

thanks a lot for your help Mr Florian , it was really useful for my work.

my name is sihem and I seek your help, my teacher recommeded that I should ask guidance from you concerning my work which I intend to submit in fulfillment of a master degree.l’m doing male and female cyberbullying and l used qualitative approach with participants observation on facebook by trying to analyse the language used there” comments and posts” and translate the because the majority are in arabic so my question is what kind of analysis shall l follow plz add me

Hi Sihem, I don’t know if you saw my response to Esther above (August 5, 2014), on the analysis of Facebook discourses – you may want to check out a few of the sources I’ve mentioned there (i.e. the back issues of journals like New Media & Society). On the issue of translation, it’s important to analyse texts in their original language (in this case: Arabic). Any combination of work-steps I’ve described above could apply in this regard, depending on what questions you wish to answer. Once you have done your analysis, you can of course present your results by translating selected quotes from your sources as illustration for your argument (though I would always also provide the original wording alongside my own translation, so that your readers can check whether you translated well). I’m afraid I can’t comment on the difficulties you might encounter working with Arabic, since I regrettably don’t speak the language, but you might also find the following blog post of mine on “Discourse Analysis and Foreign Languages” useful: http://www.politicseastasia.com/studying/discourse-analysis-and-foreign-languages/ . In it, I mostly discuss issues related to Chinese language, but the introduction and the section about translation choices might nevertheless give you some pointers. Good luck with the MA!

thanks a lot and actually l’m using the mthod as you tell me . it is pleasure to know you madam

thankx a lot for your help Mr Florian , it was really useful for my research

Hi MR Floran, I’m writing my master project on: The influence of Fairy tales on Algerian young girl’s perception of gender roles. So i’m seeking to know if fairy tales have an impact on girls’ views of behaviors and roles performed by male and females. I’m gonna do a qualitative interview with the girls plus group disscussion. My question is: Should i do a discourse analyses on a traditional fairy tales , eg: Cinderrela . Or interview and group disscusion is enough. Thank you

Also , I don’t know how to analyse the interview

Hi Sanaa, I would probably try not to do too much. I suspect that a discourse analysis of the fairy tales and the interviews / group discussions will be a bit much for an MA project. You can probably make a good case for not going into the actual fairy tales in detail, particularly if you are able to find secondary literature on stereotypes and discourses in that genre (you’ll have to check your library system, but I suspect you’ll find quite a lot). As for the interviews, it depends a bit what you want to achieve. Take a look at my response to Alia from 11 April above. She had a very similar concern, and I would probably give you the same advice. Hope this is helpful!

good day sir

I am from South Africa currently doing my honours at the University of Stellenbosch. Two thing:

Firstly, thank you for an amazing piece of work. I have to make a 15 minute presentation on discourse analysis and your concise description on this methodology helped a lot. Knowing where to start wasn’t the only thing I got from this, but also where to end. hahaha

Secondly, as I read all the millions of comments and you replying on every single one I want to thank you. Not just for the work, but also for being such a wonderful person and so helpful, taking time to read and help where you can. We definitely need more people like you. I have so much respect for you as a person AND your work.

Thank you again Dean

Dear Dean, Thank you for your kind words. I’m glad that you’ve found the website and the discussion forum helpful. That really means a lot to me. Enjoy the rest of your studies! Best Florian

Hi Sir, I’m doing a research on children’s reponces to fairy tales, (the impact of these stories on girls), I’m using a qualitative interview , I also want to ask the girls to write stories to analyse, but i don’t know if i can use this method, and what do we call this method, is it obervation or… ! so i’m a bit confused . Thank you

Hi Sanaa, I think it’s a great idea to have kids write their own versions of certain fairy tales – this sounds very similar to “diary studies” in ethnography (or the study of “creative writing”, for that matter). I can imagine that a combination of interviews and creative writing from the students will give you a great amount of useful material, all of which you can analyze using discourse analysis if you so choose. You could, for instance, examine which elements of a story the students emphasise, how they frame the story, how they represent gender and inter-personal relations in their writing, and so on. Again, be careful not to do too much, though. Depending on the amount of students and the number of interviews you are also planning, you may have your hands quite full. This is, after all, only an MA thesis. Also, one last remark: make sure to carefully consider the ethical implications of such research with kids. It’s important to assure anonymity, and of course consent of the parents, and you should make a good case in the thesis that you are not causing your research subjects any distress. All of this is worth discussing with your supervisor before you proceed. Most universities have fixed ethic procedures for research that concerns (and affects) children.

Hellp Mr.Florian,I m Imene I have already asked you for a help concerning my topic of research (The portrayel of women in Algerian modern Rai songs by male artists).In my practical part I planned an open ended questionnaire to see respondents ‘ attitudes about rai music,what are most common subjects and themes that modern rai songs usually cover,and to state some of words or expressions terms do modern Rai singers usually use to describe women in their songs ,and if women are negatively or positively represented in modern Rai by male artists.The last item in the questionnaire i asked them to state some of modern rai songs that are mostly listened to by people.Well in this last item what m i going to do , ??? I m a bit confused concerning my pactical part I would like to have your opinion !!VERY GREATFUL FOR YOUR HELP !!!!

Hi Imene, If I understand you correctly, you are you wondering what to do with the answers to your last questionnaire item once you have the responses, right? That very much depends on why you put that item on your list in the first place (you must have had a good reason to be interested in this). You could ask this kind of question at the start (rather than the end) of your survey, and you could then use the information to later look at particularly popular songs in the research. This means you would then have to look at those songs in detail, though. Or you could ask the question at the end as a simple check as to what music the person listens to who just gave you a particular take on Rai songs. There might be differences within the genre, after all, and knowing who comes from what corner of the field may help you interpret their earlier responses.

Hello Florian, thank you very much for posting this. However, I got a huge request. I have to write a seminar paper until April 22nd and I used the CDA analysis as the tool for the Representation of the muslim community in the press. I used the social actors strategies for my analysis, however I am afraid that these analysis categories won’t be enough for my analysis. Do you have a suggestion on how I could improve it? p.s. I just have found your article and therefore I am in deep trouble because I need your help in the short term Thanks

This is quite late before your deadline, and I’m not sure how I can help you. You may have to check with fellow students to see how they solved the issue you are facing. I can only say that studying social actors in texts usually means checking how the protagonists and the antagonists are constructed through language, so which communication strategies the creators of the text used to present themselves and the people/institutions they positively identify with, and how they present the “others”. Is this what you had in mind? If so, you should probably look at the language choices in sentences where such “self” and “other” distinctions are pertinent (see work-step 8 above).

Thank you very much for the quick response. As I mentioned before I am trying to analyze newspaper articles in order to see how a community is represented, therefore I chose CDA. My professor said that I need categories for the discourse analysis but I do not quite know what he means by that. I also think that point 8 is quite similar to that what I already did( social actors strategies). maybe you could know what he exactly means by categories of discourse analysis?

He likely means what I discuss above, in step 4: coding categories. As you go through your data, you are looking for recurring patterns that are worth exploring. A systematic analysis is therefore well-served if you collect sections of the data under certain categories or tags and then analyze in detail why these categories might be prevalent in the text, how they relate to other categories, and how the statements on each category work. For example, if you were looking at a US policy document, you might find that it contains a lot of military language, that it keeps bringing up “Russia” or “China” as relevant actors, that it contains ideas related to freedom and liberty, and so on. It might then be wise to create categories for each phenomenon (so: “military”, “foreign nation-states”, “freedom”, etc.) and then see how these themes play out in your materials more broadly. Hope this helps.

Hello Florian, I apologize for not answering your question right away but these days have been like hell. Thank you for your support and your help. I have never experienced such a a support on the internet, thank you for that. And it turned out that the way of my analysis was quite good. I wish you all the best and I have to add that everybody (including myself) in this discussion board appreciates what you are doing.

Hi Thomas, I’m happy that your project turned out well. And thanks for the words of support. This means a lot to me! All the best for the rest of yours studies.

Social actors strategies by Reisigl and Wodak*

This is incredibly helpful, thank you sir!

mr Florian schneider can i have your email i have a term paper and if you dont mind i wanna ask some questions?

Dear Yahya, If it’s a general question about method, then I’ll do my best to answer it. I cannot, however, read specific course assignments like term papers and comment on them. These are exams, and as such the point is that you figure them out with the materials you receive in class. If you need help with a term paper, I would suggest you contact your supervisor or instructor at your university. Of course, if you have a question regarding discourse analysis that I can help with, then feel free to post it here or send an email to me through the “contact” section on this website.

Hello sir, this is really helpful, thank you :) I’m wondering if you have any publication specifically on methods? Cheers!

Hi Ana, I’m glad this is useful to you. I’m afraid my publications on methods like discourse analysis and visual analysis are primarily the posts you’ll find here. Since it’s an academic website/blog, you shouldn’t have any problems citing them like other sources – as long as you are aware that these pieces are not peer-reviewed. The only peer-reviewed publication I have available is on digital methods in Asian Studies ( http://www.politicseastasia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/DIAS-2.1-2-Schneider-2015.pdf ), though that may not be what you have in mind. On visual communication analysis, you can also take a look at the appendix of my book, which discusses the methodology of that project. Otherwise I would recommend citing the blog posts themselves and adding the URL and the date of last access.

Hi Mr. Schneider, thanks so much, I’ll certainly cite this blogpost as needed. Cheers!

Dear Schneider, I’d like to work on discourse analysis for my MA these, but am really lost. I don’t know how to start reading and how to find a research gap os a suggested topic. Could you advice and help me? Thank you,

Dear Lareen, Sorry for only seeing your comment now. I’m currently still in Asia for research, and somehow the notification didn’t reach me. I don’t know if my advice is still helpful at this time? It’s been four weeks, so you may have moved on, but maybe just this much by way of advice: I would always try to set up a analysis based on something that spikes your interest, rather than based on what has or hasn’t been done yet. I realize we tell students that their work needs to address some “gap” in the literature, but to be honest, I’m not sure this is still a good requirement in 2015: in fields like sociology or political science, thousands (!) of new papers are produced each month (!), so any review of the literature can always only be partial. You’d have to check with your supervisor, of course, but I’d say: pick a theme that you are personally interested in, and for which you would like to figure out how it works in a particular medium or a specific publication (e.g. war reporting on the BBC in the aftermath of a specific event, or how disease prevention is discussed in a set of policy documents in a particular country before and after a health crisis, etc.). Then see if there are any studies related to that topic. This can then give you an idea of what arguments other people have made, regardless of whether they have studied the discourse or not. This step will usually help you generate additional questions or narrow your questions down, but I would always advise keeping your original general question in mind. It is, after all, what sparked your interest in the first place. If you can then get your hands on the primary sources you want to study, and you conduct a discourse analysis with the concerns in mind that some of the literature discusses, you can check whether other people’s arguments make sense when compared to how the discourse is structured.

As I said, you may already have moved on with your project, but if you want to ask additional questions or want to post an update here, feel free to do so. Again: apologies for the terribly late reply!

Dear Schneider, Thanks for your reply. That’s fine. There is no need to apologize.That is very kind of you. I have not moved on yet. I found your comments really helpful. I appreciate that! Could you please help me in finding resources to DA to read about. Thank you,

Dear Lareen, Glad I could still help. As for readings, aside from the references at the bottom of the article, you might want to start with the edited books by Ruth Wodak. There is one that introduces different approaches to discourse analysis ( http://amzn.to/1NuFChc ) and one that covers the analysis of different sources and media types ( http://amzn.to/1U2Tp3P ). I imagine you’ll find a lot of useful information in those pages. Hope this helps!

A brilliant, gripping and helpful post. Indeed, bright, tight and right. Reads like the complete idiot’s guide to CDA. Thanks!

hello Mr. Schneider

a very informative blog post…i wanted to discuss the scope and possibility of my research topic that i want to pursue for my PhD research. i want to analyse the manifestos of 5 major political parties in 2013 general elections held in Pakistan. i want to analyse the language of manifestos by using fairclough’s three dimensional model and by using software like Antconc for comparison of these manifestos. kindly guide me that this topic is workable or not? what else i can do to broaden the scope of this topic. thank you

Dear Aalia, My apologies for only replying now. As I just wrote to Lareen above, I’ve been away on research myself, and not all posts reached me like they normally would. I think your topic sounds very intriguing. Personally, I don’t know enough about the political parties in Pakistan, or the nature of these manifestos, so I can’t comment on how relevant these materials are in the context of Pakistan’s political landscape, but if you believe this will provide you with an interesting entry-point into the political ideologies of the main actors, this could be very interesting. You’d also already have your primary materials lined up, so that’s a big advantage. Maybe two quick comments: first, it of course makes good sense to have a particular theoretical framework in mind for a project like this, and if you think Fairclough will help you answer your questions, then by all means draw from his work. I would nevertheless advise you to compare this framework to what others have done, and to treat it as part of a large discourse-analysis toolbox that you can pick from depending on your interests. There might be other useful concepts and ideas out there that also apply here, or you might find that Fairclough’s approach has limitations that you need to address or overcome. All of his should then later be part of your theory discussion, of course, and you may have already worked in this direction. Nevertheless, my advice would be to not narrow your theoretical framework down too early in the project. Second, you’ll have to decide precisely what questions you want to ask of your sources, and you need to figure out whether the five manifestos will indeed provide you with enough material to answer your questions. I could easily imagine, for instance, that the manifestos will provide you with a solid foundation of what the official, ideological “party line” is for each party, but that in and of itself might not be the most interesting question to ask. Would it make sense, for example, to then check which of the main points in each manifesto the parties promoted during the election campaigns, which of them were discussed in the press or in other public forums, or which politicians picked what aspects to talk about in speeches? In such a case, you would have to carefully expand your materials (and be careful to not do too much), but you might be able to connect the official party discourses with broader public discourses, with issues such as agenda-setting and framing in the press, or with their actual instantiation in specific circumstances. Just a thought. As always, make sure to run your ideas by your supervisors – they have to be on board with the choices you are making. But do let me know what you decide, and how your project plays out. This sounds like an exciting PhD plan.

Thank for your help. I appreciate it!!! Thank you, Lareen

[…] http://www.politicseastasia.com/studying/how-to-do-a-discourse-analysis/ […]

Dear Mr. Florian , This is a v. rich article about discourse analysis and a well written one too . Can you give me some tips about medical discourse analysis , as I am a linguist and going to analysis medical texts , what are the programs and methods I should use and follow? Thank you , Haidy

Dear Haidy, Thanks for the kind words. Your topic is a rather specific, and I’m afraid I’m not experienced with medical discourses. What you could try, is to check the back issues of journals like ‘Discourse and Society’ or ‘Discourse and Communication’ to see if anyone else has worked on a topic like yours – their list of references would make for a good point to search further. Similarly, I would check the top journals in health science and take a look at any papers that take a discourse-analysis approach (this is not my field, so I can’t tell you which journals would fit the bill, but I recall colleagues in the UK deploying discourse analysis in health-related research). More generally, if you haven’t already checked Foucault’s work on biopolitics, you might find it useful to do so for your project. He mostly writes about mental health discourse, but his work on ‘managing the self’ may have implications on what you are studying. Hope this helps! All the best Florian

Dear Schneider, I am really anxious because am supposed to write my proposal as soon as possible and cannot find the right title and features to discuss. I decided to work on analyzing political cartoons , but I do not know what are the linguistic things that I could work on. I want for example to see how phonemes can help in understanding the message in political cartoons. For exampl, changing /f/ into/v/ in a word would suggest another message. something else I’d like to take your advice to see whether I can make a questionaire toevaluate the reader understanding of the message to see whether the phonological level might enhance the reader’s understanding. I mean how effective the phonological or segmental level? And could this be considered as a contribution filling the research gap in the field. Pleas, could you advice me? Thank you, Lareen

Dear Lareen, This sounds like an interesting project, but it’s a bit outside my own area of expertise. I myself am not a linguist, so I have not studied how phonemes change meanings etc. Personally, if I were to study a visual medium such as comics, I’d probably choose a methodology that focuses on visuality (I’ve written an introduction to that sort of research here: http://www.politicseastasia.com/studying/an-introduction-to-visual-communication-analysis/ , though there are more specific methodologies for comics that might be helpful). You might find Roland Barthes’ article on the rhetoric of the image interesting, at least as far as the interaction between words and visual elements goes. As for your own question about phonemes and their effects, what you propose sounds highly interesting, though you’d have to read up carefully on how to ‘test’ your materials with a target audience. You could, for instance, take a comic page and then replace the words so that you get two different versions. If you then work with an experimental and a control group, then you could show whether readers later respond differently to specific questions about meanings and associations. It helps to already have experience with experimental design. This can be quite delicate and complicated work. I don’t want to discourage you, but you should check with your supervisor to see what is feasible. I would probably advise my students to stick to a manageable corpus of primary materials and to conduct a detailed analysis on those sources, particularly at the MA level. This, of course, provided that the sources actually promise to showcase phoneme differences in a way that can answer your question. Best Florian

Dear Florian, Thank you for your advice. there something important to tell you that my thesis would be in linguistics so that am not sure whether the interaction between words and visual elements would be related to the same field. Does this put my thesis far away from linguistics? something else could I take two sources of the data one from political cartoons and the other from news and see how the linguistic features of both can contribute to the massage? Thank you,

Dear Florian, I’m writing my MA dissertation in IR at the moment and using critical discourse analysis. However I’m having a bit of issue with how to structure my analysis, I think I might have a bit too much material. I’m examining speeches by Iran made in the UNGA, and examining perception of masculinity discourses, contrasting Iranian masculinity discourse in these speeches to how they are perceived through a Western masculinity discourse (I.e. the difference in how something reads as masculine in one but feminine in the other) I have atm 20 speeches, while they are not long it’s quite a mouthful anyway. I’ve read your replies earlier about having a lot of material, but wondering if you have any suggestions for me? grateful for any replies

sincerely Isabelle

Dear Isabelle, 20 speeches does indeed sound like quite a bit of material, but it depends on how detailed your analysis is. For an MA thesis, you might be able to use all of them. I would start by either producing a quantitative overview of the most frequently used words, or I would code the speeches by sections or paragraphs for recurring themes. If you then home in on specific issues, you might not need to analyze everything in every speech: a couple of representative sentences or phrases from each speech might be enough to make your case. Every research project has to make choices about what to include and what to exclude from the study. The trick is to justify these choices well and in a convincing way. You know your materials best, so you need to ask yourself what is or isn’t worth a lengthy treatment in your thesis. Hope this is helpful. Good luck with the project! Best Florian

Good job Mr. Schneider,

Please, I would appreciate it if you can make little input in your own opinion on this topic: ‘Understanding Media Content in the process of Critical Discourse.’

This is a complicated topic, and I’m not sure I can give you any simple input on it. I would suggest looking at the various contributions in the book I recommended above, for instance to Lareen: ‘ Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences ‘. It covers CD from the angle of various kinds of media types and media contents.

Dear Sir, I manage to work on discourse analysis on Tv shows, but not sure what to do exactly?Can I seek advice? Regards!

Dear Sara, It depends whether you are planning to do an entirely linguistic analysis, in which case you would have to transcribe what is said and then conduct the kind of work steps described above on that transcript. Personally, I find it fruitful to ask how discourse works in multiple ‘modes’, so not just through language but also through images, sounds, and the arrangement of people and things in space. If you are interested in those sort of questions, take a look at my blog post on visual communication analysis for some ideas. You might find useful inspiration there. I can also recommend the Handbook of Visual Analysis by van Leeuwen and Jewitt. All the best Florian

Dear sir, Thank you, yes I’d like to make a linguistic analysis. Could I add other modes as a linguistic analysis?

Dear Sara, If you are primarily interested in linguistics, then trying to also conduct an analysis of communication in other modes may be too much work. I’d probably advise you to simply work with the transcripts, and to add a footnote to point out that there are of course additional non-verbal dimensions to the discourse, but that you are bracketing them in your study. That said, you should check with your supervisor. After all, he or she will have to approve your efforts in the end, so they should be aware of the choice you’re planning to make. Best Florian

Dear sir, wow!! thanks

No worries. Happy to help. :)

Dear Sir, I am really confused between the difference between linguistic vs. non-linguistic features of language and verbal vs. non-verbl communication. I tried to google them. in one study i found that linguistic features are metaphors, nominals, verb phrase,etc and the non-linguistic features are color, image,etc. The proble is that i cannot find these on google . So, how could I put thses types as bases for my study? Could you help, please?

Hi Sara, The thing with linguistic/verbal communication is that anything that qualifies as language is ‘linguistic’ (whether written or spoken). ‘Verbal’ is anything that a human being utters – so words (which are linguistic) but also sounds like coughs or sighs (non-linguistic – bus still verbal!). Non-verbal communication mostly refers to things like visual communication, including body-language during a conversation (note, however, that verbal communication is often transcribed into writing to reproduce it in research, in which case the transcription method uses special signs to mark the non-linguistic verbal features like intonation, pauses, emphases, etc.). So you can use the terms verbal/linguist and non-verbal/non-linguistic to narrow down what part of the communication-process you are interested in, and you can use a transcription method that then fits your needs. Best Florian

Hi Florian Your article is of a great help indeed! I am striving with my dissertation.I am working on statements and instructions written in different hospitals.I want to use CDA.I have found Fairclough’s suitable as it provides basic framework from linguistic point of view.I need your help.I want to ask can I mix other analytical tools in Fairclough’s Model?? I want to use Van Leeuwen’s social actor presentation at level of text analysis(few features of it) and Carvalho’s Ideological standpoint and surface description of text.Can I do that??? waiting for your prompt response.

Absolutely. I think it is a good idea to combine different methods and conceptual frameworks in order to answer the questions you have. After all, what are the odds that one specific research approach will fit your project perfectly? It seems only prudent to adapt that approach to suite your needs. You’ll of course have to justify the choices that you make in this regard, but I see no problem with bringing together the work of different authors.

Thank You :) You are a great help!

Hello Florian, I’m using Positivism as lens to analyse some climate change articles. Will you call this discourse analysis and can I use your suggested tools/approach?

Hi Joseph, interesting topic, but I’m a bit confused about what you mean by ‘positivism’. Positivism is usually a broader epistemological framework (so: a set of ideas related to how we can know things about the world around us). Its major claim is that we can make statements about reality and then check them with scientific methods to verify whether they are true. Positivism is all about explaining the world, and as such it contrasts with other frameworks, like hermeneutics (which is about understanding the world) or critical theory (which is about judging the world). Discourse analysis is a research method, and as such you can use it in a positivist way, but it can also be used in a hermeneutical or critical way. It depends what you do with it. So the short answer is: yes, you can formulate hypotheses and then test them, using discourse analysis. Not sure whether this is what you were planning to do, but if it is, you can deploy the tools I’ve outlined above. Hope this helps.

I think that discourse analysis may help me demonstrate how language is used to distinguish between insiders and outsiders within the discipline of archaeology. I am particularly interested in how the use of language differs between amateur and professional archaeologists in conversation, analysis of material culture, and publications. Finally, I want to explore how the professionalization of archaeology within the academy has entrenched this divide through language, especially the creation of specific terms and types of discourse–practical versus theoretical. Are you aware of anyone using discourse analysis in this manner?

Hi Dana, This sounds like a fantastic topic. I am not aware of anyone looking at archaeology in this way, though that does not mean it hasn’t been done at all. It might be worth checking the history of science to see if this has been part of their focus at all. In terms of discourse theory, your ideas are very close to the conceptual arguments that Foucault makes (and he has looked at various sciences to explore precisely such questions). You may have already looked at his work. In a practical sense, much of what you describe is indeed the focus of discourse analysis, and you might find Paul Chilton interesting here. He discusses communication strategies in detail, and I recall this also includes how in-groups and out-groups are constructed through language. Let me know what you find! This is very exciting.

Hi Dear, Actually, I am working on analyzing caricature am not sure which theory I can apply to my analysis. I want to analyze the rhetorical devices used so which theory would suit that and what title could I give to my project? tnx

Hi, Have you looked at research in visual analysis ? It’s possible that you’ll also find van Leeuwen’s work on social semiotics useful. You could also check what theories about humor have to say about caricatures more generally. The work by John Morreall is very good in this regard, and the edited volume he brought out on that topic is a good introduction.

Hi, I wanted to ask your suggestion for discourse analysis method in a research on ethnocide in specific region which involves the future role of the youths. Which specific areas should I be most careful about and what could be the procedure?

Thanks in advance

This is a difficult question. I’m not sure what you mean by the future role of the youths. Overall, your project will depend on your source materials and what you hope to find out. If you are planning to explore language practices, I’d check how protagonists and antagonists are established through communication, and what metaphors or analogies get used.

Hello! Thank you very much for such a useful post! I am conducting currently a research for my MA thesis about the graffiti protest language in the central Athens during the crisis. I have a satisfactory data corpus of 1500 pictures and also I have conducted 8 interviews with the graffiti protest artists. I am applying visual semiotics and multimodal discourse analysis in my paper. Could you give me some tipps?

Hi George, This sounds like a fantastic project, and you clearly already have the materials and your approach sorted out. I’m not sure how I can still help at this point: I would have also recommended a visual semiotics approach. If you haven’t done so already, take a look at my post here on this website on visual communication analysis – I suspect, judging by what you write, that it will be too basic for you at this stage, though. The only advice I have is to not try and do too much. This sounds like a lot of material for an MA thesis, so you will have to carefully narrow done what your analysis will actually focus on. Other than that, this sounds very promising. Let me know how it turns out!

Hello Florian,

Thank you for your kind words! I know that the material that I have already collected, including my photographic corpus and the interview data, are quite a lot for an MA thesis. That’s why I sorted my data out in distinct thematic coding categories considering their thematic frequency and then, I decided to analyze indicatively some instances of each category. The point is that I have applied the visual semiotic approach and I tried to connect it with the multimodal approach, as it is introduced by Kress & Van Leeuwen (Grammar of Visual Design). Do you think that it is a good way to approach the graffiti language? Also, I saw in your post you recommended to me that the main think that I should do is to include the part “Questions to ask of an image.” I realize that I have already done it.

Thanks, George

Hi George, I normally recommend Kress & van Leeuwen for studies like this, so you are clearly working in a good direction. What you describe in terms of sorting the materials also sounds very sensible, so it looks like you’ll have a good set of ‘data’ that you can justify using in the end. In short: it sounds like you are all set to dig into your materials and write this all up. I’m sure this will be great. Best Florian

Thank you very much Florian! I will let you know if anything makes me confused.

Best, George

dear SIR, I managed to combine an analysis on both the use of acronyms and visual image since I saw works on particles and images…Could that be!!!

Hi Sara, I’m not entirely sure what you mean – do you mean that there’s already been research on a topic that is similar to yours? Because that would be a good sign. It would indeed seem plausible that other scholars would look at how specific rhetorical devices or grammatical elements work in conjuncture with images. If you find work like that, I would recommend following its example. Best Florian

Thank you for this very informative post! I am currently writing my BA dissertation on left-wing terrorism in the 1970s and early 80s in Italy and France, focusing on two specific organisations (e.i Red Brigades and Action Directe) and I have set as my main objective for this paper to investigate into the internal factors, which could help explain these organisations’ escalating use of political violence over time.

As I understand that a discourse analysis can allow one to understand how “specific actors construct an argument, and how this argument fits into wider social practices” and also can demonstrate “what kind of statements actors try to establish as self-evident and true”, I was thinking that I might be able to use such method to analyse carefully selected communiques and theoretical reflections written and published by the Red Brigades and Action Directe organisations to analyse how the themes, structure and type of language contained in such textual productions changed over time and how specific statements might have impacted wider social practices, which in this case, given the type of subculture that clandestine organisations create for themselves, would refer to the impact the framing of these texts had on the organisation’s mentality, on its members’ approach to the use of violence and on their vision of the enemy.

If you can, I would greatly appreciate if you could tell me whether or not you think that would be a feasible approach for my dissertation. Thank you in advance!

Hi Clemence, This sounds like a very cool project, but also one that is quite ambitious. You’ll have to be careful not to do too much. I could easily see this topic working out at the level of an MA or even a PhD. Make sure to check with your supervisor what is feasible and what is expected of you by your institute. For instance, I love the idea of tracking changes over time, but this can be very labour-intensive work. You’ll have to present a rationale for drawing up your time-line, you’ll have to justify which moments in time you will study, and then you’ll have to go over quite a bit of text, comparatively, to make your case. If you think the topic easily lends itself to something like this (e.g. if there has been good work on ‘periods’ of activity that you can easily use for your own study), then by all means: go ahead and try your hand at such a comparison. Personally, I would probably advise my own BA students to establish what the situation was like at a specific point in time, particularly if they are looking at more than one source (not to mention: different languages). You could still compare, for instance between two specific organizations in France and Italy, respectively, but to then _also_ compare over time might end up being too much work. That said, what you have outlined here sounds very promising, particularly the idea of studying the discourse on violence and/or on who the antagonists are. Discourse analysis should be a great tool for this sort of thing. I wish you much success with this project, and of course: have fun! Best Florian

Dear, what I meant is that there are scholars in linguistics who worked on a pragmatic analysis on the phrasal verbs in cartoons. what I would like to look into is Abbreviations or acronyms functions in image to see how the message is built by both or the attiudes of the one who made it,,,would it sound as a good ideas?

Ah, I see. I’m not a linguist myself, so you’ll have to talk to your supervisor to be sure, but what you describe sounds perfectly plausible to me. Best – F

hi Florian, I am doing my MA research on a Discourse analysis of newspaper editorials on the Charlie Hebdo attack, using the US, Uk, Middle East and African newspaper editorials.(a total of 12 papers in all; 3 grom each region). Please can you give me your opinion on how to apply DA to such a topic?

Hi Chris, this sounds like a very promising project, and you have a manageable set of materials, which is good. What I would do, is first code the materials (step 4 above) and then see how much of step 8 might help you in your analysis. Twelve articles isn’t too much, so you should be able to code each sentence, or at least each paragraph, and then go into the text to find out what language each publication uses to frame the topic. I would in particular check who the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ in the stories are, and what statements are presented as self-evident. Also, I would check how different topics get connected in the texts, e.g. migration, religion, violence, freedom of speech, etc. If you are then able to connect the different discursive practices back to the institutional background of each publication, that would be a very interest thesis. But do make sure to check with your supervisor where he or she would like your focus to lie on this. At any rate, hope this helps!

So glad I found this! you’re a natural at this stuff! I am attempting a discourse analysis of medical text (chapters from text books) and published clinical guidelines to understand how childhood is constructed in these texts. ofcourse I would be using latest editions and updated guidelines. So in this case, do I also go about understanding for example the backgrounds of the authors of the text book? (in this case practicing clinicians/academics)? What else would you recommend in terms of establishing the context? Also, when the researcher arrives with an “agenda” , in this case I have apriori assumptions about the discourse I will find which is basically a discourse that is not aligned with the new sociology of childhood. How does this affect my analysis.

Thank you Florian!

Well, how strongly you want to explore the institutional background of your texts (including the autobiographical details of the authors) depends a bit on your specific research interests and questions, as well as on how much time you have for your project. It seems to me that you are mostly interested in the texts themselves, in which case it might be asking to much to try and interview the authors or track down their CVs to infer how their life stories affected what they write. I would take a brief look at the institutional settings in which they work and publish, and I would keep an eye out for moments where this might be reflected in the materials, but I would otherwise concentrate on the texts themselves. As for your own agenda, every researcher has expectations as to what they will find or not, so you could simply make these expectations explicit at the outset. You could even phrase your expectations as a hypothesis. What is important, however, is that you actively look for examples from your data that runs contrary to your expectations. If you can convincingly show that you have done so, then arriving at a conclusion that is in line with your expectations does not disqualify your work. Just try to be honest about your own views and fair/balanced in how you assess your materials.

Dear Florian!

I tried to read all the questions, but in the end there were far too many, so please forgive me if this question was already put. I read Reiner Keller, Foucault and (long time ago) Jäger, but I felt that many texts were not very explicit on what practical work steps they would recommend in order to analyze a certain text. Furthermore I found it very hard to distinguish discourse analysis from critical discourse analysis, even tho Keller claims that the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD) differs from CDA. Furthermore your way of conducting CDA reminds me of Mayrings’ qualitative content analysis. So I was wondering if you could emphasize the differences between CDA, DA, SKAD and qualitative content analysis. Thank you for your enlightening article! I’m looking forward to hearing from you! Kind regards from Austria,

Dear Isabelle, You are right to be frustrated: the distinctions between different DA approaches are often not clear, and most authors indeed don’t provide practical advice for students. That has in part been my motivation for putting together this post. As for the difference between various kinds of discourse analysis, I’ll try to keep it short – the topic would deserve a full blog post in its own right. First off, I am not very familiar with SKAD, so I can’t comment on Keller’s work here. I find it useful to see ‘discourse analysis’ as a broad category of approaches to communication, each of which concerns itself with the socio-psychological dimensions of communication practices. All discourse analysis approaches own something or other to linguistics, but the difference there is that discourse analysis is interested primarily in semantics and their social contexts and implications rather than in phonetics, phonology, or morphology. Within discourse analysis, you then get a sizable range of different approaches, some of which focus on specific realms of communication (e.g. political discourse analysis), others drawing from specific theoretical frameworks (e.g. post-Marxist approaches). CDA is one such discourse analysis approach, and it distinguishes itself by looking primarily at how language (and communication) interacts with ideology. In this, CDA stands in the tradition of the Frankfurt School and its Critical Theory. The aim in CDA (at least originally) is to unmask power relations and explore how dominance and resistance work through language. I usually tell students to think of any ‘science’ (that is: Wissenschaft) in the way that Habermas does: as either interested in explaining something (analytical), understanding what something means (hermeneutics), or evaluating and judging something (critical). In that sense, there are discourse analyses that are more analytical, for instance those that applying more formal approaches from socio-linguistics to establish how language works in a particular text. I myself was originally trained more in an arts and humanities context, meaning that hermeneutics have played a big role in how I make sense of communication analysis, and this is probably why you recognize the connection to Mayring, whose hermeneutic coding model I use extensively. CDA falls in the third category, which is probably why Keller sets himself and his work apart from such approaches. I imagine he is more interested in analytical DA than in critical DA (but you would have to ask him). In any case, no approach falls squarely only in one category (analytical, hermeneutic, critical), and most authors will position themselves between these categories. Nevertheless, the focus can help us understand what the intentions and the methods of a specific approach are. So, in short, all approaches to discourse analysis have a lot in common, particularly when it comes to the assumption that language interacts with social practices, and that we can study communication to understand how worldviews are reflected in and constituted through communication practices. They differ, however, in their emphasis of analytical, hermeneutic, and critical elements, with CDA traditionally being more in the critical theory corner than other approaches. The story of course gets even more complicated when you look at the individual authors and their work (not all CDA is the same, for instance), but I hope this very brief explanation helps. As you can probably tell, I am also perpetually struggling to make sense of DA and of who is arguing what in the field… All the best Florian

Thank you very much for putting it in a nutshell! I admire your ability to get to the heart of the problem! Thank you for your help! It helped me a lot!

Kind regards from Vienna, Isabelle

I’m doing a phd research on political discourse, I’d like to get the trail of Nvivo, but couldn’t, the website is always unaccessible.

Can u pleaaaaaaaaase help

Hi Sara, I’m not entirely sure what you mean – are you trying to get the 14-day trial software and the website is down? I myself don’t work for QSR, so I can’t help you there. You could try their forum ( http://forums.qsrinternational.com/ ) or their support department ( http://www.qsrinternational.com/Support/Contact-Support ), or you could contact your university department and see if they can acquire NVivo for you (…most universities have a subscription, so you’d have to talk to your uni’s IT people or the library personal to see how you can get access – that might be the best way to test the software). Sorry to not be of more help.

Hi, i am writing a paper on an aspect of discourse in social life to demonstrate how persuasive power is conveyed through language.

I need to define a topic which is suitable for me to do the paper. And i found two topic that i am interested in. First one would be “The influence of Discourse on Animal Industries”, the second one would be “The influence of Discourse on animal adoption”.

I am so confusing about which topic is better for my paper. Because i am afraid of it is not clear enough to express the message and there is a limitation on adoption that a few discourse theories and concepts could talk about it.

Hi Cherrie, I’m not sure I can help you, since I don’t know enough about these two topics, or what the limitations are that you are confronted with. Maybe a more general comment will help: I would always try to find a case that has a good range of data and that promises to answer the question you have. The question of how ‘power is conveyed through language’ is very general, so you’ll have to narrow that down and make it a question specifically about animal discourses. Once you’ve clarified for yourself what you hope to explore, you’ll (hopefully) be able to establish which of the two topics is more feasible. This may not have to mean that other authors have written a lot about the subject (it would in fact be great research if you were the first to examine a topic like that in this way), but you do need to have access to a good body of texts that you can then analyse. You know the two topics better than I do, so ask yourself: which lends itself better to explore how different actors use their institutional power to shape the discourse on animals? Hope this is helpful. Good luck with the project! Best Florian

Thank you so much for this very useful article. It does help me a lot to understand what the DA is.

Best regards, Eni

Glad you found this useful. Thanks for the positive feedback!

Dear Florian, I need an approach that is suitable besides the semiotics for the analysis of the linguistic and visual modes of cartoons. Could you help please?

Dear Sara, I’m not an expert on other approaches to comics, but you could take a look at some of the contributions in Jaqueline Berndt’s edited book ‘Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Towards Scholarship on a Global Scale’ ( http://bit.ly/1OrFdyR ). There should be a lot of inspiration in there that could help you.

Hello Florian! Thank you very much for the inspiring articles and youtube videos. I will soon start writing my dissertation, but I am somehow struggling in finding a sharp distinction between discourse and narrative analysis. Especially since I tend not to interpret the latter according to Somers and Gibson’s (1994) distinction between ontological/public narratives – so both the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and the ones we share with others. Thus, wonder whether for example an interview where the interviewed says something about his/her past and the way he/she perceives him/herself as part of a community, can be regarded as a narrative and at the same time – focusing on the words used and the implications that these words carry – as suggesting a specific discourse. Hope you can somehow clarify the distinction :)

Thank you very much!

Hi Valeria, I think you have already described correctly what the difference (but also the connection) between narrative and discourse is. I have not worked with Somers and Gibson’s framework, but what you outline makes a lot of sense to me. In my understanding, discourse constructs knowledge through language (or more broadly: through communication), and it consequently underlies our narratives. It is a resource we draw upon as we narrate. Such a view makes it possible to analyse the discursive strategies that govern specific narratives, that is the language choices and communicative moves that subjects make in order to make their narratives ‘work’ (both within certain social contexts and psychologically for themselves). Depending on how you decide to differentiate between discourse and narrative, you should be able to justify in a dissertation why you are focusing your analysis on one rather than the other, or when and why you plan to analyze both of these dimensions. I hope this helps. Let me know how your project goes. All the best Florian

Thanks a lot Florian! I also have the distinction as well as connection between the two concepts much clearer in my mind now. Will keep checking the website for interesting updates :)

All the best

My name is Lisa and I’m a Belgian masterstudent in translation. I’m doing my dissertation about the translation of the same information for different newspapers. I’m going to evaluate the influence of a different translation (or representation) on the broader image of a certain article on a newstopic. Comparing French and Belgian newspapers, always going back to the source (the press agencies).

I thought discourse analysis would be a good method to study this but I find so much information that I’m starting to doubt. I think I could use a lot of steps of your toolbox but I’m not sure how I could link this to the translation.

Could you maybe help me/explain?

Hi Lisa, It sounds to me that what you are working on is mostly a case of intertextuality – of source materials getting referenced or re-used in other contexts. Discourse analysis is also interested in intertextuality, but as a method it looks at many more issues as well: word groups, use of evidentiality, use of passive phrases, etc. It doesn’t seem that you’ll need these other angles in your analysis. You could still draw from discourse theory, if you find the general conceptual framework interest: the idea that social reality is constructed to no small degree through communication. That said, I would probably stick to the frameworks you’ve been using in translation studies, and would then make it explicit that you are interested in this particular case of intertextual translation. Just a thought. At the end of the day, I would always advise that you discuss this with your supervisors, since they will be the ones grading your effort. Good luck with the thesis! Florian

I’m so pressured. We are supposed to write a discourse paper for 5 theories of developmental psychology namely, Piaget’s, Erikson’s, Levinson, Freud and Bronfenbenners.

We were given 2 day ( TWO DAYS!) to write a discourse paper of each plus another discourse paper combining all of the theories.

I’m still new to this thing. I don’t even know what Discourse paper is until I searched it online.

Please help me. How do I do it in a beginner’s eye view? This seems so complicated, I don’t know if this is what our professor meant with Discourse paper….she did not further elaborate it, she just told us that it is an argument and that we should search more online.

this is driving me crazy.

Hi Jen, This is indeed a tough one. I’m not sure how to help – it seems like the assignment is missing important information. Frankly, I can’t imagine your professor has an actual ‘discourse analysis’ in mind for a paper like this. Such an analysis would mean that you go over the works of these authors in detail and try to isolate how they wrote about different issues, what concepts they developed, which assumptions informed their work, and so on. I can’t imagine anyone doing that sort of work within two days. She probably has a very specific idea of what a ‘discourse paper’ is, but without her elaborating on this, it’s impossible to be sure. What I would do is outline what the major theoretical arguments are that the four psychologists make in the sources that you have at your disposal. I would make it clear that you are interested in their ‘discursive position’, that is their position within broader debates and frameworks of understanding that constitute developmental psychology. I would also point out that you are not going to be able to conduct a full-scale, detailed discourse analysis (maybe mention what kind of linguistic dimensions such an analysis would examine, and provide a reference or two – see this post for more info), but that future research could take such an angle to follow up on what you are writing in your paper (e.g. look at a particular concept that all these authors use and then explore how exactly they frame that concept in their language practices). This will all, by necessity, be rather rudimentary, and will resemble a literature review much more than a discourse analysis. Again, I hesitate a bit to give you concrete advice, since I simply don’t know what the basis for your grading will be. It’s entirely possible that doing what I just outlined is precisely _not_ what your professor has in mind. I know this doesn’t help you, but rest assured I find this assignment as confusing as you do. Are you sure your instructor did not leave more information for you, e.g. in the course description or in any supporting materials? I would check with my fellow students and see what they took away from the assignment, just to be sure. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that you are able to put something together that will get you your credits. Sorry to hear this is such a drag. Developmental psychology is amazingly interesting. I hope this experience doesn’t discourage you from following this subject. Best Florian

Thanks for answering. Yep, there were no other instructions. Just that, we need to write a discourse paper about these theories…anyways, thank you so much for answering and even though you think you didn’t help at all, I was actually beginning to see what a discourse paper is. I would put your advice into heart. :)

Glad to hear I could help. Good luck with the assignment! I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it goes well.

Hi. Am a Kenyan P.h.D student. Am encouraged by the replies that you have given. I would want to do a CDA of interaction in a special needs class focussing on repair, turn-taking and word selection. Do you think it’s viable? How should I go about it? Should it take a qualitative or quantitative approach? Is it enough or too limiting for P.h.D level? Many questions but I would appreciate any help I can get. Merry Christmas!

Hi Grace, My apologies for only responding now, but as you may have already guessed, I was away over Christmas and New Year’s. What you propose sounds like a great study. You’ll of course have to check with your supervisor, but this strikes me as an eminently feasible PhD project. It will depend a bit on the number of research subjects you’ll be monitoring, as well as the time you’ll spend with them, but overall this seems doable. Methodologically, I would probably aim for a qualitative approach, which could combine participant observation, focus group sessions, and individual interviews. I’m not a health researcher myself, but do check the literature from professionals in that field. Discourse analysis is a common methodology in that area, so you should be able to find interesting templates for what others have done in similar situations. Good luck with the project! Best Florian

hi. would you please tell me how Discourse Analysis is related to TEFL(teaching english as a ….)? so many thanks in advance

Hi there, I’m not sure I’ve understood your question. Discourse analysis is mainly a research tool for studying how communication processes work and how they relate to social and political processes. In that sense, one could conduct a discourse analysis of a specific TEFL programme works, for instance by recording teaching sessions and then analyzing the communication patters in the interactions. I’m not sure whether that is what you have in mind? Discourse analysis can also be useful to create fair communication environments, for instance by reminding participants in a debate of their discourse moves and urging them to not make manipulative rhetorical statements. I could imagine a similar approach being applied to pedagogical situations, but that would be more a matter of practice than of analysis.

For a paper I am currently writing I use discourse analysis to examine both the Truman doctrine and the Bush doctrine (particulary the speech he gave in a joint session of congres). In step 8 you explain ‘word groups’, but I find it hard to explain how the dimplomatic/miltairy language is of importance. From a US president you would expect this kind of vocabulary, so are these word groups relevant in this case? Thank you for this clear and helpful toolbox!

Hi there, Interesting topic, and you’ll of course have to decide for yourself whether work step 8 is useful in this regard, but I could imagine it still might be. The main issue is not whether the two doctrines use military language to describe military actions (that might indeed not be extremely interesting), but to check what language they use on certain subjects. For instance, you might find that military language gets deployed to describe things that are not at all military in nature, for instance economics. Or maybe military metaphors and such get used only with regards to certain actors in international relations, but not with regards to others. Or you might find a completely different set of words used to describe military engagements, for instance highly technical jargon or a language that describes international relations in terms of a game. I would also try to find out when and where certain choices of vocabulary tend to meet your expectations, that is: when do they seem ‘unsurprising’ and why? That, in itself, is a strategic choice on the part of the policy writers: making the language seem natural or appropriate. But how exactly do the writers manage to get this sentiment across? This might be worth asking as well. Hope this helps!

Hello Florian, I’m Betty from Nigeria. Thanks for your article. It’s insightful and helpful. I’m currently working on a PhD thesis. My tentative theoretical framework is a combination of pragmatics and critical discourse analysis while my text of study comprises parables in the New Testament Gospels of the Bible. Please what would you suggest as an effective thesis topic and what argument would effectively communicte the essence of the study. Thanks.

Hi Betty, I’m sadly quite ill-informed about the state-of-the-field in religious studies, which is probably an area of literature your work would need to connect with. So, in terms of effective topic and research question, I would let the concerns and debates in the relevant secondary literature guide my choice. From a discourse analysis perspective, I could imagine two lines of questions that might be interesting, though you will of course have to decide which of these are useful to you. The first is how the original biblical text has been translated into other languages and into more modern versions. This is more of a translation-studies question, but it ties in with discourse theory, since the concepts and ideas in the Gospels are shaped by language choices. Another question would be how the Gospel texts are used, inter-textually, in other media or at other levels of discourse. For instance, do politicians or news media or artists use/quote the New Testament in certain contexts, and if so: how do they strategically use text passages to make their point? The trick for such a topic would be to narrow your materials down effectively. You’d have to chose a ‘level of discourse’ from a specific time and place, and you’d have to do a little bit of preliminary research to see what would yield interesting cases. These are all issues I’d recommend you discuss with your supervisor(s). Their expertise will likely guide your topical focus as well, and they may have completely different questions when it comes to biblical sources. Nevertheless, I hope these relatively random thoughts are still helpful. Good luck with the project! Best – F

Hello Florian, Thank you for your well-informed exposition in this article. I learned a lot from it. Am a PhD candidate in Applied linguistics, from Cameroon, studying in Bangkok and intending to research on a linguistic discourse analysis of language use in political interviews in Cameroon. I intend looking at political interviews in newspapers to be able to know how politicians use language eg to avoid questions. Could analyzing the data using political rhetoric, (im)politeness strategies and propaganda language paradigms a good choice for a research of this kind? What will you advise to be the theoretical framework for this study and what could possibly be the analytical paradigm to adopt in this research?

Thanks for this opportunity as I await your response.

Hi Eric, Glad you liked the post. Sounds like you are working on a very interesting topic. What you outline makes a lot of sense to me. For additional inspiration, you could take a look at Paul Chilton’s book on ‘ Analysing Political Discourse ‘. There’s a lot of useful material in there, for instance on radio interviews, and the book outlines issues like linguistic strategies and performance. I can also recommend the two edited books by Ruth Wodak (you may have seen the links in the comment section above): Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (which includes conceptual pieces by some of the leading people in the field, like Fairclough, van Dijk, Jaeger, van Leeuwen, and Wodak herself) and Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Science (which includes helpful examples of media-specific analyses – I could imagine that chapter 2 on newspaper analysis and chapter 5 on political rhetoric would be interesting for you). I hope these tips help! Good luck with the project.

Hello Florian, Thanks greatly for this significant input and enlightenment on my research project. It has really shape my perspective on the research. Will revert back to you as I move on. Thanks for this unique forum.

Hello! My name is Christina and I am currently carrying out my research for my MA thesis in Linguistics at Lund University.

I am going to apply Discourse Analysis as the main theoretical and methodological framework in order to investigate the Greek action and mind in times of Greek Referendum (July 5 2015) analyzing twitter posts (Twitter case study).

My main uneassiness is about how the Greek people expressed broadly themselves (i.e. political thoughts, actions, inquires) before the day of July 5 (June 25 – July 5) on the one strand, and how they expressed themselves the day after (July 6) via posting.

However, I have some difficulty concerning the methodological pathway that I should follow in order to achieve an objective and intersubjective goal (avoid subjective interpretations).

Any suggestions, comments and advises according to theory/methodology are much appreciated!

Thanks, Christina

Hi Christina, Looking at Twitter discourse on the Greek referendum sounds like a very promising project. I’m not sure how to help regarding your question. Do you mean: how can you assure that your research isn’t informed by your own bias? Personally, I don’t believe that it is possible to do ‘objective’ research; in fact, claiming ‘objectivity’ is itself an ideologically-informed strategic decision. I believe that the most we can aim for is honest, well-balanced, and fair research, meaning that you considered all sides to an issue and that you do not obscure how your personal views shaped your choice of topic, materials, and methods. You’ll have to check with your supervisor as to what they expect (and there are colleagues who do believe research should be ‘objective’), but I would advise you to simply not jump to conclusions about your topic and to take the various voices you are studying seriously, even if they make arguments you strongly disagree with. If you set up clear and transparent work-steps for yourself on how to select tweets and what to look for in them, and if you explain these choices in your thesis, then you can keep yourself honest along the way and limit the degree with which your personal perspective framse the issue. You’ll never be entirely able to remove yourself from the study, though, and I don’t think you should. After all, this is an important topic, and you picked it because it means something to you. You might even add a prefix or a footnote in the introduction that outlines your own personal position, so that your readers (and assessors) know that you are aware of your positionality (this is the sort of thing that ethnographers do as a matter of course). But as I said: you’ll have to clarify with the people who will grade you to what degree your thesis may or may not be informed your own political judgement. I can’t comment on practices in linguistics. At any rate, let me know if I got your question right, or whether I misunderstood. All the best for your project!

Dear Florian! Thank you so much for your reply. I didn’t reply on time because i was examing carefully all the things you wrote. You really helped me with your advices. I will contact you again if i need anything and of course i will keep you posted about how my research is going,

Best Christina

Glad I could help!

Florian, do you have this in a chart?

I’m afraid not. Only the text version, my apologies.

aoa plz tell me any one about discourse analyse how can i complete our priject i have no idea which kind of disciurse i take how can i do it

Hello Dr Florian Schneider Thank you very much for your wonderful site. I am trying to do discourse analysis about the meaning of “food security” in Iran. How it is formed and developed, it is my phd thesis. I am trying to write my proposal and welcome your advice. Thanks /

Hi Sahar, This is a very broad question. I am not sure there’s much I can advise, especially since I am not very familiar with the case. It would probably be wise to pick a time-frame, an event, or something similar to narrow your scope. You’d have to do this based on your own understanding of the issue and Iran’s political history. Next, you’d have to decide what exactly you want your research question to be, ideally phrased in a way that you can then explore empirically (e.g. ‘what discourses do different Iranian government agencies draw from in their approach to food security’, or ‘how do different media outlets in Iran portray food security in their discourse’, or something like that). Based on that, you should then figure out what sources to use (news media? government reports? will the sources be printed, or will they include visual elements? Will they be digital?). This should then inform how you build a set of sources, and what work-steps you later apply to them (e.g. some of the work-steps I have outlined above). Sorry for being rather vague and general, but I hope this helps you get the topic started.

Thanks for your advice

Hi Florian, Thanks for sharing your thoughts and expertise here. They have been really helpful and I have really learned from the questions posted and your replies to them.

Thanks Shawn, that’s very kind. :)

I am a Social Work PhD student analyzing a political document for an assignment in class. I am basically trying to examine how the text constructs certain bodies (public housing residents). Would focusing only on linguistic and rhetorical mechanisms (# 8) be sufficient enough to produce a good enough analysis? You mention that it is useful to focus on particular aspects of discourse analysis when doing projects other than theses and dissertations. The main objective of my project is to highlight the mechanisms used to construct [representations of] public housing residents.

Thanks in advance,

Hi Rachel, I think the answer to your question depends somewhat on the source materials you are using, and on the precise nature of the assignment. For a short assignment, I would indeed focus on one aspect that you think will yield the most interesting results, or I would start with a brief survey of the material and then ‘zoom in’ on a specific discursive mechanism or type of statement. If you are working with (a small number of) textual sources, then a single work-step might indeed suffice, as long as you explain your choice and point out what other aspects might be worth analysing in follow-up studies. Which linguistic features then provide the most interesting angle will very much depend on the kind of text you are using. In speeches and carefully crafted policy documents, rhetorical figures might be the most useful thing to look for. In most cases, a look at the different actors, at passive phrases, and at evidentiality markers should probably get you started.

Dear Dr. Florian,

I ran across your posts on how to do a discourse analysis and wish that I could have seen them much earlier. :) Thank you very much for your clear and concise explanation on discourse analysis. Your posts are very helpful and inspire me to further examine the issue. I am doing PhD in Japan on sustainability science, and working on a research on a transition to low-carbon energy future. My research question is how the Oil and Gas companies legitimize their green investment in renewable energy. Due to my background in political science, I have applied discourse analysis on the business strategies. As for as I am concerned, the discourse analysis has not been employed much in the study of corporate actors’ decision making, but more on politicians’ statements or government policy. In so doing, I collected all annual reports of targeted Oil and Gas companies which are available in their websites, and analyzed them to find out which discourses on green energy investment have been repeated the most. The findings are quite interesting. They are not only revealing conventional discourses such as national energy security and environmental friendly products promotion but also a group of novel discourses which are exclusively found in the case of O&G industry, such as the risk of crude oil volatility. Anyway, recently I had chance to present the findings to one scholar and received one provoking question that how can we know that the companies really did investment according to discourses as they wrote in the annual reports given the fact that the text in annual reports may be just Public Relation of the companies. I responded to the scholar by saying that I would conduct semi-structured interview with companies executives to triangulate the text and the talk. However, after been thinking through his question, I then realize that both text and talk can be a PR thing of the companies too, and certainly are discursive. It is like asking which one is more strawberry, between strawberry ice-cream and strawberry jam. So may I ask your opinion on the issue? Do you think it is feasible theory-wise to say that discourses from the talk is more ‘true’ than the discourse in written text or vice versa?

Thank you very much. Best regards, Waen

Dear Waen, Thanks for the kind words. I’m happy to hear you found these articles useful. The question you pose is indeed difficult to answer. My short response would be that there is nothing intrinsic to speech or text that makes either ‘more’ legitimate or honest or ‘real’ than the other. That said, it is important to note that different sources have different functions, and that they consequently present different kinds of positions (PR is not the same as an internal company report, for instance). The context matters, though establishing that context would have to rely on other kinds of research like a good literature review, online queries, etc. Discourse analysis itself can never fully establish what specific intentions are or what the people engaged in discourse are actually thinking. From a strict discourse-theoretical perspective, these intentions and thoughts do not really matter. All that matters is how different agents shape the ‘truths’ of the topic. From that perspective, the documents you are analysing aren’t interesting because they tell you what the companies are actually doing. They are interesting because they demonstrate how the companies ‘make sense’ of what they are doing. The focus here is on their conceptual labour and how this discursive work informs conceptions of green energy, production processes, etc. Whether their statements are genuine or ‘just’ PR is secondary. At any rate, if we wanted to establish intentions or deep thoughts about such things, we would have to do so through other research approaches, for example trick questions in surveys, psychological experiments, etc. With these limitations in mind, I have to admit that I do indeed think personal interviews can add information that isn’t just ‘discursive’. For instance, you can use interviews to ‘fact-check’ certain processes and procedures, especially if you have several sources that confirm how specific things work, e.g. in a company. It can also happen that you have personal conversations with informants who give you the non-official story on a specific issue or topic – their speech acts are still types of performances, but some of the information they are using to make those speech acts will nonetheless provide you with an inside perspective on the issue itself. So in that sense, I find interviews a useful way to explore the social practices ‘behind’ the discourse and establish what the factual parameters are that agents then act in. I hope this helps! Good luck with this fascinating PhD project. All the best FS

Thank you very much for your profound answers and suggestion. I feel more confident of what I am doing thanks to your clear explanation on the issue I raised. Also I do agree with your opinion on conducting interviews with key informants of the companies. I may have to finish discourse analysis on annual reports of all targeted companies in three countries before I make a move to ask for interviews. One more question I would like to ask you please. I am wondering what is the next step after we have critical understanding on the discourses employed in the media, or by politicians or even companies. According to my study in sustainability science, we would like to make changes and bring positive impact on unsustainable society. It is to say that we have a political obligation apart from doing a research and shedding light on the issue in question. Regarding this, could you please share some thoughts on the policy implications of the study of discourses in general? I am sorry if my question is out of question in the perspective of the discourse theory…

Thank you very much again. Best regards, Waen

Dear Waen, I personally think that as researchers we do indeed have an ethical obligation to intervene in problematic social practices that we spot through our analyses, for instance by sharing our findings with the broader public in accessible ways. This can of course also include policy advice or collaborations with non-governmental actors. I do have one caveat: as researchers who focus on human societies, we should remain aware that our interventions end up shaping the very thing we study. Sometimes such influences are minor, but in some cases they can develop a life of their own. This can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, for instance when scholars of a particular theoretical conviction successfully advise governments to behave in specific ways and then view this outcome as proof of the theoretical model that informed their own advice. Think of the influence that realist thinkers had on Cold War politics, which arguably created and reinforced the very ‘balance of power’ that realism also claimed to explain. In my view, the best way to shield against such outcomes is to be transparent and honest in one’s own research, and to clearly declare biases and conflicts of interests in academic publications. I would also advise against making predictions, which I think are very difficult to defend in social research, even though they are frequently demanded by funding bodies. This is where it is important, I believe, to point out to stakeholders that we are doing social research, not physics, and that this changes the degree to which research can predict outcomes, yet without making the research any less valid (after all, the theory of ‘evolution’ is also poor at predicting outcomes, but it’s nevertheless a great tool for explaining how life works…). So that’s my two cents on our responsibility to intervene and on the idea of ‘valorizing’ research in social studies… Best – Florian

[…] How to do a Discourse Analysis. […]

Hi there, I am doing an undergraduate dissertation on looking into whether there is a moral panic surrounding youth gangs in the UK or whether this is a reality. Therefore I am using critical discourse analysis to analyse the language of the british media to uncover how they sensualise and exaggerate the problem. Thank you for your direct and clear explanation of what to include when carrying out this method.

Just wanted to ask how you would explain in words the impact a news article can have that makes them seem more valid if it includes official crime statistics or direct speech from members of authority such as police etc on the issue? Thanks! – Paige

Hi Paige, I’m very sorry that I couldn’t write earlier. It’s the height of the semester here, so I’m swamped a bit. Sounds like you’re working on an interesting project. You’ve probably already moved on over the past two weeks, but just to still answer your question: I would say that using statistics (particularly official ones) is an appeal to factuality, and that such appeals are meant to legitimate the position of the speaker/writer. This of course does not mean that ‘facts’ are the same thing as ‘truths’, but they are resources from which people construct their version of the truth, and they can be powerfully deployed to lend a sense of objectivity to a narrative. Using factual information like statistics can make it seem as though the speaker or writer is neutral on the issue they are discussing, when really neutral positions are themselves socially and communicatively constructed: choosing a particular question to discuss and emphasising specific facts over others is itself a position, after all. I hope this still helps! Good luck with the thesis. Best Florian

Is SPSS okay to use as a tool for discourse analysis?

Hey Paul, If you wanted to do a quantitative analysis of word correlations, you could of course use statistical software like SPSS. I’ve not done any analyses like this with SPSS, but I see no reason why the software couldn’t be re-purposed in this way. That said, I would always recommend also including some sort of qualitative analysis, in which case you’d need additional tools in addition to the statistics.

Hey Florian Schneide I am a university student I am required to do discourse analysis whatever the text is could help me how do it

Hi Khair, That sounds like a somewhat vague assignment. If you are indeed free to choose, then I would recommend that you pick a short online news article that sparked your interest recently, and that you then ‘test’ some of the work steps I have outlined above on that source. That should allow you to explore what a discourse analysis can do.

I have read your articles and responses to people’s queries and I can say that’s a great job you are doing. I am taking my MA-english and linguistics and would like you to suggest some interesting topics for research in discourse analysis or syntax. For discourse,I want to look at tourism. Your help will be appreciated.

Thanks for the kind words, and sorry for only replying now. It’s been a busy week. I’m not a linguist myself, so you’ll have to check with your supervisor what would make a good topic for your project, but if you are interested in tourism, why not analyze a tourism campaign that sparks your interest? I have student who is currently comparing Chinese tourism campaigns in foreign countries, and something similar would surely be a fun project for e.g. British, Australian, or US tourism campaigns. You could explore, for instance, what cultural categories a specific campaign draw up to present the respective country, and how that country then gets framed linguistically. You could also explore how the idea of ‘tourism’ is framed by different campaigns (e.g. what ideas of leisure, cultural interactions, etc. inform the campaigns)? I would normally also look at the visual component of such activities, but again: you’d have to see what is feasible within your programme. So: just a few suggestions, but maybe they’re useful.

thanks for you paper but would u mind giving me help to analyse Donald TRUMP discourse during these US presidential elections

thanks for your paper but would u mind giving me help to analyse Donald TRUMP discourse during these US presidential elections. thanks again

Hi Malik, I think you also asked this in the other thread, so I hope you found the answer I provided there useful. If you didn’t receive that answer, let me know, and I’ll repost here. Best – F

Sorry for the late reply. Have you seen this video ? It’s essentially a discourse analysis on the language that Trump uses. You could build on this by conducting a similar analysis for a specific speech or set of speeches.

Dear Sir, Hello and thanks a lot for sharing with us this information and listening to us patiently . I would like to examine public debate in Iran about” genetically modified organisms” . I am thinking of using Laclau and Mouffe discourse analysis. Could you please give me some advice and help. Thank you

Dear Sahra, This sounds exciting, but as a topic it’s still very broad. Laclau and Mouffe sound promising, as does the topic of genetically modified organisms, but you’ll need to decide in what kind of context you plan to now study this, and also what your precise questions will be. What is it that you are trying to find out? For instance, you could ask what the discourse on such genetic modifications is in policy documents, or in the mainstream media, or in science blogs… once you take a look at some of those sources, you may even want to refine your question further and focus on something within the discourse that is intriguing. Without knowing more about the topic, it’s hard to give good advice, but I would encourage you to sample a couple of sources that interest you, and to then come up with a research question that can lead you further into the topic.

Brilliant! Thank you. I turned this into a sketchnote (kinda like this, but not as fancy http://online.focusky.com/pqnf/ipmj/files/extfiles/drag_2015128103041672.jpg ) in my notebook for fun, but I will definitely be returning to it time and again. Concise but hits on crucial points. Super helpful. ^_^

This is very cool. Thanks for sharing!

Dear Sir Hello again and thank you very much for your encouraging advice. I would like to look at public debate that is reflected in media and also in telegram groups. I am thinking that the debate reflects the political antagonism in the country, but I am not certain how I can formulate it as a research questions. Please let me thank you again for you advice and help

Dear Sahra, You may well be right about such antagonisms. I think there’s two ways you could approach the subject. The first is to identify communities that are likely to have a polarized opinion, and to then contrast what two such antagonistic groups say/write/do. Alternatively, you could pick a specific topic or event that you know has recently been part of public discussions, and you could then look at certain media outlets or political groups to see how they reacted to such a ‘discursive event’. In either case, I’d probably formulate a ‘how’ question; something like ‘how do X an Y contribute to the discourse on genetically modified organisms, in light of the recent case Z’. Maybe something like that would be feasible? You’ll still of course have to carefully justify who you are looking at, which event you picked, etc.

Dear Sir Thank you so much for your kind advice and help.Wish you are my adviser.

Thanks for your kind reply. You are such a priceless resource. Will look at the options given and work towards them.

Respected sir i don’t have words to express my feelings regarding your present page. it reminds me the qualities of the genuine great teachers and you are one of them. May you have the same loves,wishes and feelings from all of students throughout your life.

Thank you Muhammad, That is very kind and really means a lot.

Very useful. Thanks for sharing :)

Sure, no problem! :)

This is excellent! This article has given me a good introduction to discourse analysis to start my dissertation with. Thanks!

Mr Schneider this post is particularly helpful. Thank you for explaining how to go about doing DA so well! I was wondering if the same applies for visual discourse analysis. Even though I have read a lot I still struggle to understand whether visual discourse requires background research so as to better interpret the image. I am thinking of combining visual discourse with visual semiotics. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi Vili, Thanks for the encouraging feedback. To answer your question: I think discourse analysis extends seamlessly to visual materials, and I would indeed say semiotics is the way to go. Have you seen my blog post on that subject ? It discusses what additional issues might be important when doing a discourse analysis on materials such as images or videos. In short, I would say that discourse takes place in various ‘modes’ (a term I’m taking from Kress & Van Leeuwen’s work on semiotics and visual analysis), meaning it can take place textually (in written words), acoustically (spoken words, sounds, music), visually (images, movies, gestures, etc.), and possibly other modes as well (taste and smell come to mind). Oftentimes, discourse cuts across various modes simultaneously, and this is where an analysis then has to a) look at each mode to see what happens there, and b) connect the different modes to establish how discursive elements work together. I’ve provided some tools and tips in that other blog post for doing this in practice, e.g. using shot protocols for films. I’ve also pointing out that images of course also have a history, a production background, a reception context, and so on, and that this is where the discipline of iconography comes in very handy. If you want to learn more, I’d recommend checking out the contributions in Van Leeuwen’s edited volume ‘ Handbook of Visual Analysis ‘. Hope this helps!

Dear Dr Schneider, you are very welcome!

Thank you for the reply! If I am not taking up too much of your time I would like to ask you some more specific questions. I have realised that despite having read widely, the work of Kress and Van Leeuwen as you and some advisers at my uni suggest might help me unravel the mystery of visual discourse analysis. At the moment their books are unfortunately borrowed by another student. In the meantime I did read your blog-post on the matter. I am actually working with political cartoons and representations trough a ‘how’ question. My initial idea was to do Barthesian semiotics and then a professor suggested that I combine this with visual discourse analysis. However I have not found someone working with both to get a grasp of how to do this and the books I’ve read have not been enlightening to be honest. My main question is what is the difference between connotation and VDA? Barthesian semiotics does not require background research. Does VDA do? I mean citing along with interpreting what others have said? I know iconography employees background research. I am trying to understand if doing just Barthesian semiotics is interpreting the images as such with pre-exisitng knowledge and what would be the difference if I added discourse analysis to my method. I am also very confused about adding background knowledge which has not been part of the Literature Review in the discussion section. Would that be ok? Apparently according to our methods’ professors there are no specific guideliness with regard to visual analysis. Finally I am not looking at power and I am a bit scared of starting to write about Fucault or Fairclough in my methodology… Shall I rule out VDA? I would really appreciate your opinion!

Dear Dr.Florian,

Hope you are doing well. I once posted in your website a few months ago, about my PhD research on discourses of Oil and Gas companies in legitimizing their renewable energy investment. Since then I have continued working and found some challenges. May I ask for your kind support once more on my methodology? The thing is I would like to compare the discourses that five companies ( 3 from Thailand, 1 from Indonesia and 1 from Malaysia) use in their annual reports. I collected the annual reports from the first year until the latest year in the companies website. Then I identified the discourses on each renewable energy source that I found in the annual reports of each company. Then I counted the frequency of the discourses. For example, For Company A, I found that they use discourse on Energy security in total 10 times from the annual report in year 2001 until 2014 to justify their investment on biofuels, 7 times for discourse on economic benefit for company, and 4 times for discourses on climate change mitigation. I did the same with all companies and other renewable energy sources. My questions to ask for your advice is that 1) do you think I can use the frequency of the discourse to find out which discourse is more dominant in the perception of that company? If not, which approach should I use instead? 2) I wonder if this method in counting frequency of the discourse is acceptable in discourse analysis approach (given that I have a big amount of data to analyze: 54 annual reports from these five companies). I have difficulty in convincing other professors in my faculty on this method. One of criticism I got was that the frequency of discourses does not mean that the company really think that way. Anyway, apart from analyzing annual reports, I plan to interview stakeholders like companies, government and NGOs, and gain the talks data to triangulate what I found from the annual reports. What do you think of these methodologies? Thank you very much. Waen

Dear Waen, Thanks for following up on your project. Personally, I use word frequencies only as a starting point for my analyses, essentially to check how the discourse is roughly structured. I then go and check what the documents say in each case, since the qualitative differences might matter quite a bit. For instance, a speech by a politician might mention a particular concept only once, but if it makes a radical statement on that one occasion, it might matter far more than the hundreds of mentions that a popular but less revolutionary issue received in the same text. I think you can use the numbers you’ve gathered to show how there are indeed slightly different emphases between companies, but you’d have to justify these numbers by showing and explaining that your coding method is indeed systematic and consequently comparable across these cases. If you just counted word-frequencies, then this is (largely) unproblematic, since the terms you are counting are already in the text, for anyone to count just like you did. If, however, you are coding sections on other criteria (i.e. by identifying broader, thematic coding categories), then I’d be careful doing any calculations on the resulting numbers. The thing with thematic coding is that no two researchers are likely to have the exact same coding parameters, since each instance is a personal judgement of where and how to include the ‘discourse fragment’ in the broader coding matrix; the coding process is, in that sense, not necessarily ‘objective’ – it is something researchers do to the materials in order to distil order from the, in a hermeneutic fashion, based on both theoretical and empirical considerations. The number of such coding instances can still be interesting (again: provided your choices are indeed comparable), but I would not, for instance, now do advanced statistical analysis on the numerical aspects of the coding process, for instance by calculating correlations between topics, since this is not the kind of data that exists objectively ‘within’ the texts themselves; it is data that you created for your own analysis. So in short, depending on how you calculated your frequencies, I would use the numbers to highlight where the emphasis in different sources lies, according to my coding categories, and I would then follow up to see what statements the texts make, qualitatively.

As for the argument that the documents won’t tell you what the companies ‘think’, this is true for any discourse analysis (or content analysis more broadly, in fact). We can never know what anyone ‘really’ thinks, and certainly not based on what they said or wrote. However, that is not the point. The point is to see how actors contribute to communication practices through their discursive actions, and what concepts and relationships they adopt in their discourse. A radical discourse theorists might argue that it doesn’t matter what people (or companies, or governments) really ‘think’, it only matters what they express through their discourses and their social practices, since these are the only things we can actually judge them by. We cannot know anything beyond that. So I would always include a disclaimer in my writings to that effect, and I would never argue that the discourse analysis I conduct shows what someone ‘wants’, or ‘means’, or ‘thinks’. Exploring these issues would indeed require a very different kind of study (if these things can ever be established at all). I hope this is useful. All the best, Florian

Thank you so much for your profound explanation. You made very right point about how I counted those frequency. And to be honest, I am confused which way is correct. What I did is to identify discourse fragments and counted their frequency. I counted every same discourse fragment throughout one annual report. Then I would group those related discourse fragments into categories or discourse strands. Such as, I grouped “environmental friendly sources”, “reduce air pollution” and “reduce greenhouse gas emissions” under the theme “Environmental conservation”. Also I combined all frequency of those discourse fragments to make the frequency of the theme”Environmental conservation”. And you are very right that this grouping process is subjectivity. Me, as a researcher, grouped those fragments based on my interpretation. The case of environmental conservation is somehow easy to group. But there are other fragments that required interpretation to decide which theme they should belong to. I was also criticized at this grouping process, saying that I should have an objective method to group. Anyway, I used the frequency of each themes (discourse strands) to see which discourses appear to be relatively important for the company (this is based on my assumption that the more discourse was used, the more the company think about or is concerned about it.) as well as to compare between companies in three countries. In addition, I made a table to identify the change over year of those discourse fragments. From the first year of annual report to the latest year, I wrote which discourse fragment was used. This table helps me to see the dynamic of discourse and find out which year that the companies applied the most various discourse to justify their biofuel investment. Then I will go check what happened in the year, such as the world crude oil price was increased dramatically.

Above are my methodologies I have used. I am now considering other ways to count frequency. First way is counting the frequency of each discourse fragment like I did, 2) counting only when I found new discourse fragment. I mean, if I found the discourse fragment on “Biofuel is environmental friendly” 4 times in Year 2001, I would count these 4 times as “one” , or 3) counting all discourse fragments under the same theme as one. Such as, in year 2001, I would count all discourse fragments under the theme “Environmental conservation” as “one”. Each way will lead to different frequency number. Could you please suggest me which one that is correct? Regarding the comment on what company really thinks, I agree with you. However, since I am studying in sustainability science faculty, we are encouraged to provide policy recommendations based on our findings. As a result, I cannot simply say that I cannot know what the company really think or that it is not important to know “the real incentive of companies” (also I agree with you that such thing maybe not acquirable). Thank you very much again for your kindness. Best regards, Waen

Hi Waen, I’ll have to keep it short; there’s a lot in your comment that I’d love to discuss with you, but I’m sadly somewhat short on time. Just briefly: I would stick with the actual number of times that you identified a particular theme, rather than collapsing these numbers into binaries (‘yes’ vs ‘no’ on whether a theme occurred). It’s possible that the latter is also of value, but you’d have to demonstrate what you are trying to achieve by that. At any rate, you wouldn’t be measuring a ‘frequency’ any more, since frequencies look at number of occurrences during a specific time interval (which some scholars do indeed interpret as meaning: within a specific text or data sample). The trick here will be to explain and justify to your readers (and examiners) how you identified the specific themes (based on specific words that occurred? based on an analysis of the meaning within a sentence?), to assure them that you worked systematically in ways that can now be compared across samples, and to not run any quantitative procedures on those numbers or draw positivist conclusions from them that would require more objective data. Thanks again for sharing your thought process on this. I hope all goes well with the next phase of the project, and that you’ll be able to put together an argument that convinces your colleagues and supervisors at the department. All the best, Florian

Can I reference you on this step-by-step method? I.e. have you published this? If yes, what would it be?

Many thanks. I love your website!

Kind regards, Daniel Hummelsund

Hi Daniel, Glad you are finding this useful. I haven’t published the post in a journal, but you could simply reference the blog post: Schneider, Florian (2013, May 13), ‘How to Do a Discourse Analysis’. Politics East Asia, retrieved on [date] from [URL]. (or some version of this in a different referencing style). Best, Florian

[…] most popular blog post on my website, on how to do a discourse analysis, had 111,802 unique page views, out of 273,272 as a whole, and 349 comments. I’m quite proud […]

Dear, Florian, I am an MBA and was given an assignment on what is discourse analysis and how is it applied. I found your article very helpful. Incase there is something new I would like to hear from you.

Thanks Paul, I hope it helps with the assignment. There’s not much new to report, though you might find additional ideas, discussions, or even sources in the comment section of this article (if you’re willing to mine through it). Hope all goes well with your degree.

wonderfully presented, may I add that respresentations of news may use particualr syntactic forms like, Active/passive voice, ergatives…etc that are available to either foreground/ background the doer of an action. say a weapon specialized magazine writer will usually hide the lethal effect of what is discribed because the audience are more interested in the features of such item. they are aware of the its danger, hence no need to mention that..

Thanks for adding this. You’re completely right. I also like your example. It nicely shows how communities of people end up sharing an idea of what should be ‘common sense’ on the topics that connect them.

Dear Dr Schneider,

I am sure you must be busy. However, I would really appreciate your insight regarding the question I posted on the 13th of July above! Apparently visual discourse analysis is not defined anywhere by scholars…

Many thanks in advance,

Dear Vili, Sorry for not responding earlier. I completely missed your earlier post – it fell through the cracks while I was travelling. You are right that semiotics approaches can work at the level of the cultural content alone, by checking what different symbols mean in an image and how they are related through visual cues in that instance, but to be honest: I doubt there are many ‘pure’ studies that do not include any socio-cultural context at all. Most visual analyses combine the content-level with the societal level (i.e. semiotics with iconography), and I would always recommend being eclectic and mix methods as needed. The way I myself treat ‘visual discourse analysis’ is simply to draw from the theoretical frameworks of discourse theory as well as any useful methods for analysing the linguistic bits in an image (like captions). This all readily combines with semiotics (how images and text come together to ‘anchor’ denotations or ‘relay’ connotations) and with iconography (what a symbol means in a particular time and place, and what its history might be). Does this answer your question? You can also send me an email if having this discussion here becomes to cumbersome (and also: to make sure I don’t miss a post). Best, Florian

Dr Schneider,

No worries. Thank you very much for taking the time to reply and for the suggestion to e-mail you! It means a lot!

nice 1. love it, but I have a question. why is discourse analysis considered as multi-disciplinary. Florian Schneider.

Hi there. To answer your question: discourse analysis gets used as a method across various disciplines, ranging from political science to anthropology to literary studies. In each case, researchers tend to ‘tweak’ the methodological framework and take on board different theoretical concerns, but the overarching premise tends to remain the same: that communication constructs the truths we share as societies. As for your second question, tone of voice can indeed be relevant to the analysis, but it depends on your research question and your materials. For instance, tone of voice may matter a great deal in political speeches, or in ethnographic interviews, but it may matter far less for instance in news broadcasts or in some mass art formats (for instance some TV programmes are so ‘over-determined’ in their meanings that tone of voice does not add any nuances that setting and dialogue don’t already get across).

Hi Florian. why is ‘tone of voice’ Vital to the analyst.

Hello dear distinguished professor God bless you .I found your invaluable advice and recommendations,I am deeply in dire of your need ,please guide me what should I do to translate metaphors in political news discourse with the case study of war-torn Arab refugees flooding into Europe?

yours respectfully

Dear Sharifi, That’s a pretty big question that I would have trouble answering in a short online comment. I assume you mean to analyse the metaphors that get used in news reports about Arab refugees in Europe? You’d have to define which news sources you’ll be using and why, and I would also recommend limiting the time frame to something manageable (e.g. a random month, or maybe a time period that follows some specific event). Once you’ve collected the respective materials, you could go through them and ‘code’ all instances in which metaphors get used. If you then collect all metaphors and compile them according to the various sentiments they relay or statements they make, you can then explore in detail how certain sets of metaphors work in their respective context. This could also include a closer study of the historical background that informs certain metaphors, their ‘intertextuality’ (i.e. use in other contexts), and the way that they are deployed to make certain statements in certain sources. The exact parameters of your study will depend on your research question, though.

Hi, I really thank you for all the practical information, I wanted to ask you if you can kindly suggest some titles of novels that can be analysed according to the principles of Critical Discourse Analysis .

I’m not sure I have good advice for you there. Basically any novel can be analysed using CDA. The issue here would be what you are interested in exploring. Are you hoping to analyse a specific political ideology? In such a case, a novel that presents such an ideology would probably be a good choice (e.g. something by Ayn Rand to study her brand of libertarianism, something by Chinese writer Ba Jin to explore his discourse on anarchism, and so on). Or you could pick a novel that was influential in how it depicted a specific historical period (like Gone With the Wind or the Kite Runner), societal issue (like ‘racism’ in To Kill a Mockingbird or something similar), or general theme (like ‘progress’ or ‘technology’ in science fiction novels by writers like Neal Stephenson or William Gibson). As you can see, the possibilities are almost limitless, so you’ll have to make some tough choices about what you’re interested in.

Thanks a lot for the fruitful article about DA. It is very helping for novice researchers. I appreciate your help. Peace, Abdo

Thanks Abdo, that’s very kind of you. Glad you found this useful.

Dear Dr Schneider Greetings, I do not have any questions this time, just want to thank you for this wonderful page, your kind response and encouragement. God bless you.

Thank you Sahra. That means a lot.

Great work, Dr. Florian Schneider!

Super stuff! Simply amazing! And breathtakingly simplistic!

I couldn’t be more grateful, sir.

Can you kindly do a similar thing for Critical Discourse Analysis – even though I’d be the first to agree that most of the ideas you’ve proffered above can be applied to critical discourse analysis too.

I look forward to hearing favorably from you.

Dear Mark, Thanks for the kind words. I wish I had the time to do something similar specifically for CDA, but as you point out: the process is fairly similar. Also, depending on the CDA scholars you read, you get different emphases on e.g. structural features, quantitative factors, or detailed analysis of grammar features. So, sadly, I’m only able to point you towards a book I keep recommending: Wodak & Meyer’s ‘Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis’ ( http://amzn.to/2dvlEx1 ). The chapters present the views of various CDA specialists, which makes for a very nice overview, even if it’s a lot more material to work through than a short blog post. Sorry to not be able to write a summary of this at the moment, but I hope you’ll find the literature helpful. All the best, Florian

Dr. Schneider Greetings. What is the relationship between frame analysis and discourse analysis? Thank you very much for your help. Sahra

Dear Sahra, To me, the two have always been closely related. Much of framing analysis is interested in rhetorical devices as well, so there is a lot of overlap with discourse analysis, at least at a practical level. I would say the overarching questions that the two approaches ask tend to be slightly different: framing analysis ask how language (and sometimes visuals) create an organising principle for a story, usually in the news. For example, if I use the metaphor of ‘war’ to describe the issue of immigration, then I’m forcing a specific set of ideas and relations onto the topic (immigrants become ‘enemies’, processes that might be negotiated become ‘battles’, and so on). This creates a bias and guides the perspective of readers to certain conclusions. Discourse analysis asks how communication shapes knowledge more broadly, and how that knowledge then turns into institutions. For instance, if it becomes acceptable to use the same metaphor, then that discursive practice might ‘naturlize’ the idea that immigration is an existential threat to society, and this might serve as a justification to build a wall around a country. But as you can see, the two approaches are very similar. If you haven’t checked it out already, I would recommend Jim Kuypers’ influential work on framing and media bias. Best – Florian

Dear Dr. Schneider Thank you so much for the help. As always precise and to the point.

Greetings Dr. Schneider! I am an English Language major from the Philippines. My thesis adviser asked me to use discourse analysis as a research design for my study. I’m not quite sure if I got her point. Can you enlighten me with how I could possibly put that into context? Thank you and more power!

Dear Cristelle, The answer, I think, will depend on what your research project is. I assume you are trying to figure out how some form of communication practice shapes knowledge on a specific topic? If that is the case, you could first discuss discourse theory in the conceptual section of your thesis and then move on to explain how you yourself plan to study texts (or other media) to answer your research question – a discussion that I would normally place in a separate methods chapter. For that, the guideposts I’ve put together above might be helpful, though you should also check what important discourse analysts have written on the subject (e.g. Chilton, Fairclough, Van Dijk, Wodak, etc.).

Dear Dr Schnider Greetings While content analysis concentrates on the text, discourse analysis examines the text and its social, cultural, political and historical context. I have some problem with historical context. For example in my research topic “Discursive construction of risk associated with GMO” , what is the historical context. How can I historicize GMO? Should I start from the introduction of modernization in agricultural sector? Should I start from the introduction of biotechnology and the representation of its risks in the media? Sometimes people with different political subject positions have similar environmental subject positions, though their political identity are not similar and even contradictory, their environmental subject positions are similar, how can we interpret this situation? Can we use Laclau and Mouffe’s logic of difference and logic of equivalence? Public debates about risks in democratic societies is a sign of participatory governance, but how can we interpret such debate in non democratic societies? Many thanks for your

Dear Dr Schnider Greetings While content analysis concentrates on the text, discourse analysis examines the text and its social, cultural, political and historical context. I have some problem with historical context. For example in my research topic “Discursive construction of risk associated with GMO” , what is the historical context. How can I historicize GMO? Should I start from the introduction of modernization in agricultural sector? Should I start from the introduction of biotechnology and the representation of its risks in the media? Sometimes people with different political subject positions have similar environmental subject positions, though their political identity are not similar and even contradictory, their environmental subject positions are similar, how can we interpret this situation? Can we use Laclau and Mouffe’s logic of difference and logic of equivalence? Public debates about risks in democratic societies is a sign of participatory governance, but how can we interpret such debate in non democratic societies? Many thanks for your help

Dear Sahar, Sorry for keeping you waiting with a response. I was away during our exam week here in Leiden. I can’t answer your question about Laclau and Mouffe, since I’d have to read up on that first, but I’ll do my best to comment on the other two questions you raise. With regards to the historical context, I doubt you would have to roll out the entire history of agricultural production to discuss GMOs, but you should ask yourself how current institutions and discourses might be the result of previous practices. The point is to contextualize your work. Are there elements in the way that people discuss GMOs that extend (or rupture) the logic of how their predecessors discussed crop production and management? Do the institutions that today promote (or challenge) GMOs a legacy of older institutions? Do they build on such older institutions? In the US, there might be a connection between state subsidies, private enterprises, and university research that plays a role today in generating a certain aspect of the GMO discourse, but that actually dates back to earlier such collaborations in the 1950s. It’s cases like these where a historical comment might be useful, but I would recommend letting your materials guide you. Everything has history, after all, and comparing discourses ‘diachronically’ across time like Foucault did is a major undertaking. Also, not all historical precedents shape contemporary discourses, so you’d have to make your own assessment as to what matters to your case, and you’d have to justify what you are leaving out and why. As for ‘risk society’, there are quite a few scholars who have made the case that Beck’s concept also applies to non-democratic societies, e.g. China. A major point here is that any government needs to legitimate its rule to its subjects, even if that legitimation does not happen through discussions in a free public sphere or regular national elections. Under conditions of our present modernity, regulators increasingly act within a networked society (I’m thinking of Castells here), to the point where it becomes tricky to even talk about politics in clear ‘state vs. society’ terms. That said, we should of course remain careful not to reproduce discourses of modernity in contexts that had historically different experiences from Europe or the US. For inspiration, here’s a short discussion by an ethnographer: http://anthropos-lab.net/bpc/2014/03/china-risk-society . At any rate, these are pretty big questions, and you can probably tell I’m struggling to provide concise but useful answers. I hope this nonethelss helps a bit. Regards, Florian

Dear Dr Schnider Salam I am not certain how I can thank you; the language is a barrier to express my deepest gratitude for devoting your time to my intellectual problems. With kind regards Sahar

You’re more than welcome, Sahar. Glad I could help. Keep up the good work!

Assalam o alaikum Florian, Hope you will be fine. it is very helpful for new researchers, i have quesetion that could we use discourse analysis for social media content like facebook, twitter? Thanks

Absolutely! In fact, new media analysis connects very nicely with discourse analysis. You would need to ‘mine’ social media comments, which can prove technically a bit tricky, but there are free apps available for compiling Twitter and Facebook data, so I would check what is currently the most up-to-date software. If you have access to a programme like NVivo, then that software has a built-in scraper for several social media platforms that can do this part of the job for you. Something important to keep in mind are the ethical implications of gathering and using such data. You may generally want to anonymize the posters, since they probably did not expect their comments to appear in another context like an academic study. Even then, I would only use comments that have been made available publicly (e.g. on a platform like Twitter, or by a public organization on Facebook). If you plan to analyze the discourse of a closed group on Facebook or WhatsApp, or if you are hoping to include people whose profile is limited to their ‘friends’ only, then you would need their consent. Once the technical and ethical problems are out of the way, though, you should be able to use most of the work-steps I’ve outlined above on the ‘tweets’ or ‘comments’ that you have compiled, and in particular linguistic elements should prove promising for such an analysis. Finally, you may want to keep you eye open for ‘digital native’ elements that effect how such communication works differently from discourse in other media. For instance, hashtags, hyperlinks, or even the artificial limit in characters on Twitter are not part of a traditional discourse analysis, but they clearly shape how meanings are generated online, so you’ll have to figure out how such components fit into discursive practices. I hope this helps! Good luck with the analysis.

Dear Florian， Thank you sooo much for sharing your good idea.I’m Karin, from China, currently struggling with my thesis related to the features of female politians’ speeches and their translation in Chinese. Your words enligten me! I’ll do discourse analysis first. Besides, I would really appreciate if you could provide me any information related to specific features of this kind of speech. Thanks for your kindness. All the best for u. Looking forward to your reply!

Dear Karin, Thanks for your kind words, and apologies for only responding now. I’m struggling to find good advice that I might give you. The topic of gendered speech is extremely exiting, particularly in contexts like politics, but I haven’t studied the phenomenon, so I wouldn’t know what to recommend. I do suspect that the question of translation (which is somewhat a separate question) will provide you with some very interesting insights. Translation is always also a discursive practice, so checking how key terms were rendered in the target language should tell you quite a lot about the translators and the conceptual framework they use. It’ll be interesting to see what you learn, so do let me know what you find. Best, Florian

Hi, Thanks for your informative posts. I am doing an MA and want to do a discourse analysis of public policy more specifically frequency spectrum management. Any suggestion on the approach and material for analyzing policy using discourse analysis

Hi there! An interesting topic, which I sadly know very little about. I’m only familiar with the US context, mainly from the work of people like Benkler, Lessig, and so on regarding the changing nature of networked media and politics. I haven’t studied frequency spectrum management myself, though I suspect a number of media historians must have examined this issue in different national contexts. If I were to study policy on the topic, I’d probably try to explore how issues of market vs. state are presented in policy documents, and I would check whether there is a notable change over time in how the respective regulatory framework gets legitimated. You could, for instance, pick a particularly important policy ruling or an event that informed policy debate, and you could then check documentation before and after. A good thing to look for would be core concepts that the policy documents use to make sense of the issue. If you can check what those concepts are, and how they are used in their context, you might be able to track shifts of meanings and conceptual work on the part of the law-makers. These are just some very rudimentary thought, though, so make sure to check with your supervisor to see if this is what they have in mind as well. Overall, I suspect that a discourse analysis would work quite well for such a project – you should be able to apply quite a few of the work-steps I’ve discussed above to your case, depending on the precise focus that your research question and your materials require.

Thank you, I failed to understand in class so somehow landed here. I can confidently say, I am now understanding discourse analysis.

Hello dear Florian, Thank you for your informative contributions and responses and I highly appreciate your quick replies to the reader’s questions. I am conducting a study on “the inclusion of cultural elements in one of the textbooks”. My objectives are: to identify the representation of cultural features and elements in this textbook; and the impact of such cultural elements on the students’ lifestyles. Do you think that the CDA is applicable to such study? Shall I refer to the frequency of using cultural elements such as music, ethics, sports, food, etc.? Shall I refer to the layout and chapterization of the book? Shall I analyze the data based on the themes (cultural elements) or on the chapterization of the book? Thank you in advance.

Sorry for only replying to this now. Somehow the comment fell through the cracks, my sincere apologies. For a very brief answer (if it is not far too late at this point): I think CDA would work very nicely here, but depending on the book (and the students), you could indeed include visual elements such as layout and design. Your question about chapterization potentially go in this direction, and they might make for a coding categories (after all, the authors/editors chose these thematic distinctions themselves). This is quite a big question, so if you still need advice at this stage, send me an email (through the contact section), and I’ll respond in a more timely fashion.

Dear Dr Schneider Thank you very much for answering my questions patiently, wish you a very happy new you!

Dear Florian

I can’t thank you enough for this article! I am doing a discourse analysis of the citizenship debate in Australia, with a focus on partisan views and statements. I am currently exploring this area in depth and would love to hear your opinion about the best elements of DA to conduct this research.

Thank you! Remah

Dear Remah, This sounds like an exciting project. Which work steps you use will depend a bit on your materials, and the scope you want to cover through your research question. Are you interested in the linguistic details of how people frame the issue in the materials? Then a more detailed look at grammar and word-use would be interesting. If, on the other hand, you are more interested in the broad-stroke themes in a large corpus of text, then a mixed-methods approach with some quantitative elements might be most fruitful – maybe something that lets you isolate particular documents for closer analysis, or that allows you to zoom in on how particular ‘protagonists’ and ‘antagonists’ get constructed, how specific themes or key terms are deployed, etc. Let me know if I can help with any additional advice, and make sure to drop a line about how you experienced using these methods in your own study. Would love to hear how it went. Best, Florian

Dear Florian Thank you very much for your reply and apologies for my delay! My research question is “What impact does political rhetoric have on understandings of citizenship?” After reading a number of books in this area, I found that Martin Reisigl’s politolinguistic analysis of political rhetoric is the most appropriate for my research, although at some point when it comes to the detailed-case analysis I know that I haven’t decided on particular approaches. I still need to isolate certain documents for closer analysis as you said, so can I start with broad-stroke themes and do detailed analysis (for grammar and word-use) for the selected data? Or do you recommend a particular approach for this research question? I hope you don’t mind all these questions, I want to make sure that I am in the direction and really want to make the most of my project. Thanks! Remah

Hello Florian Thank you for this perfect article about discourse analysis! It really helped me. I would like to ask for some tips. I am working on thesis where I analyse political discourse of Russian president during Crimea events (from 21 February 2014 to 18 March 2014). But I do not want to analyse his speeches and texts in general but from point of view of Neo-eurasianism – It is a modern Russian geopolitcal theory which is often described that is influencing foreign policy of Russia. I would like to find the signs of this theory in president’s discourse. My research question is: Can we find new waves of neo-eurasianism in prezident’s discourse during Crimea events? Can you give me some tips how to make a coding and categories part, because I am not sure if I understand it perfectly. Sincerely Michal

Hi Michael, This is very cool topic. It sounds almost like a comparative study, at least to some extent: how do discourses of neo-eurasianism (e.g. in academia, in the press, in the documents of certain political organizations) compare to the discourses in the presidents speeches? My question to you would be: what would count as good source material on what ‘neo-eurasianism’ is? Once you have an answer to that question, you should be able to draw up a list of codding categories from those materials, and you can then apply those categories to your primary source (the presidential speeches). So, for example, if you had academic studies on the theory of neo-eurasianism, you could go through those to establish what the main concepts or themes are. You build your coding list from that, and they you go hunting for similar concepts and themes in the presidential speeches. Next, you check what is actually said in those speeches, and you assess how the speeches construct their sense of neo-eurasianism (to they conform to the academic arguments, do they extend them, do they challenge them, etc.?). One important side-note: you’d probably still need to do some ‘evolutionary coding’ as you mark up the speeches for further analysis. Even with a ready-made coding list, based on assumptions from other sources, you might come across new categories that are native to the presidential speeches, and that you did not anticipate. I would keep an eye open for such categories, and I’d then integrate them into my coding. I hope this helps! Let me know how it goes, and what you find. Regards, Florian

Thank you very much for a perfect advices. In thesis I found a several concepts of the neo-eurasianism and than I analyse three speeches of Putin. Apart from that, I analyse also a body language and use of metaphors so it was quite interesting. I found that lot of the concepts of neo-eurasianism is used in his language like anti-americanism, refusal of the West, some points connected to a orthodox religion, expansionism etc. Of course, thesis could not say that neo-eurasianism is a inspiration for foreign policy of Russia or vice versa because it is a quite subjective and qualitative method but at least it could give answers, how Putin is transforming neo-eurasianistic thought into his speeches and how he uses them. Thank you very much again, you really helped me to finish my thesis. Sincerely Michal

I’m writing my B.A thesis on the representation of women in gender magazines (I want to analyse issues of Cosmopolitan and Maxim from 2016). I wanted to ask you about the methods of data collection within Critical Discourse Analysis : is there any methodology that allows for the data to be randomly selected ? (The reason why I’m asking is that I only have access to a few magazines within the year I want to analyse and I am worried that it could be regarded as scientific dishonesty if my sample won’t include all of the magazines from 2016). The only approach I can think of here would be ‘grounded theory’ by Glaser and Strauss, but even in this case the data must be oriented around a certain theme…

P.S. I am really impressed at the fact that you take your time to help other people, that’s really heartwarming that there still are people who want to do something for others :) keep up the good work, your blog is a godsend!

Kind Regards,

Thanks for the kind words. What you describe is indeed a thorny issue. You have to be careful not to ‘cherry-pick’ your materials. I don’t think there’s a systematic angle from the literature that you can apply here, but that may not have to put an end to your study. You could, for instance, be honest about the limitations you faced collecting the materials, and as long as you declare that you can’t generalize across the whole year, you may still be able to compare particular months. Maybe there’s a particular event or topic that you can use to narrow down your materials in a way that fits what is available? For instance, if someone were to analyze only the 2017 February issue of Vogue (on ‘diversity’), that would work quite nicely and would probably be sufficient for a BA thesis. You might find a similarly useful or controversial element in the 2016 corpus you are looking at. It really all depends on how you frame the inquiry, and how you narrow down your research question. Whatever you decide: I would discuss this with your supervisor to see if they are happy with a study that has certain limitations with regards to the available materials. If they think your reasoning won’t carry the thesis, then it might be better to pick a different topic or another angle to this topic.

Not sure that was very helpful – it’s tough to decide what to do when your materials don’t line up elegantly. Let me know if you were able to come up with a creative rationale for still doing this study. It definitely sounds interesting.

Regards, Florian

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Dear Florian, I prepare my MA about tv satirical comedy shows and I want to analyze the data of 3 programs one is about political satire, the second is about fictional news comedy and the third is about social comedy. it is my first trail to analyze any text linguistically. Can you advise me what to do?. I read a lot about Simpson’s 2003 method of analysis of satirical discousre, how can i mix this method with that of media discourse analysis thanks a lot

I want to ask about if there is is a method to analyze comedy programs to get new ways of creating humor. and what are the helpfull steps for the analysis? biroo

Dear Biroo, That’s a really good question, though sadly a bit outside of my own comfort zone. I’m only familiar with the philosophical discussions about humour, e.g. the work of John Morreall on ‘Comic Relief’ (and his edited volume on ‘The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor’), though I’m not sure how much that helps here. You might find practical analyses in journals such as Discourse & Society or Discourse & Communication, but you’d have to check the back issues. Conceptually, I could imagine your study connecting to questions about whether (and how) satirical language functions ‘critically’ (as in: shocking people to think differently about accepted knowledge), or whether such language reinforces accepted knowledge (for instance by ‘normalizing’ stereotypes) – Raymond Geuss has written an interesting book chapter on the brother of Martin Heidegger, who was a carnival satirist during the NS regime (in the book ‘Politics and the Imagination’)… but again: that’s a theoretical discussion more than an empirical analysis of discourses. The only advice I have, other than checking back issues of various journals, is to take a look at the various ‘work steps’ that discourse analysts frequently use, and to put together your own ‘toolbox’ that promises to answer your questions. Personally, I’d also pay attention to the visual setup in these programmes, since humour often works by juxtaposing contradictory signs in different modes – you won’t see those signs unless you check all available modes, so: language, gestures, sound effects and music, props, camera movement, etc. I’ve provided a short introduction on such visual communication elements on this website, if you are interested: Sorry to not be of more help. I hope you find an approach that works for you. Let me know how your project works out. Best, Florian

Hi I just read your article and git amazed by the length of people’s questions and your replies. So my well concerned question or rather worry is: I am writing Research Proposal for my M.A and my research is to explore communication barriers of south asian immigrants in canada in accessing settlment service. What is in my mind is to analyse oral and written communicatio of above siad immigrants in settling their lives that range from speaking to government official, speaking to bank manager to signing a rental agrement. Any written or verbal coomunication i refer as discourse i want to analyze. I want to put it in ethnographic discourse analysis. I am worry about my method and methology, limitation and delimitation and theoritical lense. Am i right to combine ethnography and discourse analysis?

Hi Raj, This is a great project, and I’d say combining an ethnographic approach with discourse analysis should work very well. You’d actually be able to get very rich data, by connecting what people say or write with what you observe them doing. Also, a major source of ‘data’ for you, will be personal interviews, which is a classic domain for discourse analysis: you can study how people view their predicaments, what categories they use or construct to make sense of their interactions, and what legitimation strategies they come up with as they explain and justify what they are doing. You’d have to explain, in your proposal, how you plan to conduct those interviews. I’d recommend open-ended, semi-structured interviews that you record and then summarize in a protocol – you can code the protocol and then selectively transcribe sections you plan to analyze in detail. Alternatively, you can transcribe everything that is said (a much more thorough and professional approach), but that might explode the scope of an MA, depending on the target language and the number of interviews. So in short: yes! This should be doable. As always with these things, I’d talk to my supervisor later to see what they say. After all, your project has to fit into their area of expertise as well. Good luck with the project!

Your blog is such a great guideline to use for Discourse Analysis. I’m currently doing an MA paper on Discourse Analysis and our assessment is to analyse text according to some systematic functions. I have chosen to use SFL and CA in analysing Green environment discourse in terms of the website http://www.fijiwater.com/ . I will be analysing possibly only a few sections from the website. I was wondering, from a New Media perspective – which sections would be more useful for analysis?

Thank you for your on-going help and support.

Hi Nia, This is a good question. The website is full of interesting bits and pieces that would be worth examining, particularly when it comes to the interactive and animated content, as well as the cross-over with social media. If you’re mainly hoping to study the linguistic properties of the discourse, then the FAQ and about sections would be primary concerns, but if you are willing to expand into visual discourses, then I’d definitely study the homepage that users ‘land’ on, the store page, and probably also the section ‘the water’. It depends a bit what you have isolated as the major discursive themes you want to explore. In terms of how to study web content like this, I usually suggest the following two texts for inspiration (even though they are a little dated): – Knox, John S. (2009): “Punctuating the Home Page : Image as Language in an Online Newspaper”, Discourse & Communication 3/2, 145-172. – Pauwels, Luc (2005), “Websites as Visual and Multimodal Cultural Expressions : Opportunities and Issues of Online Hybrid Media Research”, Media Culture Society 27/4: 604-613. I would also recommend examining the ‘production background’ of the website (what do we know about the company, what do we know about the designers, if such info is available), and maybe even looking at the hyperlink networks that the website is embedded in, to see whether any particular ‘issue’ emerges from the online representations you are looking for (this only really works if you have additional websites and want to check if/how they are connected, though – for hyperlink analysis, I’d recommend checking out Richard Rogers’ work with the IssueCrawler software, just FYI). Personally, I’d probably still focus on the linguistic elements most strongly, expanded by an analysis of core visual and interactive components, to show how the presentation / interface ‘guides’ perception on your topic. I hope these tips are useful. Best wishes, Florian

PS: SFL (Systematic Functional Linguistics) and CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis) is what I will be using mostly for this analysis focused on the way that environmental or green discourses are used to construct and sell the product.

The guidelines you provided are really helpful and quite explicit. I came across a study recently on CDA and the researcher selected some samples by choosing the first news item, the last news item and the longest- writtennews item in all the samples for his analysis. can this selection be representative enough?

Thank you, Koiki.

Hi Koiki, I’d have to see the study to see if this sort of selection makes sense. It’s quite possible that the author is able to get a good cross-section of discourses that way. Did you think it was a successful study, and that the selection criteria ended up being convincing? I have to admit I’m a bit sceptical. I would normally look at a larger corpus of news articles at the marco-level first, so either by using quantitative methods like key word frequency calculations, or by compiling all headlines plus useful meta-data for each item (editorials vs. reports, length, or any other information you consider relevant), and I would then code the headlines for the issues I’m exploring. I’d then use that information to single out specific articles that promise to answer my core research question, based on clear selection criteria I’d explain in the methodology section of my paper. But that may just be me… Best, Florian

Hi Florian, I am student doing my Bsc program and am to submit a proposal for my final year project. working on Discourse analysis and i have no idea where to begin. I have only the basic knowledge of discourse analysis. Was thinking of working on speeches or news captions and how they always seem to be very deceiving, but my main issue is how to phrase it so i can be specific, how to get materials and how to work on the body. I have issues expressing my self that is finding the right words without repeating myself. Will be glad of any help. I admire the way you seem to know what to say, have an extensive knowledge and the very nice way of using big words.

Hi there, Took me a moment to get back to you, my apologies. I’ve been travelling. It’s always difficult to get a new project off the ground, but if you already have some experience with discourse analysis, then you’ve got some of the hardest parts covered already. You know what kind of questions discourse analysts ask, and you know what counts as useful data. The trick is now to phrase a precise question, e.g. ‘How do captions in TV programme X shape the meanings of political speeches (of politician Y, during time interval Z, etc.), and what can this tell us about the interaction between spoken and written discourse as well as images in political TV broadcasts?’ (or something of that sort). I’m providing an example here just to highlight some of the elements you may want to keep in mind as you formulate your own question: core keywords, the main subject of your research, how to narrow down the topic, how to think about the general relevance, etc. Once you have a good question, try to structure your project in digestible chunks that you can then work on: the introduction, a review of the relevant literature, a discussion of major conceptual issues, a discussion of your methods and source selection, the various parts of your actual analysis, the conclusion, an appendix with any relevant data. That way you can go in and work on any element that fits you that specific day, without loosing track of the big picture. I often write down brief phrases or keywords, inside the overall outline of my paper or article, just to see what goes where (and what I haven’t thought enough about yet). Then I expand. I hope this helps! Good luck with the project.

Hi Dear Florian! Hope you must be fine in the best of your health and spirit. Well, first of all i would like to thank you for taking time to read my message, and also would like to appreciate all those who will reply and participate in my work. Well I am a P.hD scholar and doing research in Discourse analysis. In My M.Phil level I have done research in Linguistic discourse with title “Structural and Textual Analysis of a T.V Sitcom “Hasb-e-Haal” followed by the proposed model of Sinclair & Coulthart i-e IRF model and also a proposed model by Aurthur Asa Berger “45 techniques of humour’. I did micro level textual study of this sitcom by applying 45 techniques of humour in context of humour. And at macro level applied IRF research model of Sinclair and coulthart. Now I am interested to further elaborate my work to go in deep to study move by giving it different names. Another Idea i am interested to do my research on “Inter Languages” which is actually called “Error Analysis” 50 years back. But now this new term is used as these are not the language errors but these are the developmental stages in language learning and proficiency. But I want to do this language discourse with reference to the non native speakers the language barriers they face to communicate effectively with all the communities. What do you suggest that which one is more appealing and inspiring either to continue my work or to work on ‘Inter Languages’ which i think is also more appealing and inspiring. Your kind suggestions are needed please and also could you please shared me some Research articles/Papers based on language discourse. I would be highly grateful. Moreover, i would really like to appreciate your sincere efforts you are putting to serve the humanity by providing your valuable comments and guidance. That’s really worth taking and one day am sure you will be rewarded by our beloved Lord(God). Your early response in this regard would be highly valuable. Further I would like to welcome and appreciate the comments shared by other viewers who are working in this area and those who are seeking for guidance, i will try my level best to put my ideas in this context. Thanks in advance

Hi Hafiz, Thanks for getting in touch, and for the kind words. I’m really glad to hear you find this article useful. I’ll get in touch via email next week, if that is alright (I’m still travelling at the moment). I probably won’t have a lot of good advice on detailed linguistic topics, since my own approach focuses on political communication more broadly, rather than e.g. on language learning. That said, I’ll do my best to help if I can. All the best, Florian

Dear Florian! could you please also share some of the P.hD research proposals related to this domain and also the research paper on which you are working if you could please make trust to share. If anyone else is interested to share his/her comments i would be really happy to accept . As its my email ID [email protected]

Hi Florian, I find this step-by-step guide to conducting discourse analysis is extremely helpful. I would like to know if the method is applicable to study political documentary films (my research subjects). Most of the references that I found on discourse analysis focus on written texts. I would appreciate your opinion on this matter!

Hi Raja, My deepest apology for keeping you waiting for two months before replying to your question. I had intermittent internet access during my research trips this summer, hence the delay. I hope your question hasn’t become moot at this point? The methodology can definitely be applied to documentary films, at least in principle. I would expand by also using the toolbox of visual analysis ( ). I imagine you’ll find the sources in the list of reference useful (I would start with Iedema 2001). I hope this was helpful, despite the massive delay! Best wishes, Florian

This is very useful- particularly because when one gets into reading about discourse analysis, the theoretical load is such that it tends to overshadow the nitty gritty (coming from someone who is “accused” of being theoretically inclined). Thanks for posting!

Thanks for the kind words! Apologies for only reacting now, but I was away a lot this summer. Glad to hear you found the article useful.

Hey Florian!

I am doing an assignment that is supposed to use Laclau’s concept of dislocation as a key element of my analysis, however I am having a really hard time working out exactly what the concept entails. The texts I have that supposedly explain the concept don’t actually explain it I feel. Simply explained, what exactly does the concept mean, and how should one use it in analysis?

Any thoughts on the subject will be deeply appreciated!

Viele Grüsse,

Klaus Asbjørn

Hi Klaus, I’m so sorry that I’m only able to answer your question now. I kept you waiting for more than a month. I don’t know if you’re question is still on the table, at this point? You are probably long done with your assignment. At any rate, this is an extremely difficult topic – the kind that makes my head spin. I am not hugely knowledgeable about Laclau, and I find his later shift towards Lacanian psychoanalysis particularly daunting (…which is where the dislocation idea comes in). If I understand correctly (and don’t quote me on this!), Laclau was trying to figure out how agency and structure might work as people go about making meaning of the world around them, but he wanted to distance himself from Foucault’s ideas about discursive vs non-discursive practices. To Laclau, everything is effectively discursive. Nothing is truly non-discursive. Importantly, we never have identities that are objectively and fully formed, but our identities emerge in relation to the meanings we give other people and things. As for ‘disclocation’, I’m taking my cues here from de Mendonça, who has written an article that does a decent job explaining the meaning of that term (available here: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/bpsr/v8n1/03.pdf – I found pp.68 onward particularly useful). He writes that dislocation is ‘the moment at which discourse reaches the limit of its meaning’. When something radically new upsets our order of discourses, we have to find new ways to make sense of the world, since our existing discourses no longer work. It is in these moments of crisis that we construct identities. So, in the words of de Mendonça, ‘from a dislocated structure, a need is generated for it to be restructured from new meanings or from the reactivation of meanings already in existence’. As for the relevance of that concept in an actual analysis, I have to admit that I’m not entirely sure. My instinct says we might talk of especially disruptive events as moments of dislocation, so we might explore how a discourse changes from before to after some existential crisis that forces actors to re-invent their reality (think of the Syrian refugee boy Alan Kurdi who was washed up on a Mediterranean beach in 2015 – a moment that fundamentally changed the parameters of debate about asylum, migration, and human dignity in Europe). I’m not sure whether I have answered your question, or just added to the confusion; this is a rather tricky topic, and most of the writing on it is fairly obscure. I can definitely recommend taking a look at that pdf. I’m still not 100 percent sure I have it right, but the discussion there was as clear as any I’ve seen on the subject of ‘antagonism/dislocation’ so far. Let me know if you come up with any additional information on the topic. Best wishes – Florian

I would really really highly truly appreciate it if you explain more or provide references about the focauldian (focault’s ) concept of power and discourse.. Thank you …

Hi Noha, That’s a pretty big topic. Have you taken a look at my post on discourse theory ( )? It contains a discussion of Foucault, which may already answer your questions. If it does not, feel free to get in touch by email to let me know what questions you have in mind. It’s quite busy at the moment, so it may take me a while to respond, but I’ll do my best to help. Best wishes, Florian

Good evening, i have an assignment that i should find a political discourse that fit with these ten steps and analysis it according to the steps but i feel lost , do you have some kind of models that can help me? Thank you in advance.

Dear Rawan, Sorry for only seeing your comment now – the semester has been keeping me busy. Have you already completed your assignment? If not, I can recommend trying this out on a newspaper article you find interesting, e.g. something about contemporary politics. The quantitative sections won’t be quite so relevant, though you can still test what a word distribution might look like. More importantly, you get to play with the qualitative steps in some detail, without burdening yourself with too long a text. Best – Florian

thank u ! thank u! you cant imagine how much this info helped me!!!

Thank you So much. Respected Sir.

Your article has been the utmost helpful when trying to understand qualitative research for the first time. My Masters is in Critical Diversity Studies, the research should be qualitative. Unlike many of the scholars doing case studies with he use of interviews and focus groups, I want to analyze textbooks (school textbooks in a South African perspective).

I want to go deeper than a content analysis, to engage with the deeper hidden curriculum. Your article has been enlightening through my research to find the correct data collection technique of data. This is where my confusion lines. I have been advised to use thematic analysis for data analysis. In this circumstance how do I differentiate methodologies, perpective/ approach and application.

I understand my theoretical framework, data analytical technique but not how to pose the research design and nature.

Discourse analysis seems the most fitting with the use of thematic analysis as a coding and analytical reporting.

Collection of data as well as design is the confusion.

[…] 55- Florian Schneider, “How to Do a Discourse Analysis”, Politics East Asia, May 13, 2013. http://www.politicseastasia.com/studying/how-to-do-a-discourse-analysis/ […]

[…] Schneider, Florian. 2013. “How to do a Discourse Analysis”. Web. http://www.politicseastasia.com/studying/how-to-do-a-discourse-analysis/ […]

Hello Florian, I am Supraja from India. This blog post helped me a lot in my attempt to understand CDA. I am currently working on my Master’s Thesis which focuses on finding if news values are a basis of story production and selection in hyperlocal (print) newspapers and see if the underlying news value can be ‘read off’ so to speak. So I started off with content analysis but when I stumbled into CDA along the way, I thought it would be a better tool when it comes to looking at the text as the object of study. After reading up on Fairclough’s three dimensions of CDA, I am confused about if I should go ahead with that with just textual analysis or would it be better if I look into the concept of news values taking a discursive practice? So, under which of the two should I categorise ‘news values’? Thanks in advance

Regards, Supraja

Hello and have a good day… i hope you’re in a good condition.. I’ve been through and read thoroughly your articles in this marvelous website..Glad to say that it is very helpful for me to find the useful info for what i’m doing and working on right now…

I’m from Malaysia and currently doing my PhD as a part-time student in a local university here. My research is on Discourse Analysis of printed advertisement. It sounds easy to have many previous resources that many research or study have been done. However i need your opinion and of course …advice…since i see you look very generous in sharing the knowledge and info…Thank you very much….

Apparently my focus is on Malaysia Day advertisement that to analyse the Dissemination of Patriotism Message among Malaysians through

• The use of linguistics features • Semiotics approach. • Visual communication • Speech Act Theory

Those what I have mentioned above should be based on the theories of • Fairclough’s 3-dimensional model • Reading Images by Kress and van Leuven’ • Barthes theory for semiotics. • Arthur Asa Berger semiotic analysis

that related to

• Critical Discourse Analysis • Multimodalities ???

Hence, The functions and how cultural values can be expressed in the advertisement in a detailed manner within a discourse analytic, media (ads) functions, professional communication and cultural perspective. I will Qualitatively analyzing the data..

AM I ON THE RIGHT TRACK….

Thanks for the post, I’m finding it really useful in planning my MA International Relations dissertation research.

A tip on use of Excel: rather than putting all coding in one column I suggest trying to use a separate column for each code. For example you might have a column headed China, another headed Taiwan, another Democracy, another Citizenship and so on. The researcher then enters “yes” in the column to tag that line of text. This allows the researcher to add multiple codes to one line of text and also allows you to use the Autofilter function to quickly select all lines with the same code.

Later, for presentation and analysis purposes, the researcher could change the “yes” into the name of the code by adding a new column next to each coding column. For example if the B column is for “China” the researcher would insert a blank column to its right – column C – and in cell C2 enter the formula =if(B2=”yes”,$B$1,””). They could then copy that formula down the rest of the column, do the same for the other columns and perhaps hide the columns with the “yes” values to make things more neat. A final presentational step would be to add a column that includes all the codes for each line by using the concatenate function, something like =CONCATENATE(B2,”, “,C2,”, “,D2,”, “,E2,”, “,F2).

If the number of different tags used makes this completely unwieldy a compromise might be possible by grouping codes, especially if they are unlikely to be found in the same piece of text, and then having a single column for each group. For example a column for country names, a column for political system typology, a column for IR paradigm/theory etc

Comments are closed.

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Discourse Community Essay Examples

Discourse community essay is an essential part of academic writing that requires students to explore a specific group’s communication methods and practices. To write a successful discourse community essay, you need to understand the group’s language, values, and beliefs. Here are some tips on how to write a discourse community essay that stands out.

Firstly, before writing, conduct thorough research on the discourse community you wish to write about. Understanding the group’s communication methods, practices, and language is essential. Take time to observe the community’s communication methods and the roles of its members. Conduct interviews with members of the group to gain insights into their communication practices and understand their perspectives.

Next, brainstorm discourse community essay topic ideas that align with your research. This should help you identify the unique aspects of the discourse community that you would like to focus on in your essay. Ensure that your essay is well-structured and well-researched to make it informative and easy to read. You can also use the research to draw comparisons and contrasts between the discourse community you are writing about and other groups.

To make your essay stand out, include relevant discourse community essay examples to illustrate the communication methods and practices you are discussing. This will give your readers a better understanding of the group you are writing about and make your essay more engaging. You can also include personal experiences or stories that relate to the discourse community to make your essay more relatable.

In conclusion, writing a discourse community essay requires a lot of research and attention to detail. However, with the right approach and techniques, you can produce a well-structured and informative essay that highlights the unique communication practices of the group. Always remember to include relevant examples and personal experiences to make your essay more engaging.

The Soccer Discourse Community: Passion, Identity, and Global Connection

Soccer, known as football to most of the world, is more than just a sport; it is a universal language that transcends geographical borders and cultural differences. Within the realm of this beloved game lies a dynamic and tightly-knit soccer discourse community. This essay explores...

• Discourse Community

The Nursing Discourse Community: Shared Knowledge and Collaboration

Nursing is a noble and demanding profession that thrives on collaboration, empathy, and the exchange of knowledge. Within the vast healthcare landscape, the concept of a nursing discourse community emerges as a dynamic network of professionals who share a common language, values, and goals. This...

Highly Resistant Hegemonic Discourses in the Sport

This essay will look at highly resistant hegemonic discourses in sport that relate to ethnicity and race, and whether these discourses have been successfully challenged by the promotion of alternative discourses in recent years. Therefore, both the highly resistant discourses and the new alternative discourses...

• Discourse Analysis

The Discourse Community Analysis Of A Football Team

I came to UC Merced and joined Writing 001 with no knowledge of what a discourse could be. Now in Lovas’s class reading “Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie. I had no idea what a discourse community was, the idea of this is very well...

K-Pop: Unveiling Its Discourse Community and Influence

The major difference between humans and animals is the ability to communicate with each other. Throughout the course of human development, people need a way for mass communication to reach a final decision or to represent a certain point of view or belief. This can...

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Exploring the Discourse Community of Personal trainers or Fitness instructors

Introduction As a newly certified Coach and professional personal trainer, I am writing this report for the new comer to the discourse community of personal trainer. What is the history of this community? What are its primary mechanisms of intercommunication? What kind of threshold levels...

The Communities That I Belong To

The concept of a discourse community is ambiguous in nature. Despite that, one thing can be said for sure—that most of us, in one way or another, belong to one. As defined by John Swales, discourse communities are people who use communication to reach a...

• Intercultural Communication

The Goals of the Sociology Discourse Community and the Issues within It

Introduction Discourse community is defined in the Genre Analysis as the “Increasingly common assumption that discourse operates within conventions defined by communities, be they academic disciplines or social groups”. (Herzberg Pg. 21). As this is a very simple break down of the term discourse community,...

• Interpersonal Communication

The Key Role of Functionalism in a Societal Equilibrium

Functionalism emphasizes a societal equilibrium. To put it into perspective if something happens to disrupt the order and the flow of the system, a set of interconnected parts which together form a whole, society must adjust to achieve a stable state. Functionalism is a top...

• Emile Durkheim
• Functionalism

The Theoretical and Practical Application of the Functionalism Theory

Functionalism became the most well known within the end of the 20th century. (Knox (2007) pg. 2) Although, functionalism has several antecedents in ancient philosophy and early theories of A.I and technology as well. The first view that one can possible argue to be a...

Conversation as a Target of Discourse and Disciple Analysis

Discourse as Nunan (1993) defines it is ‘a stretch of language consisting of several sentences which are perceived as related in some way’; Within the definition of discourse, it can be found that discourse refers as much spoken as written kind of languages. However, many...

• Anthropology
• Conversation

A Study of Discourse Community Through BLM Movement

A discourse community is a group of people who share a set of goals, which are basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals. The ability to communicate is very important to a discourse community. It is important because without communication the...

• Black Lives Matter

Analysis of Nursing Community According to Swales' Characteristics of Discourse Community

A discourse community is people with similar interest and goals in life, who share a language that helps them discuss and accomplish these interests and goals. In the nursing community, many code words are used for different events and situations. All nurses maintain the same...

School Theatre as an Example of Discourse Community

Everyone has successfully been able to join a discourse community. School clubs, sports teams, teachers, a job, a group of friends, or even a family can be classified into two words discourse community. According to James Paul Gee, “a discourse is a sort of identity...

Music in My Life: Being a Part of Musical Discourse

A discourse community is defined as “A group of people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals. ” An easier way of wording the definition comes from Linguist John Swales and he defines...

• Music Industry

Best topics on Discourse Community

1. The Soccer Discourse Community: Passion, Identity, and Global Connection

2. The Nursing Discourse Community: Shared Knowledge and Collaboration

3. Highly Resistant Hegemonic Discourses in the Sport

4. The Discourse Community Analysis Of A Football Team

5. K-Pop: Unveiling Its Discourse Community and Influence

6. Exploring the Discourse Community of Personal trainers or Fitness instructors

7. The Communities That I Belong To

8. The Goals of the Sociology Discourse Community and the Issues within It

9. The Key Role of Functionalism in a Societal Equilibrium

10. The Theoretical and Practical Application of the Functionalism Theory

11. Conversation as a Target of Discourse and Disciple Analysis

12. A Study of Discourse Community Through BLM Movement

13. Analysis of Nursing Community According to Swales’ Characteristics of Discourse Community

14. School Theatre as an Example of Discourse Community

15. Music in My Life: Being a Part of Musical Discourse

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How to Write an Outstanding Discursive Essay: Structure and Format

A discursive essay or discussing essay is similar to other essays in that it shares information and gives an opinion, but differs because it doesn’t provide any new knowledge or insight.

Instead, the goal of this type of essay is to convince the reader by arguing for your position and providing evidence. This blog post will teach you how to write a discursive essay so you are ready for your next assignment!

Discursive Essay Meaning

What is discursive essay? A discursive essay is a type of argumentative essay that should take the reader through your thought process and reasoning. This type of writing takes on a certain position or argument. It is usually written in order to convince the reader of a particular point of view.

For example, if you are writing about how college should be free for all students, then your stance would be pro-free college education and your goal would be convincing the readers that this idea should become reality.

Discursive writing is one of the most basic forms of writing. It can be used to write about anything from a personal experience, to an opinion on a current event.

Four (4) Steps to follow in Discursive Writing

• Choose a topic.

There are many different types of topics that you can pick from, but before picking one it’s important to make sure the reader will be interested enough in what you have to say about it.

• Formulate introduction:

Secondly, after choosing your subject matter for discussion and research, come up with an introduction based on some introductory questions into why this issue deserves attention or needs solving.

This way readers understand where your argument stems from and how they should take it further by reading more than just what was written here.

• Conclusion part

A strong conclusion is key when coming to any type of discourse because it ties everything together nicely so there isn’t anything left hanging that could confuse anyone who happened upon your writing.

• Examples, data and references

Finally, you can always think of an example or case study to illustrate the issue at hand and provide a real-life scenario for your readers so they understand it better.

Discursive essay Structure, Format and Outline

Introduction

The introduction for a discussing essay is often short, with the writer providing one or two paragraphs to introduce the topic.

This section should also include an explanation of what it means to be “discursively” writing so that readers understand how this text will organize and present information differently than other types of essays.

The majority of your discursive essay paper should consist of reading/writing about your topic in depth with evidence from research included throughout each paragraph.

In addition, you can provide additional content by including quotes from sources who have studied more deeply into the subject at hand; questions that need answering when considering certain aspects of your issue; descriptions about different perspectives on your topic; etcetera. You do not need to follow a strict outline or linear structure in your writing.

The conclusion

Your discursive essay should end with a summary of the key points you have made throughout your paper, and how these pieces of information connect to one another. This is also where you can make an argument for why this issue matters.

This is how discursive essays are typically structured in order to best engage with their audiences and get them thinking about what they’ve just read which leads into understanding on their own about this topic as well as opening up new avenues that could lead towards solving whatever problem may be at hand.

In a nutshell, discourse writing is engaging because its written in such away where arguments come together around one focused subject matter which brings forth introspection from anyone who reads it.

Discourse essay structures help keep everything organized while still being engaging by discussing events related to the argument’s topic.

Tips for Discursive Essay Writing

• Write all aspects of the topic at once
• Research the topic beforehand to make sure you have enough information for your essay and are able to cover all bases
• Write a draft of an outline before moving on to writing the body paragraphs as this will help with structuring, order, and content flow
• Create headings that match each section in your outline so it’s easier when going back over things later or if someone else has to look at it (e.g., Introduction)
• Format with double spaces between sentences unless otherwise specified by assignment instructions
• Use good grammar throughout: Comma after listing items; Quotation marks where needed; Avoid contractions like “I’m” or stay consistent within same sentence
• Include a title, author’s name and date in the header
• Proofread before submitting for review

30+ Original Discursive Essay Topics

• The role of the media in a democratic society.
• The effects of consumerism on the environment.
• Should there be a ban on handgun ownership?
• What is your personal experience with cyberbullying?
• How has technology changed how we communicate and socialize as a society?
• Does religion belong in schools or should it have its own place outside education systems to avoid bias from students who don’t share the same beliefs?
• Is capitalism bad for individuals, corporations, governments and entire societies around the world today?
• How mental illness is perceived and treated in America
• The role of the police officer.
• What the consequences are for people who consume alcohol or drugs
• Why do some people take medication?
• The benefits of living in a multicultural society
• Write an essay on Violence in schools and how it impacts students.
• How to improve public speaking skills
• Discursive Essay on Mental health: what is the difference between physical illness and mental illness?
• What makes someone successful versus unsuccessful.
• Is technology ruining our social lives?
• In what ways can we promote diversity on college campuses without hurting people’s feelings or making them feel like they’re not wanted.
• How does “unlearning” racism work?
• What are some steps that can be taken to un-learn racist behaviour, thoughts, beliefs, etc.?
• Do you think white supremacy groups should have freedom of speech at university protests?”
• The meaning behind tattoos – why do so many people get tattooed now days when historically this was a sign of slavery?
• The potential causes of obesity.
• Discursive Essay on who should be in charge: the government or self-rule?
• Is it worthwhile to save endangered species from extinction?
• What are your thoughts on euthanasia and its legality around the world?
• To what extent do you think gender stereotypes affect individual lives? – Should we work towards lessening these effects, or just let them happen naturally?
• Should all restaurant workers be paid fair wages for their service (especially those who wait tables)? Why/why not? What would this mean for customers’ dining experience at restaurants if they had to pay more than usual per meal/dessert order?”
• How much does social media really impact our teenage generations today and how will that affect society as a whole in the future?
• Applying for college to an institution: What are your chances?
• The importance of education and becoming educated about the world around us.
• Gun Control essay : Why it should be allowed or not permitted.
• Should children have homework on weekends?

Discursive Essay Example

“ The Misunderstanding between Feminists and Transgender Activists over Gender Identity Politics

In our current society, it seems as though feminists are not unified on their stance towards transgender activism based solely off of gender identity politics…Or so says what many people believe without taking into account that there are two different schools of feminism which reflect differing opinions about trans* rights and inclusion within the feminist movement. Some feminists are in favor of including transgender people, while other feminists believe that trans* activism is actually a threat to the feminist movement.

The debate between these two schools of feminism has become so intense and complicated that it can be difficult for someone who is not well-versed in feminist theory to understand what they are fighting about. However, with both sides having strong arguments rooted in past experiences as women, there’s no easy way out .”

Sample 2: Discursive essay on recreational drugs

“So  why should we use recreational drugs?

Most people argue against drugs for many different reasons: moral arguments, health concerns, legal consequences, and so on. This Discursive Essay will examine all of these arguments as well as the idea that drugs are good for society in general

An argument against using recreational drugs is moral concerns because people argue they’re morally wrong; this could be challenged by saying what about alcohol? If we say some things like driving while intoxicated or drinking from a baby bottle when you’re over 18 then there’s no difference with doing illegal substances.

A health concern to consider would be physical ailments such as lung cancer which can happen after smoking weed but it also comes down to how long you smoked for and if you have any family history related problems. The second point about health is mental illnesses such as addiction which depends on individual circumstance.

Legal concerns can range from being caught with drugs in your car to possession charges, and result in fines or jail time. The third point about legal concerns is how the drug affects you which can happen even if it’s not doing anything wrong because people react differently.

Societal implications exist due to culture: some societies may be more accepting of certain substances while others have a stricter view. This may depend on who they are talking to as well and what their position was so this could create an atmosphere where someone might feel pressured into using any substance at all times just for acceptance purposes.

Moral objectives would only really matter for those within that moral objective but if there were two parties then one will think its morally right while another doesn’t see it as being wrong. Morals can be seen as subjective and so this leads to the two parties having different views on a certain action.

Facts, such as when someone is hurting themselves or others due to substance use, are objective facts that don’t rely on feelings but rather sense. When something has an effect then it will have consequences because of how its affecting them physically or mentally which means that if they continue with their actions until these consequences happen then it becomes objectively morally wrong for one’s own sake.

Situations that may affect an individual’s understanding are: personal perspectives, societal views and cultural values. These all play a role in how people understand as well because it can impact their mental state which could have different effects on what they believe to be right from wrong for them personally.

If there is no medication then this will result in negative consequences but not always – if someone takes enough of the drug then they’ll experience withdrawal symptoms like weight loss, nausea and insomnia depending on the type of substance consumed so this would need to be taken into account when writing about drugs. ”

Topic: “ Is technology good or bad ” discursive essay

Technological advances have become so widespread in society that most people will not be able to live without them. Many of these same technological advancements are also linked with the progression of information technology, which has been a major factor in shaping and defining our culture today. With this being said, it is important to ask ourselves whether or not these technologies are good for us? Or should we reconsider how we use certain aspects of technology?

This discursive Essay will discuss five possible pros and cons related specifically to the advancement of technology including social media usage, cyber bullying, reliance on cell phones as well as computer-related activities at work/at home. It will then further explore if there are any other alternatives aside from just relying on devices like laptops or mobile phones.

The pros of technology have been argued to be the convenience it brings. For example, social media has made connecting with people easier than ever before and allows us to get information without having to go out in person or look for a local newspaper article. It also provides entertainment as well as other features that make life simpler. This includes apps like weather forecasting, calculators and even online shopping.

On the flip side, there are negative aspects related to how we use some technologies today such as cyber bullying which is defined as “the new form of face-to-face abuse”. In regards to the reliance on devices like laptops or mobile phones at work/at home; this can cause laziness due to the lack of physical movement.

There are many positives that can come from the internet such as access to information, communication with people who live in different geographical locations and a vast amount of content (both useful and useless). However, we must take caution when it comes to how much time is spent online and what types of things they look at on social media sites like Facebook , Instagram , Twitter , Pinterest , LinkedIn , Reddit and Youtube .

Technology has both positive aspects but also negative ones depending on which side you’re looking at it from. The awesome thing about this topic though is there’s not one answer because everyone carries their own opinion on whether it be good or bad so anyone reading these words should form an opinion themselves by critiquing my thoughts instead of just taking them as the truth .”

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• Critical Discourse Analysis | Definition, Guide & Examples

Critical Discourse Analysis | Definition, Guide & Examples

Published on 5 May 2022 by Amy Luo . Revised on 5 December 2022.

Discourse analysis is a research method for studying written or spoken language in relation to its social context. It aims to understand how language is used in real-life situations.

When you do discourse analysis, you might focus on:

• The purposes and effects of different types of language
• Cultural rules and conventions in communication
• How values, beliefs, and assumptions are communicated
• How language use relates to its social, political, and historical context

Discourse analysis is a common qualitative research method in many humanities and social science disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and cultural studies. It is also called critical discourse analysis.

Table of contents

What is discourse analysis used for, how is discourse analysis different from other methods, how to conduct discourse analysis.

Conducting discourse analysis means examining how language functions and how meaning is created in different social contexts. It can be applied to any instance of written or oral language, as well as non-verbal aspects of communication, such as tone and gestures.

Materials that are suitable for discourse analysis include:

• Books, newspapers, and periodicals
• Marketing material, such as brochures and advertisements
• Business and government documents
• Websites, forums, social media posts, and comments
• Interviews and conversations

By analysing these types of discourse, researchers aim to gain an understanding of social groups and how they communicate.

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Unlike linguistic approaches that focus only on the rules of language use, discourse analysis emphasises the contextual meaning of language.

It focuses on the social aspects of communication and the ways people use language to achieve specific effects (e.g., to build trust, to create doubt, to evoke emotions, or to manage conflict).

Instead of focusing on smaller units of language, such as sounds, words, or phrases, discourse analysis is used to study larger chunks of language, such as entire conversations, texts, or collections of texts. The selected sources can be analysed on multiple levels.

Discourse analysis is a qualitative and interpretive method of analysing texts (in contrast to more systematic methods like content analysis ). You make interpretations based on both the details of the material itself and on contextual knowledge.

There are many different approaches and techniques you can use to conduct discourse analysis, but the steps below outline the basic structure you need to follow.

Step 1: Define the research question and select the content of analysis

To do discourse analysis, you begin with a clearly defined research question . Once you have developed your question, select a range of material that is appropriate to answer it.

Discourse analysis is a method that can be applied both to large volumes of material and to smaller samples, depending on the aims and timescale of your research.

Step 2: Gather information and theory on the context

Next, you must establish the social and historical context in which the material was produced and intended to be received. Gather factual details of when and where the content was created, who the author is, who published it, and whom it was disseminated to.

As well as understanding the real-life context of the discourse, you can also conduct a literature review on the topic and construct a theoretical framework to guide your analysis.

Step 3: Analyse the content for themes and patterns

This step involves closely examining various elements of the material – such as words, sentences, paragraphs, and overall structure – and relating them to attributes, themes, and patterns relevant to your research question.

Step 4: Review your results and draw conclusions

Once you have assigned particular attributes to elements of the material, reflect on your results to examine the function and meaning of the language used. Here, you will consider your analysis in relation to the broader context that you established earlier to draw conclusions that answer your research question.

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Annotating Your Way into Academic Discourse

What is academic discourse.

In the simplest terms, academic discourse is how scholars—or academics, as they are sometimes called—speak and write. Believe it or not, you already have some experience with academic discourse. Think back to the type of writing you completed in high school. You were probably expected to write in a more formal manner than if you were writing a text message or email to your friends. This formality is one aspect of academic discourse. Think, too, about your participation in class discussions. You probably spoke more formally and precisely during these discussions than if you were simply hanging out and talking with your friends. Academic discourse is not as casual as everyday speaking and writing, but strives to be more formal, complex, and precise. At the college level, you will be expected to further develop your abilities to participate in academic discourse. While each field or discipline (e.g. Biology, English, Psychology) has its own specific ways of writing, all disciplines within the academy encourage more sophisticated forms of communication than those we use every day.

In order to participate in the conversations that go on across disciplines within the academy, you will need to hone your abilities to use academic discourse effectively. This is a goal that should guide you early in your general education courses and all the way through the courses in your major. Inserting your voice into scholarly conversations—rather than just summarizing what other scholars have said—may be new for you. Some previous instructors may have told you not to include your “opinion” or “voice” in your writing. Maybe you have been prohibited from using “I.” This was the case for one of my students who described the difficulty this posed for him while writing a research paper: “I had to concentrate most of my efforts on analyzing my sources while trying to make sure my own voice was heard. I will admit that it was tough due to the fact that much of my high school writing career had been focused on keeping my voice out of [my] paper[s].” While it may take some time for you to become comfortable inserting your own voice into scholarly conversations, as a college-level reader and writer it is important that you become a visible and active part of your writing, just as you are expected to be an active reader. As noted in the introduction, annotation—which brings the acts of reading and writing together—can lay the foundation for your productive participation in scholarly conversations.

What is Annotation?

You have probably been asked by instructors to “mark-up” something you are reading. Maybe you were asked to jot down questions or notes in the margins, highlight the important parts, or circle words you don’t know. Maybe you have developed these habits on your own. The act of marking up a text is commonly referred to as annotating. The word “annotate” comes from the Latin word for “to note or mark” or “to note down.” To annotate is exactly that—it’s when you make notes on a text. “What does this have to do with entering scholarly conversations?” you may be wondering. How can marking up a reading help you respond to other scholars in your discipline?

When you annotate you are writing as you read. You make notes, you comment, react, and raise questions in the margins of your text. Reflections of your engagement with the text and its author, annotations represent the initial and preliminary ways you are participating in a scholarly conversation with the author of what you are reading. As such, your annotations can serve as the basis for the more extensive contributions you will be expected to make to scholarly conversations. For example, if you need to write an essay about something you have read, you can return to your annotations—to the questions you posed and comments you made in the margins—because these are moments in which you are already interacting with the text and its author. From there you can develop those preliminary interactions into a more detailed and comprehensive response.

Annotations can be handwritten on a printed text or applied digitally on an electronic text. As noted in the Introduction, annotating digitally will allow you to mark up any text, including those on the Web, access your annotations from any computer, and share your annotations with others. See the Introduction for specific instructions on how to digitally annotate the reading selections in this textbook.

Instead of annotating the readings digitally, some instructors might ask you to print out the readings from this textbook and annotate them by hand as in the sample that follows

As you read the annotations in the sample text, notice the way the student uses annotations. The students ask questions, challenge points, define some words, and make personal connections. In this example, the students are engaging in more general annotation practices that are not governed by a specific reading strategy like those you will be introduced to in Chapter 2.

What Are the Differences Between Annotating and Highlighting?

It is important to keep in mind that annotating and highlighting often serve different purposes. Highlighting draws your attention to what you deem to be the important parts of a reading. Highlighting can help you recall those moments and the information presented in them. On the other hand, annotating encourages you to mark additional elements of the text—those beyond just “the important parts.” You will notice that in the previous samples highlighting is never used on its own. Rather, the yellow highlighting that does appear is accompanied by a comment, question, or some kind of written response. Although highlighting may be an important supplement to annotating, highlighting on its own is usually better preparation for assignments that ask you to memorize concepts and ideas from readings as opposed to those that ask you to write about and respond to what you have read. A record of your reading and your responses to the text and its author, annotations can provide you with the foundation for entering scholarly conversations, which is what you will be asked to do throughout college.

Writing as Critical Inquiry Copyright © by Keri Sanburn Behre, Ph.D. and Kate Comer, Ph.D. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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How to Write a Discursive Essay: Tips to Succeed & Examples

So, you need to accomplish your discursive essay writing. The typical questions most students ask are: How do you write it? What is discursive essay?

A discursive essay is an academic paper that involves a discussion on a particular topic. It is usually assigned to college students. You may be required to write a paper wherein you have to do one of the following:

• argue for the issue or against it;
• present your points of view on both sides;
• provide your unprejudiced opinion on that matter.

Don’t panic!

Check out the tips from  Custom-writing.org  experts below. They will assist you in discursive writing and encourage you to examine essay examples. Moreover, in this article, you’ll also learn about different types of discursive essay, and its introduction, main body, and conclusion structure.

• ❓ What Is It?
• 🏁 Main Types

Introduction

• Basic Don’Ts
• ✏️ Frequent Questions

❓ What Is a Discursive Essay?

First of all, let’s figure out what the discursive essay is.

You may think it’s similar to the argumentative essay. Yes, but there’s a difference between them in the structure and purpose of these two types of assignments:

We will take a detailed look at how to structure a discursive essay later, and now let’s find out what are the types of this assignment.

Keep reading!

🏁 Discursive Essay: Main Types

You have to think more critically and more in-depth when reviewing all viewpoints and aspects of discursive writing. Check these three main types of essay writing:

• Opinion Essay  requires the author’s opinion on an issue which is stated in the introductory paragraph. It should be clearly presented and followed by reasons and supporting examples. Also, this essay paper should contain an opposing argument that comes before the conclusion. The writer must explain to readers why the mentioned argument is considered to be unconvincing. The writer’s opinion should be restated/summarized in the conclusion.
• For and Against Essay  provides readers with a thorough debate on the topic with the help of opposing points of view. Each point should be discussed objectively and described in details. The introductory paragraph puts the issue under consideration. The main body of this essay paper should present examples, reasons, and arguments supported by justifications. The author’s own opinion with balanced reflections on the topic should be stated only in conclusion.
• Essay Suggesting Solution to a Problem  discusses problems and finds the main solutions. The introduction paragraph explicitly declares a problem and analyses its causes and consequences. The main body of the essay should offer some suggestions for a possible solution to the problem and potential state consequences or expected results. In conclusion, author’s opinion should be distinctly summarized.

📑 How to Write a Discursive Essay

Well, it’s time to talk about the structure of a discursive essay. Like most of the assignments, a discursive paper starts with an introduction and ends with a conclusion:

The first question you may ask is how to start a discursive essay introduction. Simple!

• Give your readers a hook – something that would sound interesting to them.
• Provide a short explanation of the problem. You may use quotations, as well as rhetorical questions.
• Show your readers both sides of the arguments and sum up.

You may be wondering…

Is there something I should avoid in my discursive essay introduction?

Yes. No stereotypes and generalizations, please!

The next step under formal essay writing you should take is to compose the body.

There are a few points you should remember:

• First and foremost: stay unprejudiced . Assess all of the aspects of an issue. Leave your feelings behind or for another essay type.
• Second: build your argumentation . If you have several arguments for your viewpoint—provide them in separate paragraphs. This will help you to keep your essay comprehensible and distinct. Don’t forget to submit supporting evidence.
• Third: write the body of an essay in an alternate manner. What does it mean? If your first paragraph supports the paper’s argument, then in the second paragraph you should write something in the opposite of it. Such a combination of supporting and opposite paragraphs will make your essay look apparent, and well researched. Besides, it will help you to remain neutral.
• Fourth: include topic sentences and evidence . Write a summary of the argument at the beginning of the paragraph. It will allow the reader to easier understand what the paragraph is about. Provide evidence to show that you’re not making the facts up.

Well, you’ve almost finished your writing. Now you should focus on the last section. Keep reading, and you will learn how to write a conclusion for a discursive essay.

• In the last section, you should summarize your article including the main points, specified in the body paragraphs.
• You may also logically express your opinion. Remember: it should resonate with your evidence stated in the body paragraphs.
• Don’t repeat findings, just summarize them.

Keep it short. Your conclusion length should not exceed one paragraph.

👍 Do’s and Don’ts

Do you want more discursive essay writing tips? Fine! Just check them below:

Basic Do’s of a Discursive Essay

• Write in formal, impersonal style.
• Introduce each point in a separate paragraph
• Use topic sentences for each paragraph
• Write well-developed paragraphs
• Give reasons and examples for each point
• Use sequencing
• Use linking words and phrases
• Make references to other sources and make sure that you follow proper citation style
• Identify used sources

Basic Don’Ts of a Discursive Essay

• Don’t use short forms, like I’ll, don’t, they’ve
• Don’t use informal/colloquial language, for example: old as the hills, ain’t, gonna, etc.
• Don’t use very emotional language, since it might make your discursive article look prejudiced
• Don’t use over-generalizations. Extending the features of some elements from a group more than it is reasonable will lead to generous and inaccurate conclusions.
• Don’t express your personal opinion too insistently
• Don’t refer to statistics without proper referencing (check our citation guides )
• Don’t use personal examples, leave it for a personal experience essay

Well, now you know what discursive essay means, what are its main types, and how to structure it.

Discursive Essay Topics

• Discussion of risk factors that impact human health. 
• Discuss the necessity of understanding cultural heritage to provide efficient health care.
• Analyze different opinions on withdrawing patients’ treatment.
• Examine different views on the Civil War.
• Discuss what hostile emotional states are and how they impact human life. 
• Discuss the meaning of metaphors used by Virgil in Aeneid . 
• Describe different opinions on telehealth in nursing homes.
• The ethicality of stem cell technology.
• Explore the effectiveness of motivational interviewing. 
• Discuss how people present themselves online .
• Discuss the reasons for Coca-Cola’s marketing success.
• Analyze the food safety issues and the ways to improve the situation.
• Examine the essential meaning of sleep for people’s physical and mental health.
• Explore various complications of working with groups.
• Discussion of the modern issues with virtue ethics. 
• Describe different views on the definition of love. 
• Give the for and against arguments considering food security technologies.  
• Discuss how the concept of the American dream is presented in the film The Great Gatsby.
• Analyze the influence of family problems on children and suggest ways to improve the situation.
• Present the various points of view on the ethical concepts of Buddhism.
• Examine the attitudes towards the problem of homelessness and the suggested ways of its solution.
• Explore different opinions on the American revolution and its consequences.
• Discuss various policies and views around the globe on abortion. 
• Discussion of the history of food foraging in different communities.
• Multiple thoughts on civility on the Internet .
• Analyze arguments on the effectiveness of hand sanitizers.
• Discuss the importance of visual aids in learning.
• Present and evaluate the theories of international development .
• Discuss how to prevent the spread of the West Nile Virus (WNV).
• Is embracing renewable energy sources beneficial for both environment and the global economy?
• Examine the correctness of the statement that the ideology of pleasure is the foundation of social activism.
• Discussion of the ethical dilemma of population control.
• Discuss the ethics of experimental studies .
• Analyze the topic of gun violence and gun control laws.
• Explore the reasons for opioid crises in the US.
• Give arguments for and against random drug testing.
• Discuss the problem of endangered species .
• Express your opinion on the necessity of parents to be included in children’s education .
• Present your attitude towards working in a bureaucratic organization.
• Discuss the issue of the nursing shortage and suggest a solution.  
• Give different viewpoints on the definition of beauty .
• Analyze the problem of police misconduct. 
• Discuss the description of violence of African people in literature.
• Examine the views on Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory. 
• Describe the various opinions on mysticism and express your attitude towards it.
• Discuss the diverse standpoints on spirituality.
• Is nature protection an urgent problem?
• Analyze different ideas on physical privacy at work.
• Discussion on the Jewish heritage in nursing.
• Examine the views on the meaning of life.  

Good luck with your discussions and discursive essays! Be sure to check out the articles on our blog for more academic wisdom. By the way, on the Custom-Writing website, you may find the best essay topics for your academic writing.

And don’t forget to share your opinion in the comments below.

You might also be interested in:

• Friendship Essay: Writing Guide & Topic Ideas about Friendship
• Teamwork Essay: Quick Guide on How to Write a Good Paper
• Compare and Contrast Essay Writing Tips and Examples
• Transportation Essay: Writing Tips and Brilliant Topics

✏️ Discursive Essay FAQ

There is no one definitely correct answer to this question. Like any other essay, the text should have a clear structure with an introduction, body, and conclusion. The most important thing is that the overall book needs to be cohesive, persuasive, and exciting to read.

An example of a step by step guide is:

1. Take a closer look at the topic, think about the points to cover.

2. Choose the most relevant points and compose the Body of the essay.

3. Add an appropriate Introduction and Conclusion.

To write a good conclusion, you need to have the rest of the essay finished. Does the body of your essay present well-structured points? Great, then see what you can conclude based on that. If possible, make a connection between the introduction and the conclusion.

To ensure that your essay has a perfect structure, start with creating an outline. Based on such a plan, you can present your points step by step. Your text should have a relevant introduction, several points in the main body (with examples), and a logical conclusion.

🔗 References

• Writing an Opinion Essay: Grace Fleming, ThoughtCo
• How to Write a Good Argumentative Essay: Easy Step-by-Step Guide: Master Class
• Ending the Essay: Conclusions: Harvard College Writing Center
• Academic Writing Style: University of Southern California
• Cite Your Sources: Library Guides at University of California, Santa Cruz
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How to Write About Your High School Study Abroad Experience on College Applications

September 12, 2024

Authored By:

High school study abroad is a truly transformative experience. Students return home with broadened world perspectives, demonstratable language progress, and, often, new or reinvigorated passions for their future academic or career path.  

As a high school summer abroad alumni, your study abroad experience offers unique content for your college application that can set you apart from other applicants. Here are some tips to enhance your college admissions essay and land your application in the "acceptance" pile! 

What Do Colleges Look for? 

First, let's talk about what college admissions officers look for when diving into stacks of applications. While the process isn't totally transparent and can differ from university to university, here are the general qualities of a good candidate: 

• Academic excellence 
• Personal growth 
• Unique experiences 

Maturity 

Adaptability .

• Cultural awareness 
• Defined goals 

Add to that one singular question of significant importance— What makes you a particularly good fit for their specific university?  

When crafting your college admissions essay, these are the points you want to hit. Think about it differently than a question/answer format; rather, weave these qualities into an exciting and personal narrative. That doesn't sound easy, but rest assured that your study abroad experience will likely encompass all these points and will surely be interesting.  

That's what makes it the perfect college admissions essay topic! 

Does Study Abroad Look Good in College Applications? 

Absolutely! Let's take another look at the points above and how the program outcomes of a study abroad experience meets them. 

Academic Excellence 

CIEE high school summer abroad has its own competitive admissions process that includes personal essays, teacher recommendations, and accepts only students in good academic standing. Each cohort comprises top-performing high schoolers from around the country. 

Personal Growth 

It is rare that a person will live abroad in their lifetime, and even rarer to have done it as a teenager! Living in another country leads to tremendous personal growth that can be defined in measurable results such as language learning and "soft" skills like independence, confidence, cultural awareness, or a global perspective. Living abroad is also associated with a clearer sense of self , which has all kinds of benefits, including career success and enhanced ability to deal with stress. 

Unique Experiences 

Again, the simple fact that you lived in another country is a unique experience. So is being proficient in a second language, having a host family abroad, going to classes in another country, volunteering and serving a foreign population, making friends with people from a totally different culture, navigating culture shock, and all the other amazing things you accomplished while studying abroad. 

Even though you might not think of yourself as a child, you lived abroad on your own while under 18! That requires a tremendous level of maturity. Tie that fact to the challenges you navigated, and you will demonstrate your maturity quickly. 

Living abroad requires navigating new environments, overcoming language barriers, and adjusting to different cultural norms. These experiences enhance your flexibility, problem-solving skills, and ability to thrive in diverse situations. 

Cultural Awareness 

Colleges love diversity; it makes for a rich campus life, promotes inclusive thinking, prepares students for a globalized world, and reflects our diverse American population. Diversity is connected directly to cultural awareness. When you studied abroad in high school, you built cultural awareness by immersing yourself in new cultural practices, perspectives, and social norms, helping you to become more empathetic, open-minded, and globally conscious. 

Defined Goals 

High school study abroad exposes students to new fields of interest, global issues, and potential career paths they may not have considered. This experience also enhances critical thinking and self-awareness, which allows you to better understand your passions and strengths. 

11 Questions to Ask Yourself to Find Your Unique Story 

Now it's time to get the creative juices flowing. A helpful writing tip is to brainstorm on some reflective questions.  

To craft a compelling essay about your study abroad experience, start with these: 

• What motivated you to study abroad during high school? 
• How did your experience abroad change your perspective on the world and your role in it? 
• What challenges did you face, and how did you overcome them? 
• How did the experience impact your academic interests and career goals? 
• What cultural differences did you encounter, and how did you adapt? 
• What stories do you tell over and over when people ask you about your time abroad? 
• What was the peak moment of your experience? 
• What was the most challenging moment? 
• Who did you meet that made the most significant impact? 
• What connections do you maintain? 
• How does your high school study abroad story connect to this particular university? 

By answering these questions, you can identify the unique aspects of your experience that will make your essay engaging and memorable. 

To help you get more ideas about how to write about your experience, tune in to our Out of Your Comfort Zone podcast and hear from other CIEE high school study abroad alumni! 

Connect Your Study Abroad Story to Your University 

To make your essay even more impactful, tie your study abroad experience to the specific university you are applying to. Research the university's programs, values, and opportunities, and explain how your experience aligns with them: 

• Does the university have an outstanding language program?  
• Do they have a partner university in the country where you studied abroad?  
• Do they have a research lab in the field you want to focus on due to passions you discovered or strengthened during your study abroad?  
• Do they have faculty or a large student population from the country where you studied abroad? 

Some Final College Application Essay Tips

Be Authentic

Write honestly about your experiences and emotions. Authenticity resonates more with admissions officers than a polished but impersonal essay. 

Show, Don't Tell

Use specific examples and anecdotes to illustrate your points rather than making general statements. 

Seek Feedback

Have teachers, mentors, or friends review your essay to provide constructive feedback. Have a friend from your high school study abroad experience read your story too! 

Stay Within the Word Limit

Adhere to the essay length requirements set by the college to demonstrate your ability to follow instructions. 

Studying abroad in high school demonstrates to colleges that you are proactive, open-minded, and capable of thriving in diverse environments. This experience will be the key to enhancing your college application and shaping your future in profound ways. 

Good luck! 

Thinking about studying abroad again after your senior year? Check out our study abroad options for high school graduates .

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