Faraz Arastu

English 3301

5/17/13

DCA Peer Review [Luke]

Word Count: 679

My understanding of the website, Science at http://news.sciencemag.org, per your analysis, is that it is a magazine primarily intended for a discourse community of natural scientists in the biology, chemistry, and physics disciplines. This is because it offers a collection of scientific research articles which detail specific experiments and breakthroughs in their respective field. The magazine also highlights news in science, including political discussions surrounding scientific experimentation. Both scientists and laymen can comment on this information in the blogging section which forms a sense of scientific community. There is a secondary discourse community including people searching for careers in science or involving science. News reporters, bloggers, and employers fall into this community. The ‘Careers’ tab of the website is directed towards them finding employees, networking with their peers, and building their portfolio. Overall, the site is very professional with its use of scientific terms and advertisements for scientific equipment and services.

My take on your draft is that it thoroughly covered the purpose of the website via the ‘About Science and AAAS’ section of the website which gives the history of the site as well as its mission statement to promote scientific commentary via news and research. In regards to identifying the primary discourse community, you implicitly stated that the technical language used in research articles limits the scientific community. Perhaps it would be better to explicitly state that it limits the community to educated research scientists and students, for example. In this respect, the secondary discourse community was identified more clearly as laymen who may be building on careers relating to science. My recommendation is that you mention these two distinct communities as early as possible and then use the site’s features to support that claim.

When discussing the layout of the site, my view was that you identified and explained the sections but not how they are used or by which discourse community. For instance, in the third paragraph, you mentioned the “Science Live section that displays the news that is currently taking place in the science world.” However, it is not specified if this section is for knowledgeable scientists, students, press, or the general public. There is no note of whether this section contains scholarly articles, news articles, or general information either. Perhaps these two additions may strengthen the support that there are two discourse communities for this site. I would also suggest a brief note about the red and blue color scheme of the site since it highlights the tabs and eAlerts sections of the site. Other than this, I felt that your explanation of the sophisticated language and scholarly articles supported your choice of the primary discourse community – natural scientists.

When navigating around the site, it was helpful that you outlined exactly which links you followed to the Science Career Blog. The clarification that it was an academic blog, and not a typical blog page where people post radical opinions or views was also helpful to identify which discourse communities the blog is meant for. Your analysis on the advertisements also accentuated your point on the primary discourse community since the ads were oriented to scientists. On another note, perhaps it’s worth noting that there are a few links to direct viewers towards getting an account or membership to the site and how this affects the discourse communities.

In terms of documentation and formatting, my thoughts are that the opening commentary on scientific communication was very appropriate and well placed followed by the history of the site. After this, I believe the paragraphs could be divided a little better to focus better on certain ideas. For example, maybe it is possible to divide the fourth paragraph to focus on the language of the site as it applies to scientific and non-scientific viewers. I have enclosed more specifics on this using MS Word ‘Comments’ in my attached analysis. Aside from this, I suggested only a few minor grammatical and sentence structure changes which I have also enclosed.

Thanks for bearing with my analysis!