Discourse

People hate listening to speeches and reading textbooks. Well I have some ideas that can somehow help you to understand what you’re listening to or what you’re reading.

Discourse is a term that means “Language in use” or a lengthy discussion about a subject. It can be shown in the form of conversations, talks, interviews, lectures, gossips, jokes, etc. even blogs… There is a structure that we might consider to follow in understanding a certain discourse.

1. Understand the main point - This is the most important thing that you would want to consider. It may be an argument or a main idea. It may be apparent in discourse or implied and not interpreted verbally.

2. Explanation - The main point can be explained with technical terms. However, it is hard to understand the main point with just relying on definitions and explanations that involve too much terminologies that ordinary people won’t be able to understand unless through educating or reading.

3. Example - It reflects the main point much better and it can elaborate further than the explanation itself. A life experience definitely can be an effective example to back up the main point in the discourse but examples are mainly observations that people have encountered in their lives from one way or another anyways… It opens us towards relating the subject and the main point of the discourse to our lives.

~ The rest can be treated as additional information either to enhance our understanding of the discourse or just giving us more references that we might be interested in to look at so that we can somehow relate back to the main discourse.

– indiecitizen