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Rajan Patel Ms. Hoffman English 1101-002 April 9, 2013 Inquiry into a Discourse Community The discourse community I chose to analyze is the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) and I will determine how the charlotte south chapter fits in this community. The MDA was founded in 1950 and is now one of the worlds prominent health care, research funding, and support services. The MDA encompasses over 40 neuromuscular diseases which affects over 1 million Americans. This organization is running in local areas throughout the U.S, including the charlotte south area. Across these areas the MDA is committed to discovering treatments and cures for neuromuscular diseases and provide support towards the people that suffer from these diseases and their families. Every year MDA is able to fund about 300 research projects. Most of the diseases that the MDA covers have genetic causes and lead to muscle deterioration. The age of onset for these diseases range from birth to adulthood and after the diagnosis, life span varies from a year to several decades. The types of diseases that MDA encompasses are muscular dystrophies, motor neuron diseases, inflammatory myopathies, diseases of neuromuscular junction, diseases of peripheral nerve, metabolic diseases of muscle, myopathies due to endocrine abnormalities, and other myopathies. I have been a part of MDA for 12 years now, ever since I was diagnosed with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD). I joined the MDA because they could provide support towards me and my family. The support that this organization provided were access to doctors, equipment, information, moral support, and hope for my condition. MDA is what helped inform my parents

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about DMD. MDA has been with me and my family through every conflict we faced with this disorder of mine. I conducted the research for this community by retrieving information from the MDA website: www.mda.org. The MDA does fit into Swales six characteristics of a discourse community. The MDA does have shared goals, mechanisms of communication, purposes behind the mechanisms of communication, mechanisms of communication that can be considered genres, lexis, and old timers and newcomers. The shared goals of the MDA are finding a cure for all the diseases that the MDA covers and provide support towards the people that suffer from these diseases and their families. The mechanisms of communication that MDA utilizes are meetings, emails, newsletters, Facebook, online articles, magazines, phone calls, and text messages. MDA members have a wide range of ways to communicate with each other. The purposes behind MDAs mechanisms of communication are to inform about whats occurring in the MDA, to organize events, to find a cure for all the diseases that MDA covers, to raise money, to spread the word about MDA, and to gain more members. All of this organizations mechanisms of communication would be considered to be under one genre and that is information. The lexis that group members use are the names of the diseases that MDA covers and the acronyms used, words that describe what the diseases cause and what causes the diseases, the medicines that sufferers of the diseases use, and the name of the MDA events. The old timers with expertise are people that have been involved in the MDA for over 2 years and know MDA as a part of their life. The newcomers with less expertise are people that have been introduced to what MDA is and are beginning to be involved with MDA. Newcomers can learn the appropriate language, genres, knowledge of this organization by having the pursuit to be a part of MDA. There are about an equal amount of novices and experts in the MDA.

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I am able to observe MDA, specifically MDA Charlotte on the MDA Charlotte Facebook page. MDA and MDA Charlotte have a strong online community; therefore I chose to observe the MDA Charlotte Facebook page. I found this page to be mainly about informing people of the events that are happening soon, describing the previous events, displaying pictures from the previous events, and research being done. People talk about these events and also talk about organizing new events. The majority of the people communicating on the Facebook page are the ones who are in. I can determine whos in and whos out by noticing that people who are in know whats going on and are not confused about what they see in the page. Some people who are in even post events in the page. Basically all the people who are in have sufficient knowledge about the MDA and what goes on in MDA Charlotte. The person I interviewed for this inquiry is Lucas Coe who is the Health Care Services Coordinator for MDA Charlotte South. I was really impressed by the answers he gave to my interview questions, his answers were well in-depth and more than sufficient. I hope my questions were enough to make an impact towards inquiring into the MDA and how MDA Charlotte South is a part of it. I first asked Lucas what research did he helped promote and he answered by stating that hes not very involved with research. However, he did state that all of the research goes to MDAs National Office and MDAs scientific board approves the research that they want to fund. This enables the most efficiency when funding research. I then asked him what MDA Charlotte Souths goal as of now. He answered this by stating that the goal is to raise as much funds as possible to find a cure for all the diseases covered by MDA while providing services for the victims of these diseases. Basically there is no difference between MDAs goal and MDA Charlotte Souths goal. The next question that I asked Lucas was the most important question for the inquiry and this was: How does MDA Charlotte South fit in

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MDA? The answer that Lucas provided was that the key executives of the National Office decide how the charlotte south district and the other 200+ districts around the country are run. The executives have to first report to one of MDAs 8 divisions (districts are part of these divisions) in the country to run the districts in each division. This answer to the question was beyond satisfactory. I continued the interview by asking Lucas how he was able to become the Health Care Services Coordinator. He answered this by stating that he was required to have an extensive background in non-profit to receive the job. I then asked Lucas what he found to be the most influential research MDA Charlotte has made so far. His answer was that there is a project occurring at Carolinas Medical Center which has to do with a drug called Eteplirsen which is currently showing drastically less muscle loss for the participants. The final question I asked Lucas was: How does one become a part of MDA Charlotte South? The answer he provided was that anyone can volunteer, however special experience is required for people who want to work for MDA Charlotte South. I found the interview to be quite interesting and it was a great interview. I found MDA Charlotte South to be merely a smaller part of MDA. MDA uses MDA Charlotte South as a branch to the Charlotte South area. I discovered this through the interview I had with Lucas. I find it intriguing how MDA Charlotte South is a part of MDA. I believe that MDA has districts like MDA Charlotte South to be able to support as many sufferers of the muscle diseases around the country as possible. MDA is nothing without its districts because all these districts hold the MDA together. I found through this inquiry that there can be discourse communities within an even larger discourse community.

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Works Cited
"MDA Fact Sheet." MDA Fighting Muscle Disease. Muscular Dystrophy Association Inc., n.d. Web. 5 Apr 2013. <http://mda.org/sites/default/files/publications/MDA_Fact_Sheet_P-102.pdf>.