We may gain our knowledge by reading, by entering into conversations, by listening to others speak, or by watching them perform actions. Rarely, if ever, do thoughts and ideas develop completely in a single mind. Instead, we form our concepts, analyses, and interpretations within networks of conversations, ongoing arguments, extended discussions, and other interactions people have with one another. Some researchers have gone so far as to suggest that much of our mental lives are spent in imagined conversation with others, so thoroughly do we depend on the social medium of language to carry both internal and verbalized thinking forward. It has become commonplace to envision the verbal and written exchanges and communications between speakers and listeners, readers and writers, researchers and their sources, as interactions constituting communities of discourse .
Discourse communities share interpretive, analytic, and argumentative conventions.
Academic discourse communities agree to refer scrupulously to one anothers writings and research findings by placing borrowed terms and phrases in quotation marks, and by explicitly linking such quoted materials to the name or names of the person or persons who uttered or wrote them. Such a practice makes the constitution of the community visible, as those named in the works cited or bibliography are, in effect, honored as members contributing to an ongoing discussion or argument. So that the thinking and findings of the persons whose work is utilized in your writing may be documented consistently and completely, and so that the audience reading your work may recognize various material as not your own, academic disciplines have set ground rules for how you should acknowledge the use of others language, material, and findings. Your instructor will specify which style manual to use in preparing papers for specific courses. By referring to the quoted words of others, research writers both trace out and enter into conversations and arguments that have been going on for some time.