INtroduction
The discourse community that we chose to research is The Post, “The Independent Voice on Campus & Athens”. The Post is a student run newspaper that uses writing to inform and entertain Ohio University’s student body along with Athens’s residents. The Post writes on many different genres, such as: campus and local news, OU and pro sports, culture, opinion-based writings through editorials, columns, letters, cartoons, and blogs. To better understand the Post members’ different techniques of writing, selection of writings that are issued in each edition, and the lexis used to communicate; we will be conducting an ethnographic study. Considering that everyone has a different writing process, observations will be made pertaining to Post members and their different ways of writing. Many articles are written with the hopes that they will be published, so it will be interesting to find out what criteria is needed to in order to get an article published. The Post and it’s members all use a certain lexis consisting of an understood vocabulary that differentiates this group from others. The purpose of a newspaper is to be read by as many people as possible, for this reason newspapers use specific lexis that make them easy to read an understand for the average reader.