Throughout the semester, students researched potential sites to study discourse communities in their lives and how they found a place in their community of choice. We started this research journey with major assignment 1. For my site, I chose to research my involvement in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
A discourse community provides members with a sense of belonging through mutual goals and interests. I chose AIAA as my community because it is where I found myself making new friends and growing as an engineer here at UCF. I listed excerpts from my rough draft, my final submission, reflections, and my works cited in the accordion below so you can see how my essay developed through my writing process. Within my final submission reflection, you can read how I analyzed my experience with the constructs of research genre construction and different types of communication.
The articles on discourse communities by John Swales and Ann M. Johns assisted the most in developing this essay. The definitions provided by both authors helped me decide which community I should choose for this project as well as how to define each research method. I discussed textual evidence and rhetorical language the most in my writing. I described a research idea to study how social communities differ based on context. The construct I utilized the most was generating inquiry. I described the research question “How is writing and rhetoric present in specific sites” by relating research methods to my chosen discourse community.
While writing this paper, I struggled with coming up with ways to connect interactions within my site to acceptable methods of social behavior. It’s difficult to make a STEM based community such as an aerospace club seem relatable to those not involved in activities like building rockets. There’s generally an aversion to aerospace and aeronautics because of the stigma associated with the course’s rigor; this will make it difficult to seem personable. I think I was most successful in connecting the club to different methods of using textual evidence. Most people use or know about social media and club activities, so I think I made the group more relatable to readers by including those topics. The feedback I received was positive. I hadn’t fully finished my rough draft before submission day, so it wasn’t a lot to work with. I revised a bit of my language in my essay as well as included four research methods due to said feedback. I also was reminded to cite my actual sites organization page, which I had forgotten to do. Through this assignment I learned to connect basic compositional ideas with real world examples, as well as making these examples understandable.
The Social Community of Aerospace Engineering in AIAA
The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, AIAA for short, at UCF is an organization which provides opportunities to grow knowledge, gain experiences, and field work skill development to aerospace majors. At AIAA, students have the chance to build projects, meet potential employers in the industry, and truly experience what field projects are like after graduation. These projects foster creativity and prepare them for what they’ll be doing after graduation. As a member of the club, I have gone to see guest speakers, watch launches, and look at design teamwork. All of this might seem boring to those of us who aren’t involved in engineering, but this discourse community exercises opportunities that allow students to gain expertise while simultaneously learning how to become a useful and meaningful individual in the aerospace profession. Given this information, the UCF chapter of AIAA will be a perfect site for my research on discourse communities.
To determine where writing and rhetoric has a place within this club, I need to research each portion that constructs a discourse community. Within the UCF branch of AIAA, we have several modes of communication. The discourse community framework is described by John Swales as a method of studying how a specific group of people use communication to meet their collective goals; AIAA is an outlet for students to do exactly that (Swales 24-26). Accompanied by meetings and presentations, we have an undying, always-active discord server full of event details, deadlines, and opportunities to make friends within the club. On top of this, every project requires a communicative design team. Without a group’s mutual understanding of balanced workload and willingness to meet with each other and plan layouts, the projects we work on would fail. This all successfully matches Swales’s discourse community template perfectly.
To accompany this rather exclusive form of communication, AIAA also has a public Instagram page. This is our method of community outreach and sharing our projects with non-members in search for individuals who may be interested in the work. This definition I mentioned earlier by Swales was further developed by Ann Johns who claimed that discourse communities are also a collective feeling of belongingness and inclusivity (Johns 51). STEM clubs can feel foreign and a little nerve-wracking to freshmen, but for me, the members of AIAA were accepting and extremely welcoming. They constantly reach out and invite members to events and encourage inclusion over anything else.
Over the course of this semester, I plan to attend the next meeting and interview other members. Interviewing will give me first-hand dialogue with other members and ask them about what they do in the club and their place within projects. My second method of research is examining textual materials I previously mentioned. Conversations in our discord servers and flyers handed out by the club would be good evidence for showing the social interactions between members. Thirdly, I can introduce social media pages from both the UCF branch of AIAA as well as the parent organization. UCF’s Instagram page for this club includes volunteering events, meet and greet activities, and general information about what the club does in terms of social gatherings. Lastly, I can utilize observational skills during meetings and collect results from personal experiences. All these methods require observation, but a good source in recording social interactions is simply experiencing them myself.
Through these research methods, I will be able to examine how writing and rhetoric are present in the project designs, social interactions, and student involvement in professional spaces that AIAA provides here at UCF.
This essay does the construct of research genre production by analyzing a specific research site within the academic community of AIAA. By researching AIAA as a discourse community, the essay shows an understanding of how academic writing conventions shape research within a scholarly context. It also demonstrates different types of communication within the club such as discord chats, social media, flyers, and presentations; all of which cater to different audiences. Choosing these ways of communication shows the interactions between members of this discourse community, therefore it’s exemplary of said research genres that matter to this community.
The articles on discourse communities by John Swales and Ann M. Johns assisted the most in developing this essay. The definitions provided by both authors helped me decide which community I should choose for this project as well as how to define each research method. I discussed textual evidence and rhetorical language the most in my writing. I described a research idea to study how social communities differ based on context. The construct I utilized the most was generating inquiry. I described the research question “How is writing and rhetoric present in specific sites” by relating research methods to my chosen discourse community.
While writing this paper, I struggled with coming up with ways to connect interactions within my site to acceptable methods of social behavior. It’s difficult to make a STEM based community such as an aerospace club seem relatable to those not involved in activities like building rockets. There’s generally an aversion to aerospace and aeronautics because of the stigma associated with the course’s rigor; this will make it difficult to seem personable. I think I was most successful in connecting the club to different methods of using textual evidence. Most people use or know about social media and club activities, so I think I made the group more relatable to readers by including those topics. The feedback I received was positive. I hadn’t fully finished my rough draft before submission day, so it wasn’t a lot to work with. I revised a bit of my language in my essay as well as included four research methods due to said feedback. I also was reminded to cite my actual sites organization page, which I had forgotten to do. Through this assignment I learned to connect basic compositional ideas with real world examples, as well as making these examples understandable.
“AIAA UCF.” AIAA@UCF, NASA, Northrop Grumman, www.aiaaucf.com/. Accessed 8 Feb. 2026.
“American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).” AIAA, 2017, aiaa.org/.
Johns, Ann M. “Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict, and Diversity.” Text,
Role and Context: Developing Academic Literacies. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. 51-70. Print.
Swales, John. “The Concept of a Discourse Community.” Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990. 21-32. Print
The sources listed in my works cited which are found in the rough draft, the final submission, and mentioned in the revision detail definitions for discourse communities and examples of what occurs within them. This correlates to the construct of contributing knowledge by allowing for an explanation of what AIAA is like as a member and what to expect in any community. Without the sources, it would be hard to differentiate an impersonal gathering from a discourse community such as this one. They also help explain that the members of these communities must have shared interests or values in order to qualify in the category.
My Progress in Writing Through ENC1102 