Project 1

As a third year Mechanical Engineering student, I belong to the Engineering community.

This community can further be broken down into Academic and Professional Engineering. Both

of these communities can be seen as discourse communities as they meet the six defining

characteristics set forth by John Swales. As discourse communities, they use genres of

communication in order to further their aims (Swales). Each community uses specific language

and functions within their genres, which make the genre unique to the community and reveals

its common goals. Therefore, examples of each genre can be used to show what the

community as a whole values. Within the academic discourse community one of the most used

genres is the journal article. I used the article, Numerical Study of Attacks Angle Effect on Drag

Coefficient of AUV Hull Design, by Aymen Mohamed, Hedi Kchaou, Mohamed Salah Abid, and

Zied Driss, as representation of the academic discourse community. This article shows the

communitys value of the scientific method and data-based arguments and how they are used to

expand the knowledge within the engineering community. In the professional discourse

community a common genre of communication is the website. I used the website of the

company Prodrive Technologies as an example of the professional discourse community. The

website showed that the professional community used different methods to differentiate their

products in order to accomplish their main goal of getting potential customers to purchase from

them.

In the academic engineering field, journal articles are a means for professors and

researchers to communicate with each other. The purpose of this journal article is to effectively

communicate the compiled data obtained through experimentation, and use it to describe and

support a particular theory or principle. As with most journal articles, the target audience is other

engineering academics and engineering professionals. This can be seen through the use of

specific words and terminology found only within the engineering field, such as the use of the

Reynolds-averaged Navier Stokes equations and the principles of hydrodynamic drag. The
stated purpose of this article is to see the effect that the orientation of an autonomous

underwater vehicle had on the drag created by moving underwater (Mohamed et al.). The

experiment was then run by physically testing structures and comparing the results to

theoretically obtained values.

The very specific use of structure in the article reveals a very important aspect of the

academic community, which is the emphasis on the Scientific Method. The Scientific Method is

a particular way of forming an argument in which a hypothesis is made then tested through

experimentation, and finally a conclusion is made based on the data obtained in the experiment.

This is clearly shown throughout the article by the use of ordered sections. In the introduction

section, the hypothesis is stated. The Numerical Model shows the equations and theories that

are used to structure the experiment, and the results and discussions section shows how the

experiment was conducted. The conclusion section is simply the conclusions drawn from the

experiment based on the hypothesis. The reason why the Scientific Method is so important to

the academic community is that it is the only credible way to present new information. In the

academic discourse community everything is based on scientific proof. The only way to add new

information to the community is if it can be proved with with data and repeated by others in the

field. This is why the Scientific Method is used as it clearly states the experiment, the theories

behind the experiment, and the supporting data proving the author's statements.

In the professional engineering field websites are used as a major form of

communication. Engineering companies use their websites as a way of communicating with

potential customers in order to obtain their business. I chose to analyze Prodrive Technologies

website, as it clearly shows different methods used by companies to attract potential customers.

The website has a very crisp look to it with very nice visuals. This is used to give a good first

impression for anyone looking at it for the first time. There are succinct sentences that explain

what the company does and its mission. These are meant to give a quick overview of the

company at a glance. The reason why these are used by companies is that customers do not
want to have to read paragraphs of information. They want get a quick overview of the company

to see if they want to do business with them or not.

The main purpose of an engineering website is to list the companys products, and

explain why the potential customer should choose the company. There are a lot of specific

words used by companies to accomplish this purpose. For Prodrive, they use a lot of words like

innovation, competitive, and cutting edge, in order to show how they are different from other

companies and have a superior product. In the engineering field the best product is generally

defined as the product that meets the specific design specifications that the customer has and is

the most cost effective. As most products of the same family generally meet the design

specifications and are around the same cost, companies need ways of communicating what

makes their product superior. This is why companies in the professional engineering discourse

community must use specific language and formatting, in order to cater themselves to the

customers while also proving that their product will work best. This is all done with the goal of

maximizing of sales.

Even though academic and professional discourse communities are different entities

they do share many similarities. The academic discourse community strives to further the

engineering field through development and investigation of engineering principles and theories.

The professional discourse community strives to reach customers to sell their products, which

they have developed themselves based off of engineering principles and theories. The main

commonality between the two is that they are both based in engineering principles and theories.

However, they differ in what they do with those principles and theories. The academic

engineering discourse community uses the principles and theories to gain a better

understanding of the world, as well as to expand their knowledge. The professional engineering

discourse community uses the principles and theories in order to create new products to in turn

sell and make money. The rhetoric they both use also vary by quite a bit. The academic

community uses very formal language with a heavy emphasis on technical terms and proofs,
while the professional community use simple language with emphasis on presentation and

impact.

As both communities fall under the larger engineering community, they are often closely

related. For instance, professionals will read journal articles in order to get ideas for new

material, and academics will base their experiments and research off of what is being pursued

in industry. This communication is good for both communities as it leads to more knowledge for

the academic community, and more products for the professional community. The academic

community uses data and experiment driven arguments, specifically using the scientific method,

to accomplish this growth in knowledge. On the other hand the professional community uses

specific words and formatting to attract customers in order sell products. All in all even though

the academic and professional engineering communities are different from each other,

especially in how they communicate, they do have overlaps which lead to collaboration between

the two communities.

 Works Cited

Aymen Mohamed, Hedi Kchaou, Mohamed Salah Abid, Zied Driss. Numerical Study of Attacks

Angle Effect on Drag Coefficient of AUV Hull Design. American Journal of Mechanical

Engineering. Vol. 5, No. 1, 2017, pp 8-13. http://pubs.sciepub.com/ajme/5/1/2

Swales, John. ''The Concept of Discourse Community." Genre Analysis: English in Academic

and Research Settings. Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990.21-32. Print.

Prodrive Technologies. Prodrive Technologies, https://prodrive-technologies.com. Accessed 5

Feb. 2017.